Ahead of his appearance at Civic Trust House on Culture Night, presented with IndieCork Film Festival, John Byrne provides some context below for his live presentation… join us at 8pm on Friday 20th September 2024 to listen to some of this extraordinary record collection!
When did the Irish 20th century begin?
Many will want literal chronology, and claim it for around the time Queen Victoria passed on.
A very great many might claim it for when James Connolly returned to Ireland and fell in with many Republican revolutionaries, or when their bid for revolution bore fruit in 1916.
Maybe just as many would claim it for the further fruit bearing of Irish independence in 1922.
A few might claim it for the split of Eamon De Valera and his followers from Sinn Fein to form a new political party in 1926.
Maybe any or all of those make total and practical sense on a political level.
I hope I’m not the only one on this island that will lay claim for the beginning of the Irish 20th century as being in 1936.
I claim 1936 because it was the year that a young gay Irish composer called Frederick May found himself fleeing Austria and the spreading tentacles of Fascism, and of course the impending ‘Anschluss’ with Germany.
His reaction to this was the penning of his ‘String Quartet In C Minor’ masterpiece.
The creation of indigenous Classical composition went very literally technicolor with the scribing of this piece.
A wild array of instrumental color designed to test a String Quartet to it’s very limits.
It is so easy to see this after the majority of a century of retrospect, so easy.
However only the dedicated hard corpus of Classical music lovers who witnessed one of the very few public performances of the piece paid real attention.
And the first public performance was only over a decade and a country away, in London town.
There’s a very hard corpus of a tangible reason for this; please watch as it unfolds.
Frederick May wrote other interesting pieces across the next decade, but sidled away from his own composing soon enough.
The most creative Irish composer of his generation was reduced to a humdrum day gig, and for some time was the pit piano player in the Abbey Theatre.
He was fired from this post after 12 years.
Poor Frederick was falling prey to alcoholism, tinnitus and grievous mental health issues.
He had bouts of homelessness in the later decades of his life, and died in dissolute penury in the 1980’s.
His watershed string quartet of 1936 had to wait 4 decades for a commercial recording.
That well-to-do cultural maven Garech De Brun sanctioned the recording, and picked an English Quartet, and an English producer in an English recording studio to see it turned out.
There have been nowhere near enough recordings of String Quartet In C Minor in the intervening decades.
In fact there’s been only one further full reading of this long piece in the compact disc era.
So, as I’m making a claim for Irish modernism in music, I’m also claiming Frederick May as the ideal ‘test case’ if you will for the completely unideal fates of Classical music in Ireland for much of the 20th century.
There were no professional composers.
Anyone who was so inclined either worked in academia or some other manner of an educational role. Some worked for the national broadcaster; some made their works in private all their lives, never to be performed. Such opportunities were few here. Some got out for greater prospects abroad.
For anyone who stayed, their music writing was a hobby.
Why were things so paltry you’ll be asking?
The answer is that it comes down to intentional state policy.
After the independence of the state, such pursuits as Classical composition were considered very much surplus to requirements, and not to be supported.
One could surmise that DeValera and other politicians viewed Classical music as ‘Un-Irish’ activity or worse, but state papers of the era prove that these politicians laid down avowed policy that Classical music would never be anything like a badge of state, like it might have been seen in other territories.
Things slowly changed in the latter decades of the last century.
But very slowly.
The National Concert Hall could seem like a keen signifier for this change.
However, it took a whole century of groundswell agitation by ordinary Classical music lovers to see this concert space a reality.
Recording opportunities for Classical music were also paltry here.
The first commercial recordings of Irish Classical composition made on the island were in 1956.
A pair of long playing records were made, and no one thought to try to capture such music again for many years.
A few records of orchestral arrangements of traditional tunes trickled out here and there.
The very odd record was made abroad, and often the performer or writer was just that too – abroad.
The aforementioned Garech De Brun sanctioned occasional records through his ‘Claddagh’ music imprint from the late 1960’s onwards.
The very first serial specialised imprint for Irish Classical music was founded by two sound engineers and a warehouse accountant for the Gael Linn organisation in 1970.
These guys were in the kind of circles that lead to the founding of the N.C.H., and they decided to capture the performers and compositions that badly needed doing.
They called their label ‘The New Irish Recording Company”.
They had their own recording equipment, and they took this into the churches and exam halls of Dublin to create their recordings.
Aside from calling in the producer of the London Symphony Orchestra for bigger projects, they were very much a D.I.Y. operation.
They made bespoke private records for choirs and orchestras
Because their economy of means of production outstripped their ability to produce records, about three quarters of the 20 or so albums the ‘N.I.R.C.’ recorded were issued.
These were all recorded across the first half of the 1970’s, and represent a compendium of two centuries of Irish Classical composition.
The N.I.R.C. catalogue is very much the centre piece in the history of early Irish Classical music recording.
The few overviews published have always given it pride of place.
The unheard O’Riada composition was recorded by N.I.R.C.
It took a pair of decades, and the issue of the ‘NAXOS Irish composers series’ to see a similar survey to this……….