Luke DanielsBrian Keenan
Walker between Worlds
Turlough Carolan is unquestionably the most significant pivotal figure at this point in Irelands richly embroidered musical history. His contribution to modern composers should never be underestimated, even if it is frequently misunderstood.
Our Composer lived in a period of pervasive and dramatic change. Though blind, the itinerant Harper would have witnessed the rapid withering away of the old Gaelic order and all the institutions and art forms that held it together for many centuries.
The new religion of Christianity had grafted itself onto paganism and the old gods were retreating into a Celtic twilight. A new language was being forced onto the indigenous people. A new social order was emerging and with it a system of economics and politics far removed from the established tribal systems.
After the collapse of the old Irish order the special place of the harper-bard was being swept away,the harper took to the roads, and took his music with him. This was a blessing in disguise.His audience was a new one, informed by new ideas and developing different tastes.Without patronage the itinerant musician had to assimilate to survive.Thus it loosened up the form of the music and opened it up to all the influences that such widespread cultural change was bringing about.
It should be noted that the city of Dublin was one of the largest and most sophisticated cities in Europe.Italian theatre and music were the height of fashion inside the pale Turlough Carolan , like many other musicians, was a frequent visitor and guest of many dignitaries. Undoubtly he would have heard the huge organ in Saint Patricks Cathederal and the harpsichord and violin being played in the drawingrooms of his hosts. Is incredible aural memory would have enabled himto store away these strange new sounds and later redeploy them in his own unique way.
Turlough Carolan, unlike any before him and few after him spanned the bridge between these two worlds. He was to every degree a Renaissance man; an innovator of new musical forms, which made a unique fusion out of the centuries of elaborate tradition with something new and intoxicating. He restored the soul of the ancient tradition, raised it to new heights on a dias of Baroque splendor. He infused the music of the ancients with new light, passion and power,and transcendant joy. Even the humble jig he re-energized and transformed into his planxties.
Like many renaissance men after him, he was shunned by the church,and by his comtempories for his religious and musical apostasy. But he persisted. His muse was greater than the restrictive confines of faith or tradition.
Turlough Carolan was a walker between worlds. Not only the old Gaelic world and emergent modern Ireland, but his own inner world and spiritual life made him as complex as the age in which he lived. His name is frequently subtitled with the term ?last of the bards? but he was more than this. As a bard his words have not endured the way his music has. His poetry does not have the capacity to inspire the way his music unceasingly does. For Carolan was more appropriately ?Last of the Shaman?. Carolan was a Healer. He knew the power of music to lift men and women out of poverty, disease, starvation, exclusion and alienation. He knew too that music had the power to transcend life, that music, like language was a living thing and could not be fixed into set forms and singular interpretations. To his untutored ear, baroque reflected back the passion of his own inner life and provided the means to communicate with the life that he could not see about him.
Turlough Carolan kicked open the door and let the light come blazing in. Perhaps that is as it should be. It is the way of creative people who are tuned to things outside our understanding to show us the way. Carolan unfethered traditional music from the confines of that tradition. He set it free from the Pharisees and purists to become its own creature; to embrace and make a marriage with whatever was worthy, inspiring, and elevated man and music to be once more with the gods!
I like to think that if Carolan himself were sitting listening to these challenging arrangements of his melodies, he would raise a glass in fond appreciation.
Brian Keenan