Listen Hear Seán Ó Riada
A few words on Danny McCarthy, sound installations, Seán Ó Riada, céilí bands and the “buzzing of a bluebottle in an upturned jam jar”.
Last December I posted my “Top 10 Vinyl Finds of 2024”.
Coming in at No. 1 was Seán Ó Riada’s Our Musical Heritage.
Our Musical Heritage was a series of programmes, “on Irish Traditional music which Seán Ó Riada presented on Radio Éireann in 1962.” This boxset contains a book of, “the text of Ó Riada’s talks, edited with a preface by Thomas Kinsella.” The three LPs provide a selection, “edited and introduced by Tomás Ó Canainn, of the performances by sean-nós singers and traditional instrumentalists chosen by the author himself to illustrate the character of the Irish musical tradition.”
A serious find, I was made up.
Seán Ó Riada - Our Musical Heritage (3xLP Boxset + Book, RTÉ, 1981). Photograph by Paul McDermott.
Danny McCarthy, the sound and performance artist based in Cork, got in touch with me after I posted my Top 10.
“I remember listening to my copy of Our Musical Heritage many years ago and one thing that struck me was Ó Riada describing the sound of a céilí band as about as interesting as the “buzzing of a bluebottle in an upturned jam jar”. This phrase stuck with me for years,” wrote Danny.
The exact phrase from Ó Riada that Danny was referring to is:
“The result is a rhythmic but meaningless noise with as much relation to music as the buzzing of a bluebottle in an upturned jam jar.”
The full quotation from Ó Riada is:
“One might expect that, after a certain time, the céilí bands would have managed to work out some kind of compromise between the solo traditional idea and group activity. But instead of developing this kind of compromise, the céilí band leaders took the easy and wrong way out, tending more and more to imitate swing or jazz bands which play an entirely different type of music and are organised on different principles... the whole idea of variation, the whole idea of the personal utterance – are abandoned. Instead, everyone takes hold of a tune and belts away at it without stopping. The result is a rhythmic but meaningless noise with as much relation to music as the buzzing of a bluebottle in an upturned jam jar.”
Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritage, Radio Éireann, Episode 13, 6 October 1962
Ó Riada’s description of a céilí band proved inspirational for Danny: “When UCC’s Music Department moved up to Sunday’s Well a few of us organised an event called Sound Works as part of Art Trail. We got the use of the whole building and one of the things that came with the building was Ó Riada’s Death Mask in its raw state unframed etc.”
Danny continues: “So sensing that this was a rare opportunity for me I created a work called “Listen Hear Seán Ó Riada”. It consisted of a stand with a jam jar on top of it and in the jar were two small stereo speakers playing a recording of a blue bottle in a jam jar. This was placed in front of the death mask and one had to bend/bow down to hear it thus paying homage to Ó Riada at the same time.”
“The work subsequently travelled to Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin and to the Crawford Gallery using Ó Riada’s image and a text instead of the original death mask.”
Photographs by Danny McCarthy.
Danny McCarthy - LISTEN hEAR (48-page Book + CD, Farpoint Recordings, 2008). Photograph by Paul McDermott.
In 2008 Farpoint Recordings released LISTEN hEAR, a retrospective of Danny’s life as a sound artist. It’s a beautifully produced 48-page book and CD combination, documenting selected works: “the book covers both indoor and outdoor installations with both colour and b&w illustrations, with an introduction by David Toop and an essay by Julie Forrester.”
In his introduction, David Toop says of McCarthy that he was, “moved by his engagement with the past, with his own potent memories and with Irish history and myth and by his fierce and gentle means of understanding his place in it all, which is at once ancient and modern.”
Page from LISTEN hEAR. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
“McCarthy works closely with history, the authentic space is often an important presence,” writes the artist Julie Forrester in Aftersound, her essay in the book.
“In McCarthy’s installations the significant space becomes an acoustic receptacle which holds an accumulation of events, both historic and mundane, which in turn overlaid with the listener’s own performative (re)visiting, an echoing of presences; Emmett’s Cell, Pearse’s St Enda’s School, Seán Ó Riada’s death mask on the wall of the old refectory at UCC’s St. Vincent’s Church.”
Danny McCarthy - LISTEN hEAR (48-page Book + CD, Farpoint Recordings, 2008). Photographs from Farpoint Recordings.
In February 2019 I had the great pleasure of interviewing Danny as part of the research I was doing for my Michael O’Shea documentary, No Journey Ends - the story of Michael O’Shea. Danny had performed with Michael O’Shea and Microdisney in Cork back in 1982 at the Ivernia Theatre. I met up with him in the National Concert Hall as he was setting up an installation.
Due to time constraints the audio scene with Danny never made the finished documentary but it can be heard below. A longer blog post “Danny McCarthy and the Vox Cabaret” is also below.
For further listening…
For further reading…
Danny McCarthy photographed at the HearSay International Audio Arts Festival 2019.