FANTASIA. The word is Italian for âfancyâ, and its musical application is to any kind of composition in which form takes second place in deference to the demands of imagination or even of mere wilfulnessâor, indeed, to any kinds of composition for which no other name happens to occur to the composer.Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music (1938), p. 309[For Joyce] music was a language and perhaps even something more. It was an atmosphere, a condition of thought, an aura beyond all words, which nevertheless was to be found in the words, grouping them, guiding them, giving them breath of life. For Joyce, a sentence was not severable from its melodic qualities, for they alone gave existence to it. Attention has been drawn many times to this fact and the remark has become trite: Joyceâs art is primarily musical. It was for Joyce that the divine rule of Verlaineâs Art PoĂ©tique appears to have been dictated: De la musique avant toute chose âŠLouis Gillet, Claybook for James Joyce, (1941), p. 110 (original emphases)
1 Three Lives
Three lives, three modes of Irish identity, three music-makers.
Edward Kent was born on 21 September 1881 in the village of Ballymoe in Co. Galway. The family of nine moved to Ardee in Co. Louth when father James, a policeman in the Royal Irish Constabulary, was transferred. On his retirement in 1892 they moved again, this time to Dublin.
Kentâs strong Catholic upbringing and interest in history primed him for politicisation. He took a clerical job with Dublin Corporation, but his primary energies were devoted to the cause of Irish independence. In 1899 he joined the Gaelic League, which had been founded a few years earlier (1893) with Douglas Hyde as its first president. Kent became fluent in Irish, Gaelicised his name to Ăamonn Ceannt and became a dynamic force in the Leagueâs cultural programme.
In February 1900 Ceannt, along with the cultural activist Edward Martyn founded the Dublin branch of Cumann na bPĂobairĂ (The Pipers Club). The uilleann pipes (originally known as the Union bagpipe, or sometimes just the Irish pipes) is âone of the worldâs most distinctive multi-reed instrumentâ (Ă hAllmhurĂĄin 1998: 74). It evolved from a simpler design in the early eighteenth century, and its strong national credentials made it a popular choice for nativist musicians, among the diaspora as well as in the major cities across the island. The Dublin Club was in fact a cradle of nationalist sentiment, with Ceannt among its most active and ardent agents.
Ceannt was treasurer of the Dublin Pipers Club until he retired following his marriage to the clubâs secretary Ăine Brennan in June 1905. In the same year he was elected a member of the Leagueâs governing body, although he was already beginning to question what he considered to be its abbreviated remit. The following year he won a gold medal for his playing at An Oireachtas; two years later, as a member of the Catholic Young Menâs Society, he performed in Rome for Pope Pius X.
By 1906, the Pipers Club was in financial difficulties.
The following year Ceannt joined Sinn FĂ©in.
In 1911 the club was in a âmoribundâ condition.
In 1912 Ceannt was sworn in as a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
The last entry in the minute book (dated 14 October 1913) is a request relayed by Ăamonn Ceannt for pipers to play at PĂĄdraig Pearseâs Irish-language school St Endaâs.
Earlier the same year Ceannt had joined the Irish Volunteers and was one of the principal architects of its successful gun-running operation.
On the morning of 8 May 1916 Ăamonn Ceannt was executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol for his role in the Easter Rising.
During the twentieth century the uilleann pipes emerged as one of the most popular and most recognisable of traditional Irish musical instruments. Na PĂobairĂ Uilleann Teoranta, based in Henrietta Street in Dublin, continues to thrive in the present day.1
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Ina Boyle was born in Enniskerry in Co. Wicklow on 10 March 1889 to a well-to-do Protestant family. Her clergyman father William engaged a governess to provide Ina and her sister with lessons on violin and cello. Her obvious talent warranted further investment, so she continued her studies with Samuel Myerscough, and also took correspondence classes in composition with the Irish composer Charles Wood, whose other pupils included Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells. Other acclaimed teachers were Percy Buck (later knighted), non-residential professor of music at Trinity College between 1910 and 1920, and Charles Kitson, organist and choirmaster at Christ Church Cathedral as well as professor of music at University College.
By now Boyle had decided that she wished to embrace the life of the composerâa decision which seemed to be justified when she won first and second prize for original composition at the Sligo Feis Ceoil of 1913. The Great War, as well as a decade of civil unrest in Ireland, curtailed her progress, although her orchestral rhapsody The Magic Harp (1919) was selected for performance by the London Symphony Orchestra at the Royal College of Music. Itâs a brooding piece of late Romantic Victoriana which makes absolutely no concessions at all to continental modernism; nor, despite the harp reference, does it contain much in the way of a recognisably âIrishâ tonality.
Between 1923 and 1937 Boyle travelled regularly to England to take lessonsâ with Vaughan Williamsâactually more like friendly inquiries about her current compositions and encouragement to keep faith with her calling. Boyle seems to have been unlucky with her familyâs healthâshe was obliged to care for both her parents and her younger sister for much of their livesâand this also stymied her career development. She continued to compose, however, although the majority of this workâchorales, song-cycles, string quartets, tone poems, operas as well as three balletsâremained unperformed. Her papers languished in the Manuscripts and Archives Research Library of Trinity College until, under the impetus of restorative feminism, a Lyric FM documentary of 2010 and a Trinity exhibition of 2013 went some way towards reviving her reputation. Ita Beausangâs 2018 biography finally enabled us to hear another of the lost voices of modern Irish history.
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John McCormack was born in Athlone, Co. Westmeath on 14 June 1884, the fifth of eleven children to immigrant Scottish parents. Throughout his youth and teenage years he sang in church choirs and in concerts. In 1902 McCormack auditioned for the newly formed Palestrina Choir in Dublinâs Pro-Cathedral where its director Vincent OâBrien, recognising an extraordinary talent, accepted the young man.
McCormackâs first taste of the fame that he was to so enjoy came in May 1903 when he won the gold medal in the tenor section of the Feis Ceoil. (The same prize had been won two years earlier by a well-regarded Dublin tenor named Augustine âGusâ BoylanâCostello 1992: 192.) It was during these early days in the city that he made the acquaintance of a slightly older Dubliner whom he encouraged to consider a singing career. The bronze medal that JJ won in the following yearâs Feis had a resounding afterlife in his imagination, in his work, and in his attitude towards McCormack himself.
With money generated through recording and sponsorship, McCormack moved to Milan to study with one of Italyâs premier singing teachers, Vincenzo Sabatini. His professional operatic dĂ©but came on 13 January 1906 when he sang the title role of Pietro Mascagniâs LâAmico Fritz (1891). McCormack promptly married his Irish sweetheartâLily Foley, also a singer, whose career mysteriously stalled at this point.
Thereafter McCormackâs star commenced a spectacular career across the musical heavens of the twentieth century. With Europe conquered he headed for the home of the new technologically driven mass media. Overnight celebrity was achieved with his performance in La traviata (at rival New York opera houses, and alongside different divas) in November 1909. He had already commenced what was to be an incredibly successful recording career, aided in no small measure by his ability to perform repertoire from opera, art song, popular song and folk ballad. Besides making him a household name around the world McCormackâs subsequent career as a concer...