Gifts from the Tree, lyric and melody by Patrick O'Sullivan

 

Gifts from the Tree, lyric and melody by Patrick O'Sullivan

Video link

https://youtu.be/yxZj-OA9xBI

UK Autoharps Advent Calendar Friday December 6 2024.

 

1.

Gifts from the Tree is my contribution to our UK Autoharps tradition - the Advent Calendar.

I am a great fan of traditions, especially new ones.

Members of UK Autoharps prepare a song, we are each allotted a day on the run-up to Christmas, and we release our performance on our allotted day.

My song will slot in on Friday December 6 2024.

But...

...Given how ill I was, last winter, in the months leading up to Christmas...

I thought it best to get everything tidy now.  Do not get bogged down.  Make sure everything works.  And, at the appropriate time, distribute the links.

2.

When I was asked to contribute to the UK Autoharps Advent Calendar, I looked at what I had ready on the slipway.

I had a demo, one of my own Christmas songs, me singing, made earlier in the year - ready to put before a singer.  But events, events...

So, we tidied that demo - me singing, we are stuck with that.  And we added an autoharp layer - me playing, we are stuck with that.  But the studio forgives.

I do not want to analyse the text too much.  There is another presentation that I do, about bringing emotion into our writing.

Thus, in this lyric I have paced it out, and distanced - it is a story about someone telling a story.

 

3.

The idea came from my academic reading, of course - something that was foreign, but not strange.  I was intrigued by the story of a community that absorbed private grief into shared activity, a communal and public tradition.

The private grief is still there, and emerges when we listen to people.  By people I mean, mostly, women.  We listen to families.  I won't go into all the statistics - but, for example, in this country stillbirths are running at 4 per 1,000 total births.

I remember one quiet evening, long ago, sitting with my mother - I was visiting home from university.  And my mother began talking about her lost child:  that child would have been our elder sister, Margaret;  Margaret, had she lived, would now be this age;  Margaret, never before mentioned, the missing part of our family.

 

4.

The original plan was that this would be one of my crafted, traditional, shaped lyrics - almost like a Nursery Rhyme.  (The work of Iona and Peter Opie is a major influence...)

But I could not get that to work.  The idea is, maybe, too complex.  I created a text that had moved away from a story, was not really a poem, and used lyric techniques - like pattern and repetition - which would not have worked in a poem.

We then used the patterns and repetitions to create melody lines - there is an Introduction, and 3 verses.  But the 3 verses are not each exactly the same shape - the melody lines cannot simply be repeated 3 times.

In other words, we used music to solve the lyric's problems...

The chord sequences are autoharp friendly - they sit nicely on a standard chromatic autoharp.

 

5.

Then, a very simple video, using open-source video editor, OpenShot - and accepting the limitations of the simple download version...

Make key words visible.  Many of the key words appear in many another Christmas song - they are Christmas words, in a new pattern.

Pace out the structure of the story...

 

We talked...

For...

But...

And...

...Gifts from the Tree.

My thanks to Helen Slade and Jan Brodie, of UK Autoharps, for their help and encouragement.

 

Patrick O'Sullivan

November 2024

PS

Rough scan, below, of our working notes - with chords for autoharpers...

 

Report, Report, Tribute, Report...

Report, Report, Tribute, Report...

1.

Report 1

Yes - thank you for asking - doing very well now.

As all the world knows...  I do not do Stiff Upper Lip.  So, be glad you were not around.

Here in Yorkshire I have quietly recovered from eye surgery x 2.  Turns out I have two eyes.

Reached the stage where I take the new eyes to the optician, to find  out what they can do.

Reading glasses - what a marvellous invention...

 

2.

Report 2

The first book read with the new eyes and the new glasses was...

Bew, Paul. 2016. Churchill and Ireland. Oxford University Press.

Not part of any great plan.  That book just happened to be on top of the waiting pile of books.

It is there because Paul Bew's book is much cited in other works recently read - for example in Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War, by Diarmaid Ferriter, 2021. 

And Paul Bew has paused, to add a footnote to his own book, at the bottom of a fairly recent posting, September 4, 2023, on the Churchill Society web site...

https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-197/churchill-and-ireland-revisited/

'Confession

I have here a confession to make. I think now I should have openly stated at the start of my book Churchill and Ireland (Oxford, 2016) that both my parents, one a Belfast Protestant and the other a Cork Catholic, were members of Churchill’s army in the Second World War. They were both doctors—my father, Dr. Kenneth Bew, a lieutenant in the RAF and my mother, Captain Mary “Paddy” Leahy in the Indian Medical Service, which was then an integral part of the British army and something of an Irish fiefdom.  This is why I quite like the underlying concept of Churchill’s draft 1934 film script for movie mogul Alexander Korda, that the mixed-marriage tensions of an Irish-Catholic/Protestant couple might be dissipated by a decision to join the British army.

More profoundly, as the decision of both my Irish parents to support the British war effort was the sine qua non of my existence, I have never been able to suppress my lack of enthusiasm for Irish neutrality in the war against Hitler. Perhaps as a consequence I have never been able to admire the policy of Irish neutrality. I can accept, of course, that, given the historic legacy of Anglo-Irish bitterness and tension, it may well have been politically impossible to bring Ireland into the war against the Nazis, even after the Americans joined in...'

Paul Bew's 'Confession' is interesting and important - and these issues I have explored in depth elsewhere.  But I am not sure that it adds much to the robust and readable book that is Bew, Churchill and Ireland...  It certainly does not detract from it.

(His note does add to the long list of novels and dramas about the archipelagic experience that find resolution in mystic marriage...)

 

3.

Tribute to Patrick Maume...

What strikes me now, about Bew, Churchill and Ireland, is the Dedication...

'To Patrick Maume

who has revolutionized the art of Irish biography'

And Paul Bew's Acknowledgements, p vii, begins, 'I owe a very great debt to Patrick Maume...'  his 'scholarly sympathy for all shades of Irish life...'  'his wise conversation...'

We can quarrel with terms.  The art of Irish biography.  The science of Irish biography.  The traditions of Irish biography.

Our traditions can be combative, in complex ways.  It is rare for a writer to write a biography of someone they despise, and to understand our traditions we need first of all to understand the uses of hagiography.  And then, let combat commence.  But I have said enough about that elsewhere.

Our thanks  to Paul Bew for giving us this tribute to the work of Patrick Maume.  

Patrick Maume's approach is, indeed, scholarly, patient, kindly, non-judgemental.  But is not afraid to make...  assessments.  His approach is not insular - Patrick Maume's knowledge of networks within Ireland is extraordinary, of family, friendships and enmities, influences.  But he is always aware that these networks stretch beyond Ireland - there is always, as we say nowadays, a diasporic dimension.  And Patrick Maume shares his extraordinary knowledge in patient and kindly ways.

As Paul Bew says, we can now follow Patrick Maume's work for the online Dictionary Of Irish Biography...

https://www.ria.ie/research-programmes/dictionary-of-irish-biography/

 

4.

Report 3

I particularly remember one of my encounters with that distinctive Patrick Maume voice - my reading of his book...

Maume, Patrick. 1993. “‘Life That Is Exile’”: Daniel Corkery and the Search for Irish Ireland. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen’s University of Belfast.

I thought then, this is different, this is calm, this is helpful...

I read that book as part of my presentation on the notion of 'Hidden Ireland', a notion now enshrined in many titles - notably, in interdisciplinary dialogue, by Bob Scally and Charles Orser...

Scally, Robert James. 1995. The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration. New York: Oxford University Press.

Orser, Charles. 2006. Unearthing Hidden Ireland: Historical Archaeology and Anthropology at Ballykilcline, County Roscommon. Bray: Wordwell.

But I particularly valued Patrick Maume's approach to Corkery, because I wanted to follow Corkery into a study of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin / Owen Roe O'Sullivan...

And that one poem, whose title has not settled down...  The poet asks the blacksmith to make him a spade.

The Irish language specialists use the first line of the poem - and speak, and write, of it as “A Shéamais, déan dom” (‘Seamus, make for me’)...

Seamus Heaney's version is called 'Poet to Blacksmith' - Heaney is, of course, aware of the text's complexities, and signals that.  But he dials it down, and Ola Larsmo, for the Nobel Prize Committee, dials it down even further...

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1995/heaney/article/

My approach dials it up.  

That poem by Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin is one of the most extraordinary and dense pieces of writing in world history.  A while back, during the lockdowns, I began to write up my notes on that one text.  When my notes reached 20 pages, I decided to put them aside...

Patrick O'Sullivan

November 2024