Thursday 29 August 2019

Notes towards a performance of Patrick Kavanagh, On Raglan Road

...this could be turned into a properly referenced research article, whose title might be...

'Towards a performance of Patrick Kavanagh, On Raglan Road'...

But here we are...

Notes towards a performance of Patrick Kavanagh, On Raglan Road

Practical people, like lyricists, musicians and singers, are reluctant to concede that there is such an entity as the 'folk' as envisaged by a variety of theorists - but we do acknowledge that there is a folk process, by which lyric and melody become common property.  This is a process of forgetting, half remembering, simplifying and reconstructing - perhaps best described by the Opies, in their study of Nursery Rhymes.

The story of how Patrick Kavanagh came to write a new lyric to a familiar melody, and how that song became part of the repertoire of the Dubliners, has entered the folk process - and typically of our world and its web, various versions of that story float around.  The history of the melody and the earlier lyric, Dawning of the Day, Fainne Geal an Lae, and that lyric's place in Irish traditions, can be established - for example, the song was recorded by John McCormack.  

Kavanagh's lyric is therefore what the musicologists call a contrafactum.   And his lyric is technically interesting, in its use of rhythm and rhyme to point the structure of the melody - in a way that the earlier lyric did not - and in its placing of itself in a relationship with that older lyric's vision poem tradition.

For a performer, the phrasing of Kavanagh's lyric can be difficult.  It is noteworthy that, in his version, Luke Kelly, of The Dubliners, at some points simply abandons Kavanagh's structured phrasing.  And it tends to be Luke Kelly's version that enters the folk process - unless performers make a conscious decision to return to the published version of Kavanagh's lyric, as established by Antoinette Quinn.  However, the web now allows us to track further changes, in text and in performance - and in some cases it can be argued that, for performance decisions, these half-remembered lines are better than the lines enshrined by Quinn.

Since the death of Luke Kelly the performance of the song by The Dubliners has acquired a reverential, hymn-like quality.  Two recent outings of the song, by Tradfest and in the Martin McDonagh movie, In Bruges, have located the song in a church.  This hymn-like approach, arguably, ignores the story behind the lyric, the story within the lyric, and the detail of Kavanagh's text - which is, after all, a song about a middle aged man falling for a beautiful young woman, a tale that we might today regard as a bit creepy.  

But which is, of course, a major theme in world literature.  In is a theme that scholars of literature find themselves having to defend, and transcend - as Ted Gioia does in his study of Love Songs.

So, as a performer approaches this song, there is much to consider...  In 2019, as a birthday present to myself, I spent some time in the recording studio, with guitarist Danny Yates, working on Kavanagh's song.  I now offer - not a performance of the song - but further Notes towards a performance...

The recording can be found here, on my Soundcloud...

I acknowledge the friendly support of Bent Sørensen, Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University...
Sørensen, Bent. 2014. “True Gods of Sound and Stone - The Many Crossings of Patrick Kavanagh’s On Raglan Road.” In The Crossings of Art in Ireland, edited by Ruben Moi, Brynhildur Boyce, and Charles Armstrong, 65–79. Bern: Peter Lang.

...and of Danny Yates, City Sound Studios...

Bent Sørensen commented on 'the complete avoidance of melisma...' in my performance.  I had to look it up.  Think, Whitney Houston and the 6 second first 'I' of I Will Always Love You...


Bent Sørensen is making an interesting point about Patrick Kavanagh, the lyricist.  And I Will Always...  sing like a writer...

Saturday 2 March 2019

Give us a song...


Give us a song...

When people learn that I write song lyrics, specifically people from certain specific cultural backgrounds, there is a tendency to say, at maybe specific times of the evening, Give us a song...

Whilst there are no theological objections to this, you do need to know...

I am a good lyricist.  I am a not a good singer.  I am a terrible musician.

It is true that I have attended singing lessons, for some years now - but that has mostly been about acquiring knowledge rather than acquiring skill.

The singing lessons are certainly good for my health, and my complex respiratory problems.

But mostly I use the lessons to explore song and lyric - my own work, of course.  But also, when I want to understand a Dowland song, I study and sing a Dowland song.  Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, the same.  When I want to understand Brecht, I study and sing a Brecht/Weill song - and usually I have to tidy up the English language version of the Brecht lyric.

And, also, of course, I am learning how to talk to and listen to musicians.  And better understand their needs.

In turn, if you are asking me to Give us a song, you must understand my needs.

First of all, with my delicate nature, I need a properly structured warm up.  You cannot expect me to just launch into song, like a wild bird.

Then I will need some sort of instrumental intro - this vastly increases the chances of me starting on the right note.

But I will also need some sort of counting-in guy - I might start on the right note, but will I start on the right beat?

Musicians - I do need musicians, someone or something to keep me on track, something to help me with the melody...  I do tend to drift off, and dangerously find comfort in some generalised folkloric drone.

Ideally there should be a backing singer or maybe more than one backing singer, one for harmony, one for melody.  My friend Stephanie Hladowski is very good at this.  She finds a harmony or some sort of structure to whatever I happen to be singing, and almost makes it sound as if I know what am I doing.

Remember, musicians, that if you take some sort of instrumental break - whilst the singers stand around looking appreciative - I am going to need the counting-in guy again.  Do not let the counting-in guy think his job is done.  If it was hard to start on the right beat at the beginning, it is even more difficult to hit that beat in the welter of noise.

Now, all this musicians will understand, but be puzzled by - for are all these things not second nature?  No, dears, they are not second nature to me - I had to learn.

So, I am not saying that I will never Give us a song.  But you do need to know that when you ask me to Give us a song you are asking for something complex, difficult, needing forethought and planning.

Also, I am very shy.

Wednesday 20 February 2019

Lyricist


People who know my work will recall that I am a writer and researcher, based in Yorkshire, England.  My current academic affiliation is with New York University – I am Visiting Scholar at the Glucksman Ireland House, NYU.

My work is visible in a number of places, on the web and in the research literature – as is my CV.

Not that visible in the standard CVs is my work, over the years, as a working lyricist. 

Most relevant here is this version of my CV on the British Music Collection web site…

A song lyric selection is visible, in book form, on Amazon, and in many other places…
Love Death and Whiskey - 40 songs, by Patrick O'Sullivan
Read the Introduction to that book, for some first thoughts at that time...


This is one of my song translations on Soundcloud - this is an English language version of the much loved Cabo Verde song, almost a second Cabo Verde national anthem, Papa Joachim Paris…

Blog entry about that here...

And this, on YouTube, is a lyric I wrote for a much loved melody, Jill's Theme by Ennio Morricone, from the Sergio Leone move, Once Upon a  Time in the West…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt29GzVKGRU

Blog entry here...

I have been able to give more time and thought to the song lyric part of my output, and to the lyricist part of me, over the past decade, since the publication of Love Death and Whiskey - and have gathered a little team of musicians and singers, just to make sure that I have resources to illustrate the material.  As we say in the industry, make a demo...

And I have gathered research material, to place my own practice within the research record - specifically, I am developing research projects on traditional verse forms, especially the use of rhyme.  And on song translation.

Patrick O'Sullivan
February 2019

Monday 26 November 2018

The Train (Jill's Theme)


The Train (Jill's Theme)

A lyric response to Ennio Morricone's melody...

If we are to embrace cinema as an art, well, that means that we must wrestle with westerns...

My own view is that a critique of western movies starts with the western as a 'version of pastoral...'  But that is by the by...

My generation watched SO many westerns, as we grew up.  I have seen so many westerns and I have seen some westerns so many times that often I can recognise the horses.

Of course we were intrigued as we watched the Italian film maker Sergio Leone wrestle with the western.  We can leave, for elsewhere, comment on the 'spaghetti western', the critics' readiness to sneer and the simple cineaste's willingness to marvel.

We immediately knew, in 1968, that Sergio Leone's Once Upon A time in the West was an outsider's meditation on the western.  We spotted the citations.

And we still remember that moment when that crane shot introduced Jill's Theme.

And we realised that we were also exploring the power of melody...

So, some 50 years of meditation later, I have put my lyric for Ennio Morricone's melody on my Soundcloud, and I have put a version of my vision on Youtube...

Youtube

Soundcloud

Before I start work on a lyric for a pre-existing melody I need to do a lot of thinking - thinking and, let us call it, research.

I need to be convinced that I can bring something to this, that there is something for me to do and say.

Even if the work is a song translation - like my version of Papa Joachim Paris - I still need to be convinced that the new entity in the English language is good, that we have brought something worthwhile into the world.

So...  Let us call it research...

1.
I remember asking Heather Farrell-Roberts, our autoharp star, some time ago, if Morricone, Jill's Theme, might be autoharp friendly.

The chords are simple, but the range is great.

There is some musicology, giving the chords, I-IV-V-I here...


Ennio Morricone’s Score for Once Upon a Time in the West (Part 1 of 3): Jill’s Theme (Main Theme) by Mark Richards
  
In the movie Jill's Theme is one of the leitmotifs.  Unusually for film music, Morricone's music for THIS movie was written before the film was made...

So, the melody is used in the movie in a rather scrappy way - the leitmotif floats in and out.

When we were working on my lyric for the melody Stephanie Hladowski and I had to find a song structure.

2.
It has become a bravura piece for sopranos in posh frocks...

Patricia Janeckova - Once Upon A Time In The West (Miss Reneta 2012)

Don't you feel sorry for all the other pretty ladies in posh frocks - who have to stand around looking interested?

Steffi Vertriest

This version is really worth looking at - simple piano and voice.  The structure is odd.  But there is a structure.
(The Chords are in Chordify...)

Susanna Rigacci - Once Upon a Time in The West Ennio Morricone 2002 Arena Concert 1

André Vásáry - male

etc....

3.
The melody is so attractive - there have been attempts to write words to the melody...
Two examples on same Youtube video
Mireille Mathieu and Dulce Pontes ...

Once Upon A Time In The West
Mireille Mathieu Starts at 1.44
Dulce Pontes starts at 6.05

Text Mireille Mathieu at

In French

Text Dulce Pontes at

Andrea Bocelli Your Love (Once Upon a Time in The West)

Standard love songs that do not engage with the narrative of the movie, and the melody as it appears in the movie.

But they do show how a text might be structured.

4.
My words engage with the film's narrative.  It is a response to what we hear, and what we see on screen. 

It is very existentialist.

Of course.

I did ask Danny Yates for some electric guitar at the beginning of our recording, to reference that distinctive Morricone guitar sound from A Fistful Of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More...

I have emailed Ennio Morricone's office saying:  'It might interest the Maestro that the emotion I hear when I listen to the melody is, above all else, compassion...'

Patrick O'Sullivan
November 2018


Monday 19 November 2018

Decorate the Day - Wedding Oratorio



There are a number of versions of Decorate the Day, my Wedding Oratorio.

Some versions live only in our memories...

This is a link to my Soundcloud, which I use mostly for Works in Progress, to share with chums...

https://soundcloud.com/saltduck-1

This is the direct link to Decorate the Day, the Clayton version, on Soundcloud...


The Singers are Patrick O'Sullivan and Stephanie Hladowski

Piano Danny Yates
Guitar Danny Yates
Mandolin Gene Dunford
Autoharp Patrick O'Sullivan

And here, on my blog, Fiddler's Dog, are some notes...

People who want to retain the mystery of the creative processes should read no further...

1.
My elder son has long watched my attempts to play a musical instrument with amused detachment.  And has long said that he would like me to perform at his wedding.

I could never make out if this was a dare, a challenge, or a tease...

Neverthelesss...

My autoharps and my mountain dulcimer to hand...

As the day of the wedding loomed...

I wrote a song - almost a Wedding Oratorio, 6 minutes long.

And I did perform at his wedding.

Video grab photo, above....

Autoharper, me, on left. Chorus of wedding guests. My elder son and his lovely bride, extreme right.

2.
The wedding was in September 2018, a glamping wedding, with a festival vibe - oh yes.  In rural Norfolk.

Loving families were involved.

In our case...

My younger son made the wedding rings - moving on from the simple joys of silver to the seductive lures of gold.

My wife had grown the flowers.  Not an easy thing to do, to turn a part of the garden into a wildflower meadow - and persuade those wild flowers to bloom in September.

John Clare writes of The Fear of Flowers - 'The nodding oxeye bends before the wind...'  And the nodding oxeye did bend before the wind.

And Dolly Parton sings, 'Wildflowers don't care where they grow...'  Not true, Dolly - they are fussy.

My wife made the bouquets and other floral wonderments for the wedding.

So, I watched my younger son and my wife, and determined that I had to do something - effort not like or equal, but something.

I had to write the song...

For the glamping wedding, with the festival vibe...

And already I was thinking about the LOOK of the flowers, on the wedding day...

3.
When it comes to songs I am very clear about roles.

I am the lyricist.  I write words.  I don't write the music, I don't perform the song, I don't play the music.  I leave these things to other, good people.

However, as I tried to plan the wedding song, none of the usual suspects stepped up to the plate...

So, there had to be made...

Decorate the Day, Wedding Oratorio
Words AND music by Patrick O'Sullivan
With a little help from Shakespeare, Beethoven, and John Hughes' Cwm Rhondda

I had no clear idea what resources I would have - in rural Norfolk - to actually present and perform the song.

I called, for help, on Danny Yates, ever patient and skilled...
http://www.citysoundstudios.com

and, of course, on our muse, Euterpe, the muse of music and lyric poetry, the bringer of delight...
I have to say, I had my doubts.  I asked, Is this wise, Euterpe?  I mean, Euterpe, six minutes?

Danny Yates and I made what I call a 'spine recording' - which gave a structure, simple piano, with me singing. In effect, the sort of thing that a good backing band might do, if you had a good backing band.

The song was always designed to be very pianistic - we have piano-players in the family.  Words, chords and music were sent to possible piano players.

In the event there was a decent sound system at the venue, into which I could stick my usb.  There was electricity.  The electric autoharp is great for faking it.

Two piano players stepped up - Joseph Attenborough and Michael Benaim - and were magnificent.  We played, and sang along to the spine recording.

4.
The song has four main parts...

a. 
'We need not count the miracles...'
A philosophical, meditative prelude.  Lyrical, flowing, pianistic - a long line.  The lines are fourteeners, iambic heptameters - which are not often used in English verse, and have had a bad press.  I wanted a long lyrical line.  

b.
'And here on the day of the marriage...'
A jolly folk song, changes the mood...

This poetic conceit ignores all my wife's hard work, the months of worry and hard work...

And imagines that we have wandered the fields just before the wedding, and we have gathered the wild flowers, to make our chaplets and buttonholes and bouquets...

It is about the look of the day.

c.
'Ox-eye daisy, black eyed Susan...'
The Flower Chant
And what flowers have we gathered?  Everything.

I had been making notes about my wife's plants plans, and she had given me a list of the flowers that she would be taking to the wedding.

But the list was not long enough for the Flower Chant gag to work. 

The point of the gag is that the list just has to be preposterous.  See point 5, below...

There is a hint of Beethoven, but that is because Schiller and I use the same rhythm for a lyric...

'Freude, schöner Götterfunken,'

'Ox-eye daisy, Black eyed Susan'

The Shakespeare gag, half way through the flower chant, was just too good to leave out.  Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon speaks.  The quote takes us from Cupid to 'Fetch me that flower...'  So, it summarises our song.

A more considered version of the song might put in a bit more business here.  For the song and the singers obey Oberon's instructions.  They fetch that flower.  The flower that maidens call 'Love in Idleness' is also called Viola Tricolor and Heart's Ease.

And the Flower Chant begins anew...

'Viola Tricolor, (Heart’s ease), Wood spurge...'

d.
A final football chant, to Cwm Rhondda/Bread of Heaven

Selected wedding guests had been primed, and were ready to join in.

But, in fact, all the wedding guests got the idea, without trouble.

The moment caught in the photograph, above, is the final chant...


5.
Wild Flowers

Some background...

I was a minor poet of the late twentieth century.

Why only a minor poet? you ask.

There were many reasons - but the most significant for our discussion here today is the fact that I can never remember the names of flowers.

Actually, it is worse than that.  I find it difficult to be at all interested in flowers.

I watch the bumble bees.

We have in the autoharp community a song, Wildwood Flower - which everyone can play, but no one can remember the words.  Why? - because it is a half-remembered 1860s lyric full of the names of flowers.

The connection between flowers and poetry is one of those underlying structures that shape knowledge and create traps for the unwary.

It is a special problem for us peasant poets.  I have written elsewhere about my fellow peasants - for example, Patrick MacGill and Robert Story - and I have studied, for example, Patrick Kavanagh and John Clare.

Generally the market for poetry is not amongst peasants.  So, the peasant poet and his muse must produce stuff that will appeal to the un-peasant audience.  (This is just one example of the ways in which markets shape the arts.)

A little while ago I was at a conference in University College, Dublin - where I did what I always do when travelling...  I popped into the library.

There was an interesting - and moving - Patrick Kavanagh exhibition in the special collections section...

https://www.ucd.ie/specialcollections/archives/kavanagh/


And, on display, was one special poem by Patrick Kavanagh, which partly addresses that peasant poet problem, On Reading a Book on Common Wild Flowers...

'...I knew them all by eyesight long before I knew their names
We were in love before we were introduced...'

And Kavanagh's very own copy of that book was there, Common Wild Flowers, by Dr John Hutchinson - it is a little blue Pelican book.

There is a note in one of Kavanagh's manuscripts which more directly addresses the peasant poet's predicament...  '... to progress into print he does not write out of his rural innocence— he writes out of Palgrave's Golden Treasury.'

Now, Palgrave's Golden Treasury is a major influence on my own thinking about verse techniques - and would have had even greater influence, if I could only remember the names of flowers...

On Palgrave see...

Spevack, M. (2012). The Golden Treasury: 150 Years On. EBLJ. Retrieved from https://www.bl.uk/eblj/2012articles/pdf/ebljarticle22012.pdf

Sullivan, M. J. (2016). Tennyson and The Golden Treasury. Essays in Criticism, 66(4), 431–443. Retrieved from
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgw023

The flower names in my Decorate the Day are based on a book I found in a local charity shop for £4...

Maurice Burton, Field Guide to British Wild Flowers, 1982.  Whose flower names list is based on English Names of Wild Flowers, Botanical Society of the British Isles

Now known as
Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland

https://bsbi.org/

The melodies are by me - except, thank John Hughes for the final football chant, Cwm Rhondda...


I use just the chorus, of course.  We had to have something that everyone already knew, even if they did not know that they already knew it...

A more considered version of Decorate the Day might give the song - as one friend has put it - 'room to breathe...'  In particular, the Clayton Version transitions are very abrupt.  But we had to try and control the length.  I mean, Euterpe, six minutes...?

Patrick O'Sullivan
November 2018




Friday 9 November 2018

I am a footnote in Tolkien Studies...


Surely something that is on everyone's bucket list...?

And at last I can it say it...

I am a footnote in Tolkien Studies...

Stuart Lee's article about the 1968 BBC tv Leslie Megahey film is now visible on the Project Muse web site.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707035

And downloadable - for those with access.

Patrick O'Sullivan (me) appears first on page 121, on a number of pages thereafter, and in the footnotes.

The article also cites my notes on this blog, Fiddler's Dog.  (Search for the Tolkien items, below.)

I have sent an email to the BBC History email group, updating them about the publication of the article.

It is an amazing relief to see Stuart Lee's article now out there, and I thank him for it.

It is an example of the sort of thing that a lot of us find ourselves doing, at a certain time of life - and there is, undoubtedly, an element of frustration in all this.  That is, instead of getting on with the new work, that fills our brains, we are having to give time and energy to the rescue of old projects, and somehow finding ways to place them in the research record.  The final rescue of a 1968 project in 2018 is perhaps an extreme example, but it is a good example.  There was luck here - in a few more years we would not have been able to call on the networks and the influences that helped Stuart Lee to put his research in place.

It is done.  

Yes, I am busy, yes, the next rescue...  Yes.

Patrick O'Sullivan
November 2018

Wednesday 10 October 2018

Visiting Scholar, Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, 2018-19


Visiting Scholar, Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, 2018-19

I can report that, once again, the Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, has negotiated on my behalf the processes within NYU - and I am now, again, still, one of NYU's Visiting Scholars, in the year 2018-19.

As ever I acknowledge the patient encouragement of Miriam Nyhan Grey, Director of Graduate Studies, Glucksman Ireland House, and of Eli Elliott, Administrator, Glucksman Ireland House, who choreographed the process.  And thank all the team at Glucksman Ireland House - who understand how people like me fit in to the Universe.

And, once again, as ever, I take all this as an Instruction from The Universe that I should continue to do academic, scholarly work, and make myself available within the scholarly networks, as best I can.

I am now at that September/ October stage, seeing what projects have firmed up for the coming year - and what resources I have available.

Still doing the other kind of work, of course...  For example, doing a lot of work in the recording studio, tidying the song lyric record - in every sense - and working on new songs.

In recent times I have tried to be a better Visiting Scholar, and - despite my notorious aversion to travel - do some actual visiting.  For example, I attended two major conferences in Ireland, the Global Irish Diaspora Congress, Dublin, August 2017, and the American Conference for Irish Studies, ACIS, Cork, June, 2018.  At both conferences I was able to informally confer with NYU colleagues.  I have established informal contact with New York University, London, England.  I have attended meetings with the British Association for Irish Studies (BAIS), here in England, and meetings with other Irish centres, including meetings at the Irish Embassy, London.

I will note that one of the events I attended this year, 2018, was a valedictory celebration of the career of Professor Joe Lee, the retiring Director of the Glucksman Ireland House, NYU, in the Glucksman Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland – as part of the gathering of the American Conference for Irish Studies 2018.  I would like to record my appreciation of Joe Lee’s friendly interest in my work and his support over the past decades.  Joe, I was there in June 2018 - mine was one of the hundreds of glasses raised, to wish you a long, happy, productive retirement.

And I welcome the new Director of Glucksman Ireland House, Kevin Kenny - whose strengths I know, and whose strengths will be needed.

Patrick O'Sullivan
October 2018