EVER SINCE THE days when the god Apollo wielded his healing lyre over great swathes of the Mediterranean, music and poetry have been intertwined in the European mind. Opera is an obvious meeting point, as are the settings of poems by Goethe and Schiller in the German lieder tradition; but the connection is equally direct in popular culture, with the lyrics of songwriters from Bob Dylan to The Beatles regularly being described as “poetry”. When it comes to instrumental music, however, the lines of connectivity are less clear.
As part of its celebrations for Seamus Heaney's 70th birthday, RTÉ commissioned three contemporary Irish composers to write a new piece in which they would each respond to Heaney's poetry. The commission was for string quartet and, if the composer wished, solo voice. Interestingly, all three – Rachel Holstead, Kevin O'Connell and Ian Wilson – eschewed the vocal option. Their pieces will be premiered in the Irish Museum of Modern Art's Baroque Chapel this afternoon, and before each one is played, Seamus Heaney will read the specific poem which inspired it. The poems are The Given Note(Holstead), Fosterling(O'Connell) and Horace and the Thunder, also published under the title Anything Can Happen(Wilson).
HOW DID THE composers approach the business of making the connection between poetry and music? With delight, says Holstead. “It was one of those dream commissions – even if you had 10 million trillion other things on, you would have to drop everything and do it. But in a way, one of the biggest challenges of the commission was how to approach it. How do you write music for a poet?”
O’Connell points out that music can’t be “about” a poem. “If you’re setting a poem to music, then you’re in league with it,” he says. “A poem is not just a semantic kind of a thing. It’s also rhythmic. It’s constructed like a piece of music – at least, a poem by Seamus Heaney is.”
The task for this commission was to use the idea in the poem to suggest something intrinsically musical. For Wilson, the range and freedom of the commission was in itself inspirational. “It’s often useful for a composer to be given something to link to – and very useful not to have the link too specific,” he says. “By being given the brief to choose your own poem, you’re really off and running.”
Even for three Heaney enthusiasts, mind you, choosing a poem isn't necessarily a straightforward business. "There's one poem in particular – The Given Note – which tugs all sorts of strings in me," says Holstead. "Partly because it has to do with my home place, the Dingle peninsula, and with a piece of music, Port na Púcaí, which is close to me in quite a fundamental way. I've referred to that tune – and even to that poem – in several other pieces. So the very first thing I said to myself was: 'Right. I'm not having anything to do with that poem. I've been there, done that.
“I was trying to get inside my own head and think: ‘What is it about Seamus Heaney’s poetry that really strikes a chord with me? What is it that gets me every time?’ What I came to eventually, and what constantly amazes me about his work, is the process of translation: seeing the world through his eyes, and then seeing how he captures that thing that he sees.
“And once I alighted on this idea, it brought me straight back to The Given Note, because it’s about the process whereby this fiddler on the Blaskets hears this noise – a sound on the wind – and translates it into music. I thought, that’s exactly what Seamus Heaney does.”
For Derry-born composer Kevin O’Connell, inspiration arrived as he was walking along the street one day.
"The line from Heaney's Fosterlingabout waiting until he was nearly 50 to credit marvels just came into my head," he says. "I thought: 'Well, before that he used to define his poetry as rather earthbound and bog-like; this seems to admit the ethereal dimension coming into it.' So you've got an earthy music, which could be dance music – there's an Irish jig in my piece, you know? – and on the other hand a kind of flighty, ethereal music."
His piece, Where Should This Music Be?, takes its title from Ferdinand's question when he hears Ariel's sweet airs in Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Where should this music be – i' th' air or th' earth?"
Ian Wilson says he was looking for “something striking and strong, in terms of jumping off the page at me. I bought a book a couple of years ago called Anything Can Happen. It was a poem that Heaney had written for Art for Amnesty, and it was translated into 16 or 20 different languages, paired by countries or cultures which had been in conflict. So on one page you’d have Serbian and on the other Bosnian – which is essentially the same thing – or German and Yiddish, or whatever.
“The poem itself was one Heaney wrote after the 9/11 attacks, and I suppose I liked the idea of trying to engage with something that stark. I asked RTÉ did it have to be a celebratory piece and they were quite clear in saying, ‘no, it doesn’t’. So I said: ‘Right. Well, then, I’ll take the opportunity to react to this very striking poem – which I think is actually a reworking of an ode by Horace. It’s very powerful, and it has very clear links to what happened in New York, and I just liked the idea of trying to react to that that musically.”
The title of Wilson's piece, Across A Clear Blue Sky, pays tribute to the poet's ability to "always respond to diverse aspects of the human experience with insight and dignity".
Speaking on his way to the first rehearsal with the Vanbrugh Quartet, Wilson adds: “This is the first proper quartet I’ve written for about eight years. I’ve done a couple of others, but they were transcriptions of other pieces of mine. I wanted to do something different, so I have a big bag of drumming toys and analogue radios. I’ve written into the score that at certain points the players have to tune these radios to get a bit of white noise — and at the end, the idea is that they all wind up these little drumming toys and just let them wind down. A kind of ironic nod towards the whole art of war. But today is the first time to get together to see if this works or not. If it doesn’t, then there’ll be no drumming toys.”
FOR O’CONNELL, THE commission offered an artistic double whammy.
“I love writing for string quartet, and I love Seamus Heaney’s poetry – I’ve been a fan since my teens,” he says. “So it sort of pulls together two strands of my life as an artist.”
Holstead, on the other hand, found the musical medium somewhat daunting.
“I’ve only ever written one string quartet before, and at that time it freaked me out entirely,” she says. “I spent months fighting with it, trying to come to terms with all the baggage that comes with the string quartet repertoire. But a few weeks before the call came through for this commission I had said to a friend: ‘You know, I‘d really love to write another string quartet.’ You put the idea out into the world, and something comes back.”
Can she describe her piece? “It’s probably best to leave it to be heard. It’s a very tiny piece – a fragment, in some ways. I didn’t set out to write a weighty piece of music. It’s a small birthday offering for the poet. That’s what it is.”
The three new pieces for Heaney at 70 are premiered at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham today, with the poet reading each poem before the piece is played. The concert, presented by John Kelly, will be transmitted live on RTÉ Lyric FM as part of Classic Drive, starting at 5pm. The recording of the event will also be available for online listening on www.rte.ie/heaneyat70 until May 13
It's Seamus Heaney's 70th birthday today, and as part of the celebrations, three commissioned pieces of music, inspired by specific poems, will be heard for the first time. The composers tell Arminta Wallace about their musical responses to Heaney's words
