MUSICALLY, we are still deplorably undeveloped. One good sized Austrian or Hungarian town would probably produce more music scholars, music teachers, music schools, music academies and most of all, more music than the entire Republic of Ireland. Never mind the small pockets - and they are deplorably small, despite our endless self congratulation on the vitality of the form - of traditional music. In the world of music, they only go just so far: and when all is said and done, can it really be maintained that Irish traditional music is superior to Bulgarians or Spanish or Bosnian or Scottish or Hungarian?
Perhaps it can. But we do know that the music which internationally enchants, which is universally recognised to be the definitive musical art form, which draws on the genius of Western musical traditions, reaching back to Pope Gregory, and which is expressed in the multifarious genius of the composer, the instrument maker and performer is the classical music of Europe. That music explores itself, examines themes, is amenable to searching intellectual inquiry, and yet, despite its profound cerebral content, speaks to the heart.
For reasons which I do not understand, classical music is shamelessly neglected in the musical curriculums of Ireland - where there is such a thing as a curriculum, which is not everywhere. Large tracts of the country are musical deserts, where the aspirant musicians must aspire in vain or travel very far indeed.
Ever present music
Yet music is the true universal art form, able to find fresh expressions and interpretations of beauty whenever it is performed. Caravaggio speaks only to those before his canvas. Mozart speaks whenever and wherever people gather in his name. It is not surprising that the development of music is so closely associated with the church: the sacrament of the Mass, of the consecration, and of the reliving of the Last Supper, finds cultural echoes in the apostolic way we gather around music. All we require is the priesthood of performers, for the text lies in the written music as it lay for religion within the sacred writings of the church, and it is the priesthood of performers that in Ireland we are so sadly lacking.
With such a dearth of performers at every level, necessarily, the standards of music must be diluted; and that is what makes the Dublin Baroque Players such an utter mystery. In the relative wilderness of unpaid musicians who play for love, they are uncompromised by untutored and unskilled enthusiasm. They play with the skill and intellectual integrity of paid musicians; but they have that quality which is so often lacking from the performance of professionals - who are after all, just doing a job - and that is love.
It is a love which gets them to rehearsals at uncongenial hours in uncongenial places at the end of an uncongenial working day or the conclusion of an uncongenial working week. It is a love which causes them to play with such brio, such zest, such heartfelt passion, and which makes their concerts such a deep pleasure to attend.
Playing for love
The Dublin Baroque Players were formed in the summer of 1966 by three friends - Liam Fitzgerald, Kieran Egar and the late Michael Clifton - who, though all trained academically in music, were making their careers beyond it. They decided to play regularly for love, and drew to them musicians who shared that unpaid love.
The musical petals of the Dublin Baroque Players are not opened often, but when they are it is a particular pleasure, most especially in that temple to the baroque, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, much of which has been turned into a gallery of the gimcrack and trivial ephemera that is modern art, but which still has some of the original rooms where fine music can be performed.
Something happens to music in such a setting - but only provided, of course, that it is played by musicians of quality. Baroque music needs only minor errors in key or in timing for it to sound like pioneering experiments in metallurgical stresses or root canal treatment without anaesthetic; and no doubt you can see the visual equivalent of that in the art gallery next door.
But you will wait in vain to hear it from the Dublin Baroque Players, whose next concert in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham is tomorrow night, under the experienced baton of its co founder, Liam Fitzgerald, and with Aedin Halpin on the recorder. The recorder is gravely misunderstood and often traduced, largely because of the ravages done to its goods name by little Emilys and Emmas, who have been trotted out by overenthusiastic mammies in order that they might inflict their offsprings salival lispings on the instruments on unsuspecting friends who actually only called around for coffee.
Misunderstood recorder
The child is meant to be performing something from Peter and The Wolf It sounds like piglets being caught in a thresher. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star bears a remarkable resemblance to an interrogation of a Jesuit priest on the rack by Elizabethan secret police. And that sweet and dulcet little ditty, What a friend we have in Jesus is aurally indistinguishable from the passage of broken glass down a human urethra.
An hour later, drenched in spit, with their brains shrieking as if tuning forks had been tested inside their inner ears, their friends totter homewards, pausing en route only to smash the shop window of a recorder shop, grab the recorders within and install them about the person of the recordershopowner in such a fashion that they are relatively unlikely to be played for a while.
Maybe Aedin's parent's friends left a trail of destruction behind them as they headed homewards all those years ago. I doubt it. She joins the Players as soloist for tomorrow night's RHK concert, which begins with Mozart's Haffner Symphony, Number 35, is followed by Vivaldi's two concertos, 2 La Notte and 3 Il Cardellino, is chased then by Barber's Adagio for Strings, and concludes with the Symphony No 4 in A Major by CPE Bach. Go, do.