Andrew Hunt (1860-1946) was a hedge-school teacher, occult adept, and music-maker whose practical knowledge of bardic, folklore, and mystery traditions and his connections to contemporary art in the late 19th and early 20th century led to the creation of a body of avant-garde music, written materials, and treatises.

Hunt was born in Shanwallagh, Mayo to Bridget and Patrick Hunt in 1860. His mother’s family were well-known as musicians and teachers while his father’s family had resided in the east Mayo area for several generations. Thus, the Hunt family’s well-known associations with folklore, music, and scholarship would provide the young man with a plethora of knowledge from which a singular and inimitably Irish avant-garde art emerged. In time, Hunt naturally became a musician and teacher, the latter role giving him access to an oral tradition that encompassed bardic knowledge, in addition to the curriculum of the hedge schools where he taught.[1] Crucially, the prodigious Hunt also began to corresponded with like-minded individuals from his late teens, a habit he maintained throughout his life, and from the age of nineteen he would travel the North-Western region of Ireland teaching fiddle, flute, and voice in the Irish traditional style.[2] Indeed, one notable account of the young master depicts him as ‘handsome, brightly dressed with his gaze skyward, and the blackthorn stick over his shoulder with the satchel hanging from it’.[3]

It was during the last decade of the nineteenth century that Hunt came into close contact and correspondence with members of the secret societies An Druidh Uileach Braithreachas[4] and the Hermetic Society of Dublin, the latter formed by William Butler Yeats in 1886. These developments would shape Hunt’s life and art significantly as it was through these contacts that he would converse and engage with like-minded individuals further afield, in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States of America. Furthermore, Hunt was intimately familiar with fin de siècle European music: amongst his possessions are numerous such musical scores, the earliest of which is Trois Sonneries de la Rose+Croix, a rare Erik Satie score dating from 1892.

It was during the 1890s that the first written evidence of Hunt’s unique approach to music-making is evidenced, via his correspondences, diaries, and most obviously, in the document known as Automatic Music-Making (1893).[5] This latter two-page document, present in several private collections, was written by Hunt using the pen-name ‘Bráthair Aisling Gheal’, perhaps as part of his identity within a larger organisation or in an effort to protect his name.[6] Nonetheless, whether Hunt was operating alone in creating the material for these ‘knowledge lectures’[7] or with a group of associates known as ‘The Four Masters’, he brought forth an art that fused elements of the Hermetic tradition of Pythagorean music[8] with then current movements in contemporary European art, a project that would lay the foundation for future developments in the avant-garde.

Automatic Music Making – Andrew Hunt

The written directions for Automatic Music-Making bears witness to the creation of a ritualistic music, fully improvised, for one or more musicians using whatever instruments they see fit. Crucially, the openness to the world of sound espoused by Hunt allowed ‘nonmusical’ sounds to be introduced into musical practice:

All is vibration and light in Life’s infinite ocean of energy, thus, every sound is inherently sacred. Accordingly, when performing this automatic music-making, be courageous and daring enough to venture far beyond the beyond into the Great Unknown, yet remaining always in the here and now.[9]

Within the wider context of the Irish avant-garde, the music of female composer Billie Hennessy (1882-1929) would employ similar compositional approaches to Hunt’s automatic music, albeit her idiosyncratic use of such strategies led to the creation of non-improvised, automatic compositions that often extended for an hour or more.[10] As documented in the artist’s own extensive personal diaries, Hunt certainly had an awareness and appreciation for Hennessy and her music as one entry acknowledges her as a ‘True Gnosister of the Art’.[11]

Significantly, Hunt’s private correspondence reveals the extent to which he engaged with avant-garde artists during the twentieth century. His love of the French Symbolists [12] led to an invitation to visit Marcel Duchamp — the ‘modern alchemist artist’[13] – at his Puteaux home in the period prior to the outbreak of World War I. Here, among the company of Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, and Francis Picabia, Hunt discussed the Golden Ratio, Orphism, and the role of art in relation to the Spirit. Subsequently, on his return to Ireland, Hunt would explore the issues discussed on his visit to the Parisian suburbs, and in a letter expressing his gratitude to Duchamp, he noted ‘the need for new forms of representation to express that which is inexpressable, a post-symbolist art for [Hunt quoting Kandinsky] “the great epoch of the Spiritual [….] had already begun yesterday”.[14] Thus, Hunt’s engagement with his peers detail an artist who relentlessly sought to perfect his art, seeking a myriad of methods by which to transform consciousness through the creation of art and by the art itself.[15]

Another excellent source of documentary evidence that demonstrates the influence of Hunt’s music and the ‘pioneering Spirit’[16] therein is to be found in the correspondence of American composer Henry Cowell and Irish poet John Varian between 1917-1918. Both Cowell and Varian had taken to study Irish mythology and folklore during this time, and it is apparent that fellow Theosophists brought the work of the redoubtable Hunt to their attention. Furthermore, Cowell had obtained a typed copy of Automatic Music-Making along with other of Hunt’s music, including Poem for Kettle, Mantel, and Table (1918), and the proto-Fluxus-minimalist work Whhhssst! (1931).[17] This latter piece comprised a set of performance directions that instruct the solo vocal performer to ‘extemporise a one-note hieratic vocalisation interspersed with long periods of silence using the word ‘Whhhssst’’.[18]

In addition to musical scores and written directions, Hunt also wrote a treatise on sound-colour corelation that built upon theories of his contemporaries Paul Foster Case and Edward D. Maryon. In particular, Hunt’s insights into the magical properties of sound and its relation to spiritual traditions — most especially in healing, ritual, and transforming consciousness are outlined. As further examples of Hunt’s written music and treatises come to light, documents uncovered during the course of this research suggest that recordings of his oeuvre may exist also.[19]

In his latter works from 1930-1944, Hunt applied the knowledge of the power of sound in conjunction with Pythagorean tunings, improvised sean-nós singing in a florid Connaught style, and aleatory procedures. Now, Here (1939) best exemplifies the combination of these diverse compositional approaches with instrumentation that included three gramophones, three radios, and three typewriters. This piece, the last documented music by Hunt, is a fitting finale for an artist whose music connected archaic traditions with the vanguard of contemporary art.

Notes

[1] As Yolanda Fernández-Suárez documents, hedge schools were in operation in Ireland as late as 1892. For more, see ‘An Essential Picture in a Sketch-Book of Ireland: The Last Hedge Schools’, Estudios Irlandeses, Number 1, 2006, pp. 45-57.

[2] Hunt’s granddaughter Mary Robinson recalls an early childhood memory from around 1944: “when [Hunt would] visit her parent’s home I’d often awake to hear a haunting, beautiful piece of music on the piano in the house’ (correspondence with author, July 2014).

[3] George Moore, diary entry dated 17 May 1881 (courtesy of Moore’s estate). Moore’s connection with the French art world and in particular the Symbolists, would prove crucial for Hunt as their friendship developed. In addition, Moore’s subsequent move to London in 1890 would pave the way for Hunt’s engagement with artistic circles there and in Paris, where Moore was close to a great number of prominent European artists, thinkers, and writers.

[4] This organization has documented roots that can be traced back to 1717. Furthermore, the Druid groves involved with the historic merging of 1717 can be traced further back in time to the tenth century when Haymo of Faversham laid the foundations of the Order; after Haymo’s death, Philip Brydodd would establish Mount Haemus Grove, Oxford in 1245.

[5] Hunt’s directions for this piece is included with this article.

[6] The music analysed in the course of this research, along with several other key written surviving documents of Hunt’s own art, are sourced from materials provided by his family’s estate, private collections, and his correspondences with others. Increasingly, items relating to Hunt are coming to light as scholarly interest in early Irish avant-garde art continues to develop.

[7] Automatic Music-Making first appears in the privately published Knowledge Papers, Course C, Lesson 19, 1893.

[8] As Joscelyn Godwin notes ‘the two great insights that emerged from the Pythagorean school are, first, that the cosmos is founded on number, and second, that music has an effect on the body and soul’. (Godwin, ‘Music and the Hermetic Tradition’, in van den Broek & Hanegraaff (editors), Gnosis and Hermeticism: from Antiquity to Modern Times, New York: SUNY Press, p.183, 2003).

[9] Andrew Hunt, Automatic Music-Making, written instructions, 1, 1893.

[10] Erik Satie’s influence was another point of intersection between these two artists. As an artist who functioned on the fringes of a largely indifferent society, Satie’s music and resolute individualism was a great inspiration to both: Hennessy’s Dada’s Mama (1917) and Hunt’s Poem for Kettle, Mantel, and Table (1918) were inspired by Satie, with the latter piece dedicated: ‘To the great phonometrician of Paris’ (Satie had declared himself to be a phonometrician, ‘he who measures sound’ in 1912).

[11] Andrew Hunt quoted in his artist’s diary, 8 November 1919, courtesy of the Hunt family estate.

[12] For example, Hunt used a monochrome reproduction of Gustave Courbet’s Hesiod and the Muse (1891) for the purpose of providing the participant or participants with a magical image in Automatic Music-Making (see main illustration with this article).

[13] For more, see John F. Mofitt, Alchemist of the Avant Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp, New York: SUNY Press, 2003.

[14] Hunt, letter to Duchamp, dated 2 January 1914.

[15] As such, Duchamp’s own exploration of alchemical, magical, and mesmeric techniques may be viewed in a new light, and as Professor John F. Mofitt notes regarding techniques such as mesmerism ‘in its strictly artistic applications, its corollary became “automatism,” a somnambulist tactic producing the Duchampian procedure of an “art made by chance”. (John F. Mofitt, Alchemist of the Avant Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp, New York: SUNY Press, 2003, p. 28).

[16] Henry Cowell quoted in a letter to John Varian dated 17 September 1917.

[17] In 1933, Cowell tutored John Cage, an artist whose meditative and open-ended approach to sound was foreshadowed by Hunt’s pieces, most especially Whhhssst!

[18] Andrew Hunt, written directions for Whhhssst!, 1931.

[19] These recordings, reportedly made between 1929-1931, may yet prove to be among the earliest recorded documents of Irish avant-garde art. However, the private estate holding Hunt’s recorded music is not willing to make these documents available at present.

(b Longford, 14 February 1872; d Dublin, 23 April 1938).

Uilleann Piper.

O’Farrell was the third and youngest son of Padraic O’Farrell, also a piper, and performed at regional fairs and fleadhs with his father and two elder brothers, Michael and Fiachra, in the late 19^th Century. Initially achieving moderate popular acclaim as a family band, as documented in Captain Francis O’Neill’s “Irish Minstrels and Musicians” ¹, in later years O’Farrell was shunned by the traditional music establishment for his tendency to emphasise the sonic capacities of the uilleann pipe’s regulators over the chanter as was common in standard practise. His pariah status was confirmed when his name was omitted from a group photograph taken after the Union Pipes Competition at the Rotunda (Dublin) in July 1912 ². After this public humiliation O’Farrell withdrew from public performance and died in obscurity in Dublin in 1938.

O’Farrell made only one known recording during his lifetime, a fragment of which survives as part of the Busby-Carelny Collection of wax cylinders at the Irish Traditional Music Archives ³. The recording, from 1910, is highly unorthodox – the sound recordist’s notes document that after a spoken introduction by Michael O’Shaughnessy, who was perhaps expecting a reel or jig, O’Farrell proceeded to play extremely long drones on the pipes’ regulators, ignoring the chanter completely. The recordist tried to record as a faithful a version of the performance as he could, changing wax cylinders as rapidly as possible as O’Farrell played without break, but unfortunately ran out of spare cylinders after about 15 minutes; O’Farrell apparently kept playing for almost half an hour longer. This recording is presented here – it has been digitised for presentation and the recordings from the different cylinders edited together as closely as possible. For this reason, O’Farrell’s work is considered an early exponent of drone music in Ireland ⁴.

Untitled (excerpt) (1910) by Ultan O_Farrell. Performed by Ultan O_Farrell.

In the 1960’s O’Farrell achieved a moderate cult status after the recording was taken up by the experimental radio station WFMU in New York and subsequently played on Radio KPFA, Pacifica Foundation station in Berkeley. O’Farrell was cited as an influence by Pauline Oliveros in a 1972 interview with Orland Boulanger ⁵.

SELECT REFERENCES

¹ Captain Francis O’Neill, Captain Francis. 1913. Irish Minstrels and Musicians, Chicago. Regan Printing House.

² Photograph by Roe McMahon at the instance of the Pipers’ Club, Dublin, immediately after the Union Pipes Competition in the Rotunda on Tuesday 2^nd July 1912.

³ The Busby-Carelny Collection of 48 wax cylinders and associated MS and TS material was acquired by the Irish Traditional Music Archives (ITMA) from Ellen Carney and digitised in 2008.

⁴ White / Boydell. 2013. Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland. Dublin. UCD Press.

⁵ Pauline Oliveros in interview with Orland Boulanger. American Public Media. June 1972.

Performance artists. A group of musicians and artists working in Kilkenny, 1973-75 approximately.   

The Kilkenny Engagists – known mostly in abbreviated form as the K/E – consisted of a loose affiliation of individuals who came together for a brief period in the 1970s to give performances. The group identified their aesthetic as “engagism” – a political performance art deeply engaged with contemporary issues. The group was formed mainly of graduates of the National College of Art in Dublin who all were inspired to make forays into performance-based, politically motivated art through Brian O’Doherty’s adoption of the name “Patrick Ireland” at the 1972 Irish Exhibition of Living Art in the Project Gallery, Dublin. While the group started staging some small performances from as early as 1973 – their first performance was a version of Christian Wolff’s Stones, performed using stones found on the street after riots in Belfast – their commitment to performance art and the fervour of their work seems to have been intensified by the 1974 visit of Joseph Beuys to Dublin for his “The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland” show at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (now the Hugh Lane Gallery).

The K/E were strong supporters of Beuys’s efforts to establish his Free International University in Milltown, Dublin and took on Beuys’s call, in the Free International University’s manifesto, for a “creativity of the democratic” as a central tenet of their philosophy, incorporating large numbers of people, both artists and non-artists in their work. As a result, early membership of the group fluctuated wildly. By late 1974, however, membership of the group had stabilized – core members included Claire Donegan, Malachy Fallon, Nuala McCarthy, Ferdia O’Brien and Maeve Ryan, and the group is best known from the work created by these artists. The K/E’s work now focused on the performance of extremely violent, visceral, theatrical actions, usually political in subject matter, and can be seen as a sister movement of the Viennese Actionists.

The K/E’s pieces show a concern with Irish politics and the Troubles, often expressed using quite violent ends. In Cealachan (performed in October 1974) four members of the group installed themselves in an abandoned farm-house in Kilkenny and starved themselves for three weeks. The fifth member of the group (Fallon) studied Brehon law and force-fed himself the food the starving members would have eaten during this period. All members of the group had to be hospitalized after this performance, an experience which seemed to deepen their commitment to extreme actions. In All Around the Anti-Riot (1974) Donegan and McCarthy took turns firing rubber bullets at each other across a fairy circle (the rubber bullets used by the British Army in Northern Ireland were identified as “Round, Anti-Riot, 1.5in Baton”). The medical documentation of the injuries they suffered was exhibited later.

In Transubstantiate, (1975) the work considered by most critics to be the most significant piece made by the K/E, the group turned their attention to the Catholic Church. The piece consisted of numerous tableaux, with performers entering dressed in lurid costumes as priests, bishops and nuns – what Ryan referred to as “Jack Smith-inspired papal drag” – accompanied by music composed by McCarthy and O’Brien. McCarthy and O’Brien contributed music for a number of K/E performances; the style was primitive and ritualistic, at times playful and deliberately inane, sometimes with a jazz-inflected flavor, often involving the use of traditional Irish instruments. The pair particularly favoured the use of multiple tin whistles, usually played in unorthodox keys or using non-standard playing techniques.

Transubstantiate part I “Introit” (1975) by Nuala McCarthy and Ferdia O’Brien. Performed by Malachy Fallon, Nuala McCarthy and Dave McShea.

Transubstantiate part II “Gloria” (1975) by Nuala McCarthy and Ferdia O’Brien. Performed by Malachy Fallon, Nuala McCarthy and Dave McShea.

Transubstantiate part III “Alleluia” (1975) by Nuala McCarthy and Ferdia O’Brien. Performed by Malachy Fallon, Nuala McCarthy, Dave McShea and Maeve Ryan.

According to production notes, Transubstantiate included actions such as Fallon stripping naked, then using a sharpened crucifix to create an incision in his thigh, before urinating on the incision, and clumsily sewing the wound closed. In other parts of the piece O’Brien attempted auto-erotic asphyxiation, masturbating while using a set of rosary beads, as Donegan stuffed pieces of turf and crushed Communion wafers into her vagina.

Paul Reilly, the chief art critic for The Irish Times spoke about the piece in an interview at the time:

“It was horribly powerful. At first I thought ‘oh, this is ridiculous, they are just trying to cause a stir’ because you see the first part was very funny, parading in with this silly tin whistle music and them all got up as priests. But as they performed, stripping off the habits and showing us weak, pale Irish skin, something we had all been reared to think of as so shameful, as it went on, with them wreaking havoc on their own bodies with a deep sadness and commitment, I began to feel a huge anger building in me. An anger at the way this country has been warped into violence by religion, at the sectarian violence we pursue on a daily basis with aspects of our own psyches being the frontline victims, at a Church who polices and abuses so many.”

The three movements available here are taken from a performance of Transubstantiate given on April 12^th 1975. The material has been made available by German broadcaster BWR, who recorded the first part of the performance before the obscene and violent nature of the performance resulted in the technicians refusing to participate further. The material was intended to be included on a BWR documentary on performance art which was never completed.

SELECT BIBILOGRAPHY

Dowling, Chris “Dirty Protest: Performance Art in Ireland during and after the Troubles” in Performance Research, Volume 4 Issue 4 (May 1985)

Telford, Martina “Cealachan: Starvation, Brehon Law and the Hibernian Body” in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Issue 32 (September 1988)

Ireland was an extremely chaotic place to live throughout the teens and 1920s. Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Europe, with over half of Dubliners living in appalling slum conditions. Coupled with this poverty the Irish were engaged in two wars – fighting World War 1, and a civil war against the British, who still occupied and ruled Ireland until 1922.

The art scene in Ireland was split between conservative painters such as William Orpen and Sean Keating, who painted in a traditional style using Irish folk scenes as subject matter, and more modern painters such as Mainie Jellett, who were interested in modern techniques such as abstract painting, and very sensitive to developments in art on the Continent. This split was again mirrored in literature – the nostalgic folk leanings of WB Yeats and his fellow Celtic revivalists were set against modernist experimental advocates such as James Joyce.

Despite their differences, all these artists were dealing with how to negotiate one’s identity and nationality. Dada in Ireland emerged as a product of and a reaction to these different senses of national identity. Indeed, it can be viewed as a synthesis of these polarities.

The Irish Dadaists are often called the “Guinness” Dadaists because the three most active members of the group worked at the Guinness brewery. This was important, because unlike the other prominent artists and writers of the time, the Guinness Dadaists were working class. Guinness was a remarkably progressive employer – it was one of the few places they could have worked and actually had time to make art.

The three main protagonists of the group were Dermot O’Reilly, Kevin Leeson (seen above in the middle and on the right), and Brian Sheridan. The group was most active from ca. 1920 through 1922. Led by O’Reilly, the group put on performances, wrote sound poetry, and produced drawings and sculptures.

The Guinness Dadaists were pacifists where World War 1 was concerned, but not with regard to Irish civil war, with Brian Sheridan a proud member of the old IRA. (The term “Old IRA” is used to distinguish between the IRA who fought for independence in the Civil War, and the terrorist force of the same name.) The participation of members of the Guinness Dadaists in conflict set them apart from all other Dadaists, and may have been reason they were disconnected from other Dadaist groups.

What we do know of the Guinness Dadaists’ activities comes from O’Reilly’s notebooks and papers, held at Trinity College Dublin. These notebooks feature plans of performances, descriptions of sculptures made by Leeson and Sheridan, general notes and ideas. The entry dated April 12^th 1921, for example, shows a rough plan for a wall hanging to be made by Leeson. Leeson was a cooper at Guinness, and the wall hanging was made from braces from barrels. O’Reilly describes in a later entry how he placed a pile of potatoes in front of the wall hanging, and stood on the potatoes to perform, wearing a green jacket which he had twisted out of shape with wire.

As well as the diaries, we have multiple examples of sound poetry written by the group. This is fortunate because very little of their drawings and sculptures survived the civil war. O’Reilly’s notebooks detail the different methods of declamation that were used. Some poems were designed to be performed simultaneously creating a cacophony of sound. Sheridan in particular was very interested in different types of chanting. Other poems were extremely rhythmic and percussive.

The Guinness Dadaists’ sound poetry is interesting because it is written mostly using the Irish alphabet, following Irish rules of pronunciation. Irish is one of the most difficult languages in the world to pronounce, and decoding the poetry for performance can only be done by Irish speakers. While the Guinness Dadaists’ choice to work with Irish was a political one, it was not nostalgic – it was not about looking to folk culture for a sense of identity. The Guinness Dadaists used Irish as a medium rather than a symbol, if anything they sought to weaponise it. O’Reilly wrote how:

“…the Irish language is a material which can be broken into fragments which can be mobilised against all sense and meaning”

In this, they forged a completely new way of dealing not only with art and language, but also with nationality and identity.

Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde Vol. 1: Dada (1921; 2012) by Dermot O’Reilly, Brian Sheridan and Jennifer Walshe. Performed by Jennifer Walshe at New Music Dublin, 8th March 2014.  

(b Galway, 12 Dec 1940; d Galway 27 April 1988).

Composer and conductor.

Sr Anselme was the youngest of 7 children, born into a poor family in Galway city during the Second World War. Sr Anselme entered the enclosed community of Carmelite Nuns in Loughrea, Galway, at the age of 16, and remained there until her death. Over the course of her life she became responsible for all aspects of music within the convent and raised the quality of the nuns’ singing to a very high standard. Her organ playing was considered particularly fine.

In 1972 Sr Anselme came to the attention of the producers of “In the Footsteps of Hildegard”, a radio documentary series which focused on music-making by nuns in enclosed orders. The documentary was commissioned by National Public Radio in America, and produced by a team headed by musicologist Dr Judith Schäfer and anthropologist Verena Shaw. In late 1972 the team traveled to Loughrea and made various recordings, including two of Sr Anselme performing the compositions for organ she called Virtue II and IV. According to notes made by Schäfer, Sr Anselme considered her “Virtue” compositions a form of contemplative prayer. She composed and performed them for herself alone and did not normally perform them for the other nuns in the order. The Virtues are quite long in duration, and focus on incremental changes in organ stops. They are regarded as unique examples of drone music composition in Ireland.

Virtue II (excerpt) by Sr Anselme O’Ceallaigh. Performed by Sr Anselme O’Ceallaigh.

Virtue IV by Sr Anselme O’Ceallaigh. Performed by Sr Anselme O’Ceallaigh.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schäfer, Judith “Hildegard’s Legacy: The Contemplative Organ ‘Virtues’ of Sr Anselme O’Ceallaigh” in The Journal of Feminist Musicology, January 1974.

In 2009 Irish musicologist Antoinne Ó Murchú was digging through the audio archives of the Irish Folklore Commission when he came across a set of bizarre recordings made in Cork in 1952. The only information noted on the tapes was “Pádraig Mac Giolla Mhuire,” a name completely unknown in Irish traditional music circles. As Ó Murchú listened to the recordings, he immediately recognized that they were a precursor of late 20th-century minimalism. Ó Murchú noted afterwards “I was shocked and immensely excited….layers of grinding drones from the fiddle and accordion with a tin whistle whirling above like some demented Eric Dolphy solo…..to think that the roots of minimalism could lie in Irish outsider culture…”

SS Caronia manifest, right panel

SS Caronia manifest, left panel

Ó Murchú immediately began researching the provenance of the tapes. From 1935 to 1971 the Irish Folklore Commission (Coimisiún Béaloideasa Éireann) sent recording units around Ireland to document speech and music. Notable collectors included Séamus Ennis, Alan Lomax and Robyn Roberts. Ó Murchú discovered that the Commission recorded Pádraig playing with friends Dáithí Ó Cinnéide and Eamon Breathnach sometime during autumn 1952. The results were considered too eccentric for broadcast and the tapes languished in the archive of the Commission until they were discovered by Ó Murchú over half a century later. Further research unearthed the immigration records of Pádraig’s parents, Maggie Leary and Michael Murray (lines 5 and 30 in the ship’s manifest shown here). Both from Cork, Maggie and Michael immigrated to New York in 1921. They were married in New York in 1923, and the following year Maggie gave birth to their first and only child Pádraig. After Michael’s death from tuberculosis in 1950, Maggie and Pádraig returned to Ireland, living in Cork until they passed away in 1978 and 1992 respectively.

Michael was a gifted folk musician, his primary instrument being the uileann pipes, an instrument which he taught his son to play. Michael’s death affected Pádraig very deeply, and he never played the pipes after the passing of his father. The structure of the pipes seemed to be in his blood, however, most significantly the instrument’s focus on fixed drones.

Upon Pádraig’s return to Cork in 1950 he began playing with local musicians, developing a style of playing he titled “dordán” after the Irish word for drones, Ó Cinnéide, one of Pádraig’s musical collaborators from this time, has described how “he was a soft, kind lad with a strange ear…he wanted to get rid of everything except for the held notes of the pipes…no tunes, no chanter, just the drones…truth to tell, it was a very quare sound…”

DORDÁN: Pádraig Mac Giolla Mhuire will be released by Radio Telefís Éireann on CD in 2015. RTÉ have supplied the printer’s proof of the CD cover and excerpts from several different tracks.

Dordán excerpt 1 (1952) by Pádraig Mac Giolla Mhuire, Dáithí Ó Cinnéide and Eamon Breathnach.

Dordán excerpt 2 (1952) by Pádraig Mac Giolla Mhuire, Dáithí Ó Cinnéide and Eamon Breathnach.

Dordán excerpt 3 (1952) by Pádraig Mac Giolla Mhuire, Dáithí Ó Cinnéide and Eamon Breathnach.

Dordán excerpt 4 (1952) by Pádraig Mac Giolla Mhuire, Dáithí Ó Cinnéide and Eamon Breathnach.

(Niall Kilbride, b Limerick, 22 Sept. 1950; d Boston 8 April 1999; Karen Malone, b Limerick 3 Oct. 1952; d Boston 17 July 2013).

Jazz musicians Niall Kilbride (saxophone) and Karen Malone (drums) were among the earliest practitioners of free improvisation in Ireland, beginning in and around Limerick in the very early 1970s. The two musicians played with many different experimental musicians and groups, but their duo was known for particularly discordant, noise-based performances.

The Kilbride & Malone Duo came to nation-wide attention briefly in 1974 when the British military intelligence used one of their recordings as part of a “psy-ops” operation against paramilitary groups in the North. Between 1972 and 1974 Captain Colin Wallace’s Information Policy group planted fictional press stories and created fake “Satanic Mass” settings around Northern Ireland in an effort to link these practices with paramilitary groups and scare the local populace off engaging with such groups. A bootleg recording of a highly distorted Kilbride & Malone Duo performance was left playing in an abandoned farmhouse near Larne as part of one of the Information Policy group’s “Black Mass” set-ups. An RTÉ news clip filmed at the farmhouse described the music as “played by people possessed” and “demonic”. An excerpt from the recording is given here.

Untitled Improvisation (excerpt) (1974) by Kilbride & Malone Duo

Kilbride and Malone immigrated to the USA in the mid-1970s and lived in Boston for the rest of their lives, where they worked as instrumental teachers at local high schools. They played with a number of local musicians in Boston and New York including John Zorn and Lydia Lunch and are featured in several films by maverick “no-wave” Irish film-maker Vivienne Dick.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jenkins, Richard Black Magic and Bogeymen: Fear, Rumour and Popular Belief in the North of Ireland 1972-74 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014)

(b Belfast, 11 June 1890; d Donegal 23 Aug 1958 and 27 April 1917).

Composers, instrument builders, teachers. Considered early exponents of Futurism in Ireland.

Born in Belfast, the Ó Laoire twins moved around Ireland and England for much of their formative years before settling in their mother’s native Donegal in 1908. Their father Stephen Ó Laoire, a mechanical engineer who worked at various shipbuilding firms, inculcated in the twins a deep respect for industrial design and educated both siblings in mathematics, applied mathematics and other engineering basics, often bringing them to his place of work to demonstrate practical points. These early experiences left strong sonic impressions on the twins – Sinéad recalls how as child she and her brother “had full run of the shipyards in the holidays…we didn’t swim in the sea like other children, we bathed in that mad vortex of sounds…hundreds of men shouting, hammering, driving piles…the bash and rattle of huge cranes, vast clanking chains tumbling across plates of metal, the fizz and spurting crackle of welding…”

In 1908 the twins’ mother, Clíodhna, and Fiachra were both badly injured in an accident at the Harland and Wolff shipyards. The accident left Fiachra blind in one eye and with only 20% vision in the other; Clíodhna’s head injuries left her disabled for the rest of her life, and the twins moved with her to Donegal in 1908 in order to care for their mother while their father moved on to London to work. This was a bitter time for the family, with Fiachra’s hopes of following his father’s footsteps dashed to pieces by his injury. Sinéad began teaching lessons at the local school and the family tried to settle into country life. The twins longed for the city, however, and in the rural quiet of Donegal their memories of bustling urban and industrial landscapes took on epic imaginative proportions. This longing was only further stoked by their father’s periodic visits, with tales of his latest engineering feats and stories of experiences in Dublin, London and other metropolises.

By early 1910 the twins were designing and building their own experimental musical instruments, investigating a highly unorthodox noise environment which brought them back to the sonic experiences of their youth. They called their instruments “ruaillebuailles” from the Irish expression “ruaille buaille” meaning pandemonium or mayhem. In her diaries, Sinéad refers to 17 different RBs. All are characterized by the use of bows to activate strings, and most exploit subtones, undertones and scratch tones. The twins wrote numerous pieces for the instruments, abandoning standard musical notation for graphic schematics. Scores for compositions such as “The Death of King Rí Rá” (1910) show simple lines depicting contours, entrances and exits.

The Death of King Rí Rá (1910) by Fiachra and Sinéad Ó Laoire, performed by Panos Ghikas, Nick Roth and Jennifer Walshe.

The Ó Laoire twins only presented one public concert of the RBs – this took place in 1911, and was poorly attended. Critiqued in the Donegal Post as “a night of horrible scraping”, the siblings did not make any further public performances. Despite this discouragement, they kept designing and building instruments up to Fiachra’s death from tuberculosis in 1917. After her brother’s passing Sinéad did not continue working with the RBs and over the years the instruments fell into disrepair and were eventually destroyed.

Considered by many to be examples of Futurism in Ireland, it is notable that these Irish intonarumori emerged in a rural context, divorced from the art-world connections of the Italian Futurists. The Parisian life of Irish painter Mary Swanzy, considered one of the very few Irish artists to dabble in Futurism, could not have been further from the twins’ existence. The Ó Laoire’s work was largely unknown either in Ireland or abroad until a 1988 paper by Dr. Barry Walken opened the door to interest in their work. It has since been the focus of attention from many Irish and non-Irish noise musicians. Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth described how “reading about this Irish brother and sister, off in a field just coming up with this jagged, vibrant sound-world blew my mind.”

The recording presented here was made using RBs 1, 4 and 7. The instruments were built using Sinéad Ó Laoire’s notes by engineers working at University College Limerick directed by Sinéad’s grandson Prionsias Madigan and Dr. Barry Walken. The construction of the instruments was funded by the Arts Council of Ireland.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walken, Barry “Towards a History of Noise Music in Ireland” Proceedings of the Irish Musicological Association, Vol. 8, Issue 2, April 1988.

Crewe, Tom “Sonic Youth: The Noise of Noise” Rolling Stone, 13 April 2001.

Outsider artist.

Irish outsider artist Caoimhín Breathnach lived in Knockvicar, Co. Roscommon, as a recluse for most of his life. Upon his death in 2009, a huge archive, including diaries, drawings, photographs and tapes was found in his cottage.

The main focus of Breathnach’s artistic practice was the creation of his unique brand of “subliminal tapes.” This was a two-fold procedure – Breathnach began by recording sounds onto cassette tapes, before subjecting the tapes to a wide range of physical processes, such as burying, burning or encasing them in various materials such as velvet, paper or moss. In most cases, these physical processes rendered the tapes unplayable, so that the sounds recorded on them can now only be imagined.

LAB NOTES

Breathnach’s extensive diaries detail his bizarre methods for making the tapes and the wide range of behavioural changes and experiential benefits he felt them to have had on him. Decoding Breathnach’s diaries is a tricky task, as he used the Ogham alphabet to write in a mixture of Irish and English.

For tape 79, Breathnach notes how he rose at dawn on the summer solstice (“grian-stad”) in 1982 to record himself playing a series of chords on the harp against the backdrop of his radio broadcasting at 1485 Khz. After sleeping with the tape under his pillow for a night, he then wore the tape strapped to his abdomen for a week, noticing significant improvement to his “strampail” and “glórghail” (both obscure words are defined in Dineen as referring to stomach noises).

Subliminal Tape #86 (1985 ca.) by Caoimhín Breathnach

Breathnach’s notes for tape 80 begin with a description of a series of recordings Breathnach made of himself playing harmonica. He then wrapped the tape in masking tape and “screened” several kung fu films for it. On 13th July 1982, he buried the tape, with the intention of unearthing it on May 31st 1984, a time period which coincided with the 1982-84 eclipse of Epsilon Aurigae. Early in his notes Breathnach uses the term “luanchad” which refers to a lunar eclipse, and then later changes to “dorchacht” which is a poetic term for an eclipse of any sort. This shows both his depth of knowledge of Irish linguistic nuance and his astronomical knowledge about the eclipse of Epsilon Aurigae, which was not caused by the moon.

Breathnach did not limit his use of Ogham to his Lab Notes – he also employed it to inscribe many of his musical instruments. The Book of Ballymote (1390ca.) details over a hundred different Ogham “scales” – different variants for writing the alphabet, many with esoteric implications. Breathnach’s violins are usually inscribed with characters from these different Ogham scales.

Breathnach’s interest in Ogham also extended to his personalised set of divination tiles, similar to runes, which he had inscribed with the Ogham alphabet. Breathnach used these tiles to carry out chance procedures and compose pieces such as the Song Rolls series (see below).

SONIC RELICS

The physical processes Breathnach subjected his tapes to often transformed the tapes from sound recordings into contemplative objects. Breathnach treated the tapes as corollaries of Catholic religious relics – for him they were sonic relics, complete with special powers of healing.

DREAMIC INFUSION & THE PATRÚN

Breathnach believed his mental state affected tapes in close proximity, and so often slept with tapes under his pillow to effect what he called “dreamic infusion.” He would frequently tuck small pictures into the pillow-case with the tapes. Breathnach refers to these pictures as “patrún” in his diaries. It is a curious choice of word, as while “patrún” means picture or photograph, the word is more commonly used in the phrase “tógaim patrún leat” which means “I follow your example.” The linguistic implication seems to be that Breathnach saw the pictures as examples for the tapes to follow.

STAR BURIALS

Breathnach was an avid amateur astronomer, and often buried tapes for periods of time aligning with certain astronomical observations. His enigmatic calculations and notes on these “adhlaicthe réaltaí” or “star burials” can be seen on these star charts.

“BEARERS”

Breathnach believed that if a person carried certain objects in their hand or upon their person, over time the object would come to “bear” whatever energies, thoughts or feelings the individual wanted to be rid of. He thought the best candidates for this practice were nuts, chestnuts, pebbles, shells and even very small fireworks.

Breathnach carried one “bearer” chestnut in the pocket of his coat for over 30 years, and was buried with it upon his passing in 2009.

SONG ROLLS

In the 1980s, Breathnach began annotating piano rolls. Abandoning the use of Ogham, Breathnach wrote exclusively in the English alphabet, using pencils, stamps and transfers. He called these works “song rolls” in his notes.

Breathnach’s interest in astronomy and music intersect in the song rolls, as he traces constellations and crystallographic forms with pencil and needle to create a new type of score.

Song Roll 5 (1984) by Caoimhín Breathnach, performed by Nick Roth.

(b Carlow, 7 Oct. 1882; d New York 21 June 1929).

Painter and composer.

Hennessy trained at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Hennessy’s work first came to attention through the endorsement of Hugh Lane, in particular through Lane’s purchase of her cubist series On Aran. In addition to the 14 paintings which make up the series, Hennessy composed a suite for multiple pianos titled On Aran Soundings (1906). The piece is designed to be performed by pianists positioned throughout a gallery in which the On Aran paintings are exhibited. As such it is considered an early proponent of intermedia composition.

Hennessy’s compositional activities were secondary to her work as a painter, but she continued throughout her life to compose works, mostly for piano. On a trip to London in 1917 Hennessy was introduced to the concept of automatic writing by Elizabeth Forthnot, a member of George Hyde-Lees’ social circle, and began to both paint and compose melodies in this mode. Hennessy called the melodies she composed in this way “Scripts”; according to her diaries she composed over 30, most of which have been lost. Hennessy’s manuscript for Script 4 runs to over 20 pages and was the result of an automatic writing marathon which took place in early 1918. The piece runs over 50 minutes in duration. A short excerpt, performed by Hennessy’s grand-daughter Emer Tyrrell, is given here.

Script 7 (excerpt) (1918) by Billie Hennessy, performed by Emer Tyrrell.

Hennessy’s early Scripts unfurl seemingly endless, meandering tonal single-voice melodies, with apparently arbitrary moves to different keys. They are notable for their lack of standard compositional concerns, similar in this vein to the works of Erik Satie “…one finds jumpcuts, anti-variation, non-development, directionless repetition, absence of contextual relationships, logic, transitions” (Nyman 1999: 35). According to her diaries, Hennessy’s later Scripts departed entirely from any standard tonal models of the time, often alternating between sparse repeated motifs and extended passages of clusters, as in Script 23, “received” in 1926.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nyman, Michael. 1999. Experimental Music Cage and Beyond, Cambridge. Cambridge University Books.