East welcomes West in anticipated gig

ONE of the most anticipated acts at the Feakle Festival this week is the West Ocean String Quartet performing on Thursday night in Caher House with Maighréad Ní Dhomhnaill.

While their concert will mainly feature tracks from their latest album Ae Fond Kiss, it will include the first public performance of part of a suite in memory of a young man from the Crusheen area who died in February 2006.
Joseph Browne, 19, was a talented traditional musician from Knockmeal, between Crusheen and Gort. At the Joseph Browne Spring School in February 2009, Neil Martin of the West Ocean String Quartet was commissioned to write a suite in his memory.
“The suite is written and it’s entitled Indigo Sky. It hasn’t been recorded yet, but it is due out next year in time for the 2011 spring school. We will play one movement from the suite at the Feakle Festival and it will be the first time it will be played publicly. I feel that the music for it is very appropriate to the memory of Joseph Browne and I hope it will be a comfort to all who knew and loved him. There will be a significance in the suite for everyone, as unfortunately there isn’t a person who hasn’t been touched by tragedy and loss. But also it pays tribute to what Joseph as a young man had contributed to his own community during his short life,” Neil said.
The West Ocean String Quartet is made up of Neil Martin on cello, Seamus McGuire and Niamh Crowley on violins, Ken Rice on viola. The quartet formed at the end of 1999 with the intention of exploring traditional and newly composed music. They have collaborated on stage and in the studio with many leading musicians in the past 10 years, including Brian Kennedy, Liam O’Flynn, Matt Molloy, Mary Black and, of course, Maighréad Ni Dhomhnaill.
The quartet came about after Seamus McGuire suggested to Neil Martin the idea of forming a string quartet that would straddle the worlds of traditional and classical to him. Neil and Seamus had worked together on Seamus’ solo album The Wishing Tree and found that they had an understanding that would merit further exploration.
After a number of meetings and many phone calls, they approached Niamh Crowley, a violinist from Rosses Point in Sligo, and Ken Rice, a violinist from Kerry, who also plays viola.
Neil writes and arranges 95% of the quartet’s music. He says that as a composer and a member of a string quartet, he can write specifically for each musician, targeting his compositions with great precision to the strengths of each member of the quartet. He describes the quartet like a marriage.
“It takes time for things to settle down but it only works if each part has their own voice but yet we can all perform as a unit too.
Each member of the quartet has their own individual work too – Niamh runs the Sligo Academy of Music, Seamus is a paediatrician, Ken plays with the Irish Chamber Orchestra and Neil works on film and television commissions.
Neil said that they each bring a different musical background to the quartet. “Seamus is steeped in traditional Irish music from Donegal. Ken’s background was classical originally, then jazz and pop and Niamh’s leaning would be to classical music. I’m right down the middle, with influences from both traditional and classical music. I play the uileann pipes, the cello and the piano, which I mainly use these days for composition purposes. It is an interesting blend and that unique quality is evident in our music and in our live performances,” he comments.
He continues, “My first memory of any kind was waking up on a Sunday morning to the smell of a fry, and the sound of Bach’s B Minor Mass. I was probably only about three. My parents, while they didn’t play music themselves were very musical and they had a very widespread collection of music with a wonderful mix of classical and traditional,” he said.
Neil was keen to emphasise that he is not the quartet’s frontman. “A quartet is not about one lead musician and three others. It is the sum of the parts, an absolute democracy, with an equal place and focus on each instrument. Quartet is a very intimate music form and it doesn’t make much sense to play it in a massive venue. We love playing at local festivals, in smaller quaint venues, which is just the case with Feakle this coming weekend,” he remarks.
He admits that he is very much influenced by all things historic. “I’m just finished recording documentaries about the 17th Century Plantations, which were co-commissioned by TG4 and BBC. I’m hugely interested in all aspects of history. Very few people in the North are ‘thoroughbred’ as such and most people are a mix of nationalities. That was my springboard for making this documentary,” Neil adds.
History has also inspired his most acclaimed composition to date – Oileán na Marbh, a song cycle which is the central part on the quartet’s last album, Ae Fond Kiss, which takes its title from the timeless Robbie Burns’ poem of the same name. The piece was commissioned by the Templebar Cultural Trust and was premiered in June 2006. The song cycle was inspired by a small rocky island off the west coast of Donegal, called Oileán na Marbh, which was the burial places of babies who died before baptism in the 18th and 19th centuries, as church law forbade their burial on hallowed grounds. Neil wrote the song cycle specifically for Maighréad Ni Dhomhnaill.
“Once I went there, I knew I’d write about it some time. I had been haunted by Oileán na Marbh. Maighréad was the only voice I could imagine singing about this. She has such a powerful clear and deep female voice with beautiful lyrical Donegal Irish. As well as unbaptised babies who were buried there, there are the remains of unidentified war men. In all, there is believed to be the up to 500 human remains buried there,” he said.
“There are other places in Ireland and in other countries that are similar. This is a topic that touches everyone. The music is very moving and emotive,” he said.
The song cycle and other tracks from Ae Fond Kiss will be part of The West Ocean String Quartet’s performance at the Feakle Festival, as well as some of their earlier material and also new material which they haven’t recorded yet.
Neil doesn’t recall the quartet playing in Clare other than at the Joseph Browne Spring School, and is looking forward to their Feakle performance. “We have also had discussions with Glór about a performance date, so that is in the pipeline for the not too distant future,” he says.
And as of yet, they haven’t recorded with any Clare musicians. “Martin Hayes and myself are exploring some ideas, mainly over email, about ways we could work together. The places Martin has brought music interests me hugely. He is also playing at the Feakle Festival, of course, so we will have some time to sit down and talk about the possibilities more. I won’t say anymore about that for now, but I am very interested in working with Martin and I believe we understand each other’s music,” he adds.
The West Ocean String Quartet concert with Maighréad Ní Dhomhnaill will take place in Caher House, Feakle this Thursday at 8.30pm.
For more details on the Feakle Festival see www.feaklefestival.ie.