Interview, Simon Mayor on Carolan

Hot on the heels of a recent foray into the Irish Baroque world for St Patrick's Day the other day, I've been lucky enough to speak to mandolinist Simon Mayor about his new album Carolan, exploring the musical legacy of the eighteenth-century Irish harpist Turlough O'Carolan (Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin).

Much of Carolan's music survives only in outline - a consequence in part of the predominantly oral, quasi-improvisatory nature of the musical tradition in which he worked - but his importance for eighteenth-century Irish music as a performer and a composer would be hard to overstate. In particular, a fruitful musical interaction with Francesco Geminiani seems to have enriched both men's compositional styles, and many of Carolan's melodies remain in the folk repertoire today. Mayor's new album reimagines, in various instrumental guises, some of the songs and tunes by Carolan that have come down to us through from his time.

Carolan's monument in Dublin's St Patrick's Cathedral hails him as "the last of the Irish bards" - what do we know about his contemporaries and predecessors in the harp tradition?

Not nearly as much as we do about Carolan, which arguably reflects the standing in which Carolan was held during his own lifetime and in the five or so decades after his death during which his music only survived aurally. Donal O’Sullivan, in his book Carolan: The Life & Times of an Irish Harper, lists nine harpers of significance who were contemporaries or near predecessors. He tellingly points out that from these composers we now have a total of only about thirty tunes, whereas Carolan’s list runs to over two hundred. Perhaps the most significant of his near contemporaries were the brothers Thomas and William Connellan. Thomas reputedly composed over seven hundred tunes, but fewer than a dozen survive, although it is entirely possible some still lurk uncredited within the tradition.

In recent years a number of albums have come out that play with the boundary and relationship between "early" and "folk" music - Bjarte Eike's Alehouse and Playhouse Sessions with the Barokksolistene spring particularly to mind. Is this album in something of the same spirit?

I’m not familiar with those albums so can’t draw any specific comparisons, but from what you say about them I’d say ‘yes’. Carolan was fundamentally a traditional musician and tunesmith, but the strong influence classical music had on him is evident in his writing. I’m coming from a very similar starting point.

Statue of Carolan in Mohill, Co Leitrim, Republic of Ireland, where he died on St Patrick's Day in 1738

You mention the loss of the harmonic "middle" of Carolan's original harp compositions over centuries of incomplete attempts at transcription, necessitating an element of reconstruction. Is this more of a blessing or a curse?

It's actually the complete lack of any harmonic content; we have bare melodies and nothing else. If you want to play these tunes as an ensemble in anything but unison then quite simply you have to create your own harmonies from scratch. In my case, ‘reconstruction’ is probably an inappropriate word, partly because I don’t play Carolan’s instrument, the harp, and know little about how a harp player knowledgeable about the music of 17th and 18th century Ireland would approach them, and partly because I had no desire to do that even for the instruments I play. My approach was much looser and more wide-ranging: to grab these tunes by the hair and put them in a variety of settings, some simple, some more intricate, including mandolin quartets, string quartets, solo guitar arrangements, extemporisations around the harmonic sequences, and any mix and match of these. I very much hope I’ve done that with an evident love and respect for the original. That’s perhaps a long way of saying that in my case it’s a blessing.

When you were putting together these arrangements for various combinations of instruments, how did you decide what forces worked best for each song?

Intuition is the short answer. This in an interesting question because in many cases I did different arrangements of any one tune for different instruments or combinations of instruments. In most cases only one was chosen for the album, but in the case of Carolan’s Dream I decided to put both the solo guitar and the string quartet on because I liked them both equally. It may be a huge generalisation, but with music from that era the notes are usually more important than the textures and so melodies transfer easily from one instrument to another.

The connection with the Italian Baroque composer Geminiani (especially in Carolan’s Concerto) is fascinating – did the two men ever actually meet and exchange musical ideas, or was it more of an indirect inspiration?

Apparently they did meet and had both mutual respect and friendly rivalry. Geminiani visited Dublin on a couple of occasions, once playing one of his own concertos to rapturous reception. It’s said that Carolan’s Concerto was Carolan’s response to that and while it’s not really a concerto as most people would understand the term (there’s no orchestral accompaniment), it certainly bears noticeable Italian influence.