Blasts from the past of the piano

Who says there are no Irish composers? Una Hunt has tracked down several of them for her new CD, writes Arminta Wallace

Una Hunt has spent a good deal of her musical life tracking down piano music by dead Irish composers. And if you didn't know we had any, you're not alone. Hunt's new CD, Fallen Leaves: From An Irish Album features 16 short pieces in all shapes and styles, from gently descriptive nocturnes to skittish waltzes through improvisations on traditional airs. It's attractive music which is easy to listen to, if not to play; but some of the names on the tracklist are enigmatic, to say the least.

Ranged alongside the familiar suspects - John Field, William Wallace, Charles Villiers Stanford - are some intriguing strangers. Who, for example, has ever heard of Francis Parnormo? Or Thomas Augustine Geary? Or Philip Cogan? "Well," says Hunt, as she arrives at the table in the National Library cafe bearing lashings of coffee and herbal tea. "I've been studying this music all my life and I had never heard of most of these people. But it explodes the notion that there are no Irish composers, doesn't it? We do have our own composers. OK, they're not Mozarts or Beethovens - but they're there, and they're ours. And we really should know about them, and play their music more, I think."

Easier said, alas, than done. Almost without exception, Irish composers went abroad to work, which means their music could be languishing anywhere from Sydney to Moscow via Chile and New York. After many frustrating years of chasing missing music from the archives of various publishing companies and orchestrating searches in the British Library, Hunt contacted our own National Library about seven years ago to ask if it would be possible to set up an archive.

"On foot of that, they asked me to do a survey of their own music collection, and I remember my heart sank because I thought, 'God - sure there's nothing in there'," she recalls. "I have to say I was very chastened when I saw what is actually there."

She spent four months among the stacks, leafing happily through bound volumes of music, many of which probably hadn't been touched for 200 years. "My husband used to call me the dirty birdie," she says. "I used to come home like a coalman, with black all over my face and everything. But it was a wonderful experience - and there's so much more to be discovered in there. It's all in the process of being properly collated now - and of course, would make a wonderful basis for an archive. So hopefully we're on the road to doing that."

Hunt has already recorded CDs of music by the Co Fermanagh composer Joan Trimble - who studied composition with Vaughan Williams - and Limerick-born Charles Osborne, who went to Paris as a young man and became a close friend of Chopin and Berlioz.

"It's a whole repertoire of piano music which has been completely forgotten," she says. "Talk to any pianist, and they'll tell you we play the same music over and over again. And it's great, of course - that's why we play it - but we've forgotten 90 per cent of the music which was written for the piano when it was developing into the most important instrument in the world. In the 19th century, anybody who had a bit of money at all had a piano in their parlour. It was the ultimate instrument. I suppose it was the computer of its day, really."

One of the most fascinating aspects of the later 19th-century piano repertoire is that much of it was aimed directly at a female audience, with many of the most famous pieces of the period boasting unashamedly girly titles: The Shower of Pearls, Woodlark Rondo, The Robin's Return.

"It was written specifically for the domestic market - which was huge," says Hunt. "Because this was what women did to entertain themselves. They had their needlework, and they went off and played the piano. I remember reading about how the big music shops in the major cities worked. They had piano rooms at the back of the shop, and - this was the beginning of pop music, actually - you would take a fistful of the latest stuff away into the back room and try it all out, and then decide which ones you wanted to buy. When you look at the covers of the music sheets, you can see how they marketed them. On Osborne's music, for examples, it'll always say 'By the popular composer of The Shower of Pearls. His greatest hit is on there to help sell his latest thing."

Very often, that "latest thing" was a fantasia on a popular opera tune or a traditional Irish or Scottish - no distinction was made between the two - melody.

"If you were a composer-pianist at that time," says Hunt, "you didn't play other people's music - you played your own music. Which is light-years away from how pianists work now. We're supposed to be the servant of the composer, pretty much. Nowadays you can't change a marking, or a note, or any of the detail on the music. But in the 19th century, composers played it differently every time."

Keen-eared listeners will note that on Hunt's CD the opening track, John Field's famous B flat Nocturne, begins in the familiar way - and then takes off, halfway through, in a totally unfamiliar direction.This is because the version she's playing is taken from a manuscript which is still in Moscow, where Field died in 1837. He called this version Serenade - which, as Hunt explains, would have been perfectly normal procedure in the more fluid compositional atmosphere of the time.

"Every time a famous composer - and Field was the most famous composer of his day - had a piece published he would have had it written out by hand; and they're all different," she says. "Look at Chopin's music. People have been trying to get a definitive edition ever since he died, but there isn't one - because he didn't think like that himself. In those days music was just entertainment. Now there's so much reverence - which I think is misplaced reverence, actually. Of course lots of people wouldn't agree with me."

Some people might not agree with her definition of an "Irish" composer, either. Aren't most of the composers on her CD actually Anglo-Irish? "Whatever 'Anglo-Irish' means," she says. "The long and short of it is, that most of these 19th-century composers were Protestants - because, I suppose, they were the only ones who had the educational opportunities. But they're as Irish as anybody else. I mean, we have accepted our writers and they all come from the same background."

Political bias may help explain why our indigenous piano music has been severely neglected. So, ironically, may the current strength - both at home and abroad - of traditional music. "Irish classical music just isn't known. It almost doesn't exist," says Hunt. "Irish traditional music is wonderful, but in some respects it has stolen a march on Irish classical music all over the world. Which is a pity, because this music is very attractive. There's nothing unapproachable about it. And because it was written for the popular market it, too, is very much the music of the people."

Una Hunt will perform music from her CD Fallen Leaves at Kilworth (Village Arts Centre, Oct 7, Dún Laoghaire (Pavilion Theatre, Oct 8). Thurles (The Source Arts Centre, Oct 12) and Ballina (St Michael's Church, Oct 13). Further details from Music Network (01-6719429) or www.musicnetwork.ie. Fallen Leaves: From An Irish Album is on Lyric