Feis Ceoil agus craic: 120 years of celebrating classical music

There is currently an exhibition celebrating 120 years of the Feis Ceoil Association at the Little Museum of Dublin. You'll find an array of silver-plated cups etched with the names of winners at the association's annual classical-music festivals. If you look carefully you'll see the same names recurring – and if you're an aficionado of classical music you'll probably recognise the names of many who went on to become luminaries of the Irish scene.

Others featured here are more famous for nonmusical pursuits. There’s a bronze medal, prominently displayed, that James Joyce won for singing, in 1904, and that has been loaned by Michael Flatley.

“Joyce threw something of a hissy fit and refused to sight-read and got relegated to third place,” says Kim Foy, the exhibition’s curator. The modernist trailblazer only entered, according to anecdote, because his friend John McCormack said it would be easy.

There’s a reproduction of a William Orpen portrait of McCormack himself, winner of the 1903 competition, as well as a signed photograph. There’s an 1898 letter of “fraternal greeting” from the “archdruid” of a Welsh organisation with similar revivalist aims.

There's the score of Exodus, the sacred cantata that the Irish rebel and signatory to the Proclamation Thomas MacDonagh wrote with Benedetto Palmiere (who was also, for a while, Joyce's unfortunate music teacher) and that won the Feis Ceoil composition competition in 1904.

Unfortunately the Little Museum could not get its hands on the uilleann pipes owned by his fellow signatory Éamonn Ceannt. Ceannt was both a participant in the feis and a judge. “He was to be an adjudicator in the 1916 feis,” says Foy. It was meant to be held at Easter. “But of course he was particularly busy that week.”

The Feis Ceoil festival is one of those things that people take for granted. Many reading this will have participated. Others will remember it as something that obsessed their enthusiastic music teachers and more musically talented peers. Each year it continues to celebrate the hard-earned musical skill that it has highlighted since Annie Patterson cofounded the association, in 1896. Patterson was the first woman to receive a music doctorate from the Royal University of Ireland; the association was established on foot of a letter to this newspaper that lamented the decline in Irish musical traditions.

Worried parents

When I first spoke to the Feis Ceoil Association’s chief executive, Laura Gilsenan, about all this it was March, and she was in the middle of running this year’s ESB-sponsored event. She was sitting in an office at the RDS, in Dublin, fielding calls from worried parents – her ring tone is a euphoric string section – and giving directions to children and adjudicators, who sporadically wandered in holding instruments or sheet music and looking confused. In the background I could hear male voices warming up by singing arias.

The involvement of MacDonagh and Ceannt was no coincidence. (Joseph Mary Plunkett’s father, Count George Noble Plunkett, was also a committee member.) Originally the feis was linked directly to the Gaelic cultural revival and the nationalistic ferment of the times.

“Ireland was still under British rule, and it was felt that the Irish musical culture was diminishing,” says Gilsenan. “So the feis was initially focused on Irish music and Irish compositions and airs . . . There were a lot of pipes, uilleann pipes, Irish harp, vocal ensembles and the whistling of Irish airs.” She pauses. “I really like to think of that as someone getting up and whistling an ould tune, but it was probably tin whistle.”

After independence, however, the focus of the organisation shifted, and the competitions began to concentrate more on classical music. “I guess once Ireland became a republic, traditional music gathered its own momentum,” says Gilsenan. “So the feis went down a separate road and evolved as a different sort of festival.”

Nowadays, she says, the festival is about setting a standard. “It’s a benchmark. We get adjudicators in, primarily from the UK. We know they’re judging against an international standard. Competing at the feis is different from music exams, because that’s just you and an examiner, but this is you and an adjudicator who’s going to critique your performance in front of your peers and your family.”

As we chat a woman comes in to say that her daughter won’t be competing in the junior piano the next day. Do many withdraw? “Singers get ‘throats’,” says Gilsenan. “And people realise they’re not ready. Entry closes in December, and they think, That’s fine: I’ll have learned the repertoire by the time of the competition. But then it gets closer. It’s challenging. You’re putting together a programme of maybe 10 or 12 minutes, a little recital to perform in front of an audience.”

Gilsenan shows me some of their trophies and cups, pieces of ornate silverware that have been passed from winner to winner. Many have been in circulation for the best part of a century. She points out that you can follow the careers of notable performers through certificates, medals and cups, and that several generations of the same family often turn up etched on the same trophies. She points out the spot where her own school won an orchestra cup. “I was in that orchestra,” she says. (She is, to this day, a singer.)

I stroll over to St Mary’s Church in Donnybrook, where I watch a succession of preternaturally talented preteens play nocturnes by John Field. (“We can play any nocturne except 18,” one child whispers. “I don’t know why. I don’t know what’s wrong with 18.”)

Lip-biting parents watch, and a smiling elderly adjudicator takes notes, rising at the end to read his results and to make some comments.

Back at the RDS I watch children from the junior orchestra at St Canice's Co-Ed Primary School, in Kilkenny, as they play a rambunctious version of Let It Go, from Frozen. "Every year we stop in Liffey Valley and go to McDonald's and shop," says one of the school's conductors, Ruth O'Leary. "Predictably, that's always their highlight."

Have things changed much? “The fundamentals are still exactly the same,” says Gilsenan. “You go for your lessons. You prepare. You perform your piece. In that way it’s been the same for 120 years. It’s a kind of a lonely place, standing up there on your own, performing.”

Is it a lot of pressure for young people? If it is a bit pressurised, says Gilsenan, what’s the harm? Nowadays “you get seven- and eight-year-olds who are probably being told they’re wonderful by everybody, and then they come in and there are 44 others who might be just as good,” she says.

“So we get a few little disappointed faces in here, and then some absolutely thrilled to be getting a certificate.” It can be a bit of a reality check, she says. “The certificate has to mean something, otherwise it’s no good.

“So they have to deal with the disappointment and deal with going off in the car saying, ‘I’m never playing the piano again. That’s it.’ And then of course they’re back next year, and they’re grand. They learn to cope with it. These are good life skills.”

Living tradition

And this, I suppose, is how people have felt about the Feis Ceoil gathering for 120 years. It’s a living tradition. (Hence the grand piano in the exhibition, which is there for a series of live performances at the Little Museum of Dublin.)

It has only ever been cancelled once, in 2001, during the foot-and-mouth-disease crisis. In 1916, despite the destruction of Dublin’s city centre by shells and revolution, the festival was merely postponed. At the time the postponement was presented, according to Gilsenan, “as a bit of a nuisance rather than a major upset”.

An advertisement was placed in The Irish Times announcing that it would be rescheduled. It went ahead in July 1916 without its piping adjudicator and in a different Ireland.