Legendary accordion player Breanndán Begley can't read music, and prefers learning tunes person to person. But he believes in the value of preserving the repertoire in book form, he tells SIOBHÁN LONG
THE BEAUTY OF traditional music is that while it flourishes in countless kitchens, pubs and snugs across the country, it can lurk with equal comfort in the unlikeliest of corners, sometimes lying dormant for decades until unearthed by a diligent scholar or inquisitive musician.
Much celebration accompanied the discovery, just a few years ago, of the words to more than 80 tunes from the Canon Goodman collection. Goodman’s work dates back to the period 1860-1866, when he compiled a comprehensive collection of tunes in west Kerry, and the unveiling of accompanying lyrics some 130 years later added a further layer of intrigue to the unpredictable and picaresque ramblings which have characterised our music throughout its existence.
Breanndán Begley grew up in Cuas, west of Dingle town, in the belly of the west Kerry beast. It’s likely that he emerged from the womb with an accordion welded to both hands, so inextricably is he intertwined with that instrument. But for all the riches of Canon Goodman’s bequest, Begley, like so many traditional musicians, felt at arm’s length from the revered manuscripts, by virtue of the fact that he can’t read musical notation.
Breanndán’s eardrums (and fingers) can pick out an errant note at 100 paces, but his acquaintance with formal notation is akin to, as he puts it, “a blind man’s appreciation of a beautiful sunset”.
Begley inherited vast prairies of tunes at his own father's knee, and in the company of scores of traditional musicians in west Kerry. With organiser Niamh Ní Bhaoill, he founded Ballyferriter's Scoil Cheoil An Earraigh and, over its five-year existence, he has developed a growing appreciation of the value of committing a swathe of his native repertoire to a collection. This is published this month in a bilingual book, Ceol Duibhneach: Ceol agus Ceoltóirí ó Chorca Dhuibhne/Music and Musicians from West Kerry. The book is accompanied by two CDs, the first featuring a rake of tunes played slowly and the second with the tunes played at normal speed – a novice's dream.
“I don’t read music,” Begley declares. “And any music I have, I listened to it and saw dancers dance to it at home. It was a visual way of learning, in a way, and that’s how I like music books to be, to have a strong visual element.”
Ceol Duibhneach is visually stunning, a marriage of photographs of the raw landscape of the region with (often grainy) shots of musicians who bequeathed the tunes to the community. Alongside pithy pen pictures of each musician, (from Seán Coughlin to Muiris Ó Dálaigh, Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé and Tomásín A Rí), tunes are presented in formal musical notation in parallel with their associated named notes. It’s as if Begley and Ní Bhaoill wanted to share the personality and context of the music as much as the music itself.
“All these fellas, if you put them into the one room,” Begley says, “they couldn’t play together. They had such a distinctive sound.”
In the book, Begley talks of how “the musicians always played on their own. People were of the opinion that music was being wasted if two were playing together when one could do the job just as well.” Was this an ecologically sound approach to musical appreciation? Not quite, but Begley explains the pragmatism behind such an attitude to live music. “There were two main reasons,” he says. “Accordions were scarce, and there was no use having two musicians playing together, when you could have the second fella down the road playing for another crowd. It would have been a waste of music! As a result, they all made their own of it.”
Tunes morphed into variations, according to the finesse of each player’s memory and the latitude of his or her creativity.
"The musicians just brought home what they could in their ear, and they tried to learn the tune as best as they could," he says. "But that's what you have to do with music anyway. The danger of this [publishing Ceol Duibhneach] is that people will say that this is the right way to do it, the fact that it's written down. But I think you should learn a tune and then throw away the book – and play it your own way. And if it makes the dancers move, then you've done it right."
Perhaps Ní Bhaoill’s and Begley’s ace card is that they’ve revived the personalities behind this incredibly effervescent, and at times, ineffably plaintive, music. Muiris Ó Cuínn is described as an “aristocrat of music”, while Moss Martin’s death in 1980, on stage alongside piper Eoin Duignan, is recounted warmly, with Begley observing: “Wasn’t that a beautiful way to go?”
Amid copious accounts of the “flood of music” in west Kerry, unlikely coalitions emerge. Only in Kerry would you have a musical biography refer to a musician’s passing (in this case, John O’Donnell’s) as it related to the doomed 1982 attempt by the county team to bag five All-Ireland titles in a row. Calendars are etched with such unlikely sporting and musical links and coincidences, from Cuas to Feothanach, and from Dingle town to Slea Head itself.
“These were great people and they’re gone now,” Begley says. “Times are different now. There would have been no need for this book 30 years ago. But it’s great to be able to turn things that would have come in the way of the tradition being passed on, such as video and TV footage, to the benefit of musicians today. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that when you learn a tune from a book, it’s only notes. When you learn a tune from a person, Jesus, it’s so much closer to your heart.”
Each year of Scoil Cheoil An Earraigh, Ballyferriter’s boutique traditional music festival, has witnessed exponential growth in the numbers of students enrolling in classes. Begley might have been the architect of this burgeoning gathering, but he’s canny in his assessment of what measures its success.
“This year we thought the numbers would be down – and they were up again,” he says, with a glint in his eye. “When we started off, there were 24 enrolled for the accordion, and this year there were 15 – so it’s definitely working!”
What Ceol Duibhneachis ultimately about is identity. It's what drives Begley and what he sees as fundamental to the music. "You have to hold on to the folklore cornerstones of your upbringing," he says. "And if you have them, you can go anywhere. Otherwise, you're only living by other people's upbringing. I mean, you have to pick the good of the place you were reared in. Of course, there was bad there too, but if you take the good as your starting point, you can go anywhere."
Ceol Duibhneachis available from www.scoilcheoil.com
