Publication of life's labour reveals Shakespeare's debt to `Croppy Boy'

A life's labour has come to fruition

A life's labour has come to fruition. The consequence is a seminal work which will be used down the years by researchers in the field of Irish traditional music. The sad thing is that Aloys Fleischmann did not live to witness the publication of his Sources of Irish Traditional Music c.1600-1855.

For four decades before his death, Prof Fleischmann dedicated himself to meticulous research, making these two weighty tomes possible.

Somehow, in a life filled with teaching, composition, and numerous other pursuits, UCC's music professor found time to delve into all available archives, listing every traditional tune recorded in Irish manuscript and printed collections, as well as Irish or related material in Scottish, Welsh and English collections.

He also unearthed source material from 1583 to 1855, ending with George Petrie's Ancient Music of Ireland.

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The scale of the undertaking is mind-boggling. Fleischmann's problem in life was not how to fill his time but how to find enough time to accommodate all his interests. He was a human dynamo and when he undertook a task it was always a fair bet that he would complete it. He was nothing if not enthusiastic when a new project was conceived. Even in retirement his goal was to complete the mission he began more than 40 years earlier. He almost succeeded before his death in 1992 - but not quite.

It fell to Prof Micheal O Suilleabhain, who began working with Fleischmann as a lecturer in the music department of UCC in 1995, when the project commenced, to complete the work.

He is now director of the Irish World Music Centre at the University of Limerick. As assistant editor of Sources he was joined by Mr Paul McGettrick, a research student at the centre, who acted as associate editor.

Prof O Suilleabhain says that when he died Fleischmann had finished 95 per cent of the project. Completion was supported by financial assistance from UCC, the University of Limerick, FAS and the Arts Council. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland also assisted.

Prof Micheal O Suilleabhain's links with both universities thus created a symbiosis between the research facilities in the two institutions.

If Fleischmann spent 40 years of his hectic life bringing the project to the point where it was almost ready for the printers, the final hurdles were no less daunting for the Limerick-based team. It was, says O Suilleabhain, akin to poring over almost 7,000 mathematical formulae - because that is how many tunes Fleischmann had catalogued and annotated.

Each one had to be checked and double-checked for accuracy before it could be allowed with confidence into the hands of the publishers - Garland Publishing Inc of New York. And the material had to be transferred to an updated computer format, something made possible by the co-operation between UCC and the University of Limerick.

"It is not overstating it to say that this was the largest research project ever undertaken in the field of traditional Irish music. It will last, of course, and it will generate much more research in the years ahead.

"It is a monument, literally, to a lifetime's work. Aloys Fleischmann's name is the only one on the cover because this is the reality of his dream, his vision," Prof O Suilleabhain says.

When the President, Mrs McAleese, launched the two volumes recently at UCC, the occasion was a celebration of Fleischmann's genius.

Tenacity is an adjective that hardly does him justice. Micheal O Suilleabhain illustrates this poignantly in his preface to the volumes: "In 1990, the professor climbed Mount Brandon in Co Kerry to celebrate his 80th birthday. Two years later, in the summer of 1992, aware of his approaching death, he completed a final session in his office location at the university and, armed with a plastic bag full of old Irish music prints, he insisted on walking to the hospital and checking himself in.

"When I visited him some days later, he was sitting like a young boy on the edge of the bed with music books spread across the floor like cultural maps. `Where will we launch it, Micheal?'

"His eyes were alive with the music which had occupied his soul throughout his life. During his final weeks he suffered severe pain but refused the appropriate medication in order to allow him to continue to work on the introduction.

"Three days before his death, assisted by members of his family, he managed to complete the final draft after seven hours' hard labour, when he was so weak he could hardly hold the pen. He died on Tuesday, July 21st, 1992."

He added: "It is fitting that it was Fleischmann's work which linked the research interests of UCC and the new University of Limerick in this way. Cork has had an international reputation for the way in which it nurtured the seed of Irish music studies throughout the years, a seed which continues to produce new growth with every year in the flourishing music department built up through a lifetime's selfless dedication."

The two volumes, he continues, would be the legacy of "a great citizen of Ireland, of Europe and of the world, as Irish traditional music breaks through its ethnic bonds into the flow of a new millennium. In it all Fleischmann, like a good cartographer, has mapped the course of that tradition over three centuries.

"In doing so, he has charted something at the quick of the Irish psyche which will undoubtedly prove to be a treasure house of information for future research and performance."

And the introduction on which the then seriously-ill professor worked allows us to know Fleischmann's own view.

"Irish traditional music," he wrote, "is one of the richest treasuries of folk music in the world. Since it belongs to an oral tradition, most of it has already been lost, and what has been recorded is only partially available - in Irish collections after 1724 and before that, scattered among early Scottish and English manuscript and printed collections - so that no composite picture of it has yet been presented showing its remarkable range and diversity . . . Much of what has survived up to the present has been recorded as a living tradition, but of the past we have only the fossil remains."

Fleischmann went on to set out his primary aims as he embarked on the ambitious project. They were: "To enable Irish songs and dance tunes to be identified, with access to whatever information about them can be gleaned from the available records; to present the scholar with a mass of material showing the evolution of the Irish vocal and instrumental folk style, period by period, from the earliest recorded tune up to the middle of the last century; to put into renewed circulation many of the splendid airs which had been lost but have now been located among the sources covered by the project."

Fleischmann remarked that in the 1700s travellers in Ireland were struck by the musicality of the people and their propensity to sing and make music at the slightest prompt, or without any.

He noted: "Two developments, however, were to have a disastrous effect on this accumulated heritage from the past. First was the gradual abandonment of the Irish language in the course of the 19th century.

"When people no longer spoke or understood Irish as a living language, the traditional songs declined and, within two generations, only a small fraction of that vast heritage which had been in use from time immemorial managed to survive . . ."

The second development to which he alluded in the introduction was the potato blight. It was the beginning of a nation's decimation through starvation and emigration. "Petrie declared that `the land of song was no longer tuneful'; or, `if a human sound met the traveller's ear, it was only the feeble and despairing wail for the dead'."

Fleischmann's introduction turns from matters of general interest to tunes of special interest. Scholars will follow his musical notation and history of the tunes with care, but anyone would be interested in the manner in which the genesis of a tune called Calleno Casturme was unravelled.

In Shakespeare's play Henry V, Pistol, on a French battlefield, says "yield cur" to a French soldier whom he has taken prisoner. When the Frenchman says, "Je pense que vous estes le gentilhomme de bonne qualite," Pistol replies: "Quality! Calen O Custure me."

What might this have meant? Nobody was really sure until 1939, Fleischmann explained, when Prof Gerard Murphy of UCD identified it as an early song in Irish with the presumed title of Cailin o Chois tSiure me (I am a girl from beside the river Suir).

The tune survives to the present day as The Croppy Boy. Fleischmann said that the quotation in a Shakespearean play proved that it "was well known in the England of the 16th century."

Sources of Irish Traditional Music is published by Garland of New York at £190 sterling. Ms Ellen Byrne of the Irish World Music Centre at the University of Limerick may be contacted at 061-202917 to discuss distribution details - as of now not finalised.