A Concord of Sweet Sounds: A Visit with Musicians Michael Wilding and Jordan McConnell

PZI musicians Michael Wilding and Jordan McConnell join us this Monday night for a concord of sweet sounds, playing and talking about the source of sound and music. We will investigate strains of South Asian melodies in the sweet notes of the flute. Or we may hear, in the strings of the guitar, the story of an abandoned and barren island off the coast of Ireland, in music written by fairies to the thrum of wind in halyards and the sheets of old sailing vessels.

But music for a time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night … let no such man be trusted.

—Lorenzo, from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice
 
A couple miles off the southwest coast of Ireland, facing the gray Atlantic, lies the barren island Great Blasket (Gaelic: Blascaod Mór). A century ago it was home to 175 fisherman, small farmers, and their families, but now lies abandoned. Often inaccessible due to ferocious storms rolling in from the west, it was there that the mythic Tune of the Fairies (Port na bPúcaí) was first recorded. Its origins are obscure.
 
“It is a weird, eerie tune,” says guitarist and Irish bagpipe player Jordan McConnell, “and not at all typical of the Celtic tradition.” Is the tune the sound of whales and seals, of the whipping wind through sheets and yardarms of old sailing vessels? It is the song of fairies, of ghosts.
 
In 1969, Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote a poem about the unnamed fiddler who first received that melody out of the night, out of the wind, out of the weather.
 
The Given Note
 
On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.
Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather
Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpracticed, their fiddling easy
For he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.
So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don’t care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.
Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.

Photo: Jordan McConnell and Michael Wilding