Get a Life Fund Awards have been made to:
In 2008: Jacquelyn Hynes, Andrew Clark and Paul Medd.
Jacquelyn Hynes: Hearing the News
I was in the west of Ireland at the Cuckoo Fleadh, a small music
festival held in Kinvara to celebrate the first cuckoo of spring
when Alison McGillivray phoned me with the great news that I had
been awarded £10,000 by the Katherine McGillivray Get a Life Fund.
It was a bright sunny day and the good news seemed to be reflected
by the glorious weather. There is something about Ireland and Irish
weather, and Irish music that seems to contain and express contrasts
of joy and sorrow, the vast circle of life.
The week before that I had played in Land Of Light by composer Howard Haigh at the Barbican, a demanding thirteen movement work of contemporary music for small ensemble and 150 voice choir, fusing elements of Sephardic, Spanish and Moorish music and language and improvisation. I'm very interested in music of different cultures and this was a great ensemble to work with, incorporating French, Israeli and Tunisian musicians. (It also involved a memorable Tunisian lunch cooked by the Darabuka player!) It was a very intensive rehearsal period but greatly enjoyable. Working with musicians from other cultures and Irish music is where my heart really lies; it was great to be steeped in contrasting experiences of these for a few weeks. Now this is over I can really concentrate on the opportunities afforded me in this respect by the Get a Life fund.
I am so excited by the award- and a little daunted as dreams turn into the possibility of reality. I wanted to take this sabbatical to re-invigorate my playing more than anything-- over the past couple of years I have been experimenting with multi-cultural collaborations and paradoxically this has led to a great desire to go deep down inside my own playing, take it apart and build it up again perhaps because the musicians I have most enjoyed working with in this context have a great rootedness in their own musical culture coupled with a strong desire to collaborate and experiment.
The Project
This is a two-year project, a foundation year in London which I am
spending getting to grips with the wonderful new flute I am now able
to order which has a different fingering system to the ones I am
used to ( I play either Boehm or keyless), making a start on the
Uilleann pipes and building up my repertoire studying at the Irish
Cultural centre leading up to year studying in Ireland, the M.A. in
Traditional Irish Music Performance at the Irish World Academy,
University of Limerick, Eire, beginning in September 2009.
This MA is the only course which enables the study of Irish
Traditional music performance at an advanced level outside of North
America and they take twenty four students a year. Students come
from all over the world to the Irish World Academy, as do teachers,
so it will be a great international environment. The Academy is the
brain child of the Irish composer Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, and the MA
course is led by a flute player Niall Keegan, a fine player himself.
This course can only make me into more of the musician that I wish
to be, and a better teacher. It will give me the chance I didn't
have, as I am self-taught in this area and have been too busy
playing or working or procrastinating, to deeply develop my style
and repertoire, and also to learn the Uilleann pipes which is a long-
held desire. (They say this takes twenty five years, and it is also
prohibitively expensive so certainly would not have been possible
without this award. I hope to make a good start at least.)
At the end of the course students perform a forty minute solo recital on their first instrument (this will be Traditional Irish flute in my case) and a smaller recital on a second instrument if taken as an elective -for me this will be the Uilleann pipes. There are elective modules in ethnomusicology and education as well. Apart from the chance to study in the heartland of Irish music there is an amazingly radical aspect to the Performing MA course and a very exciting one - at the outset, students are invited to write their "wish list" of instrumental tutors - this can include any musician anywhere in the world - and from this, musicians are invited to come and tutor workshops at the college with students. I'm already planning mine!
The Flute
The award has enabled me to order my dream flute.
I was at the Traditional Music Festival in Ennis last year when I bumped into the Breton flautist Sylvain Barou - Sylvain plays in Comas with the fiddle player Aidan Burke, who played in my Taraba project so we said hello, and he introduced me to a friend of his, Stephane Morvan, who is a flute maker. This was all taking place in a pub doorway, and Sylvan suggested trying the flute that Stephane was carrying, a Pratten style simple system 5 keyed Irish flute. We moved to another pub to try it, and I was really impressed with the dark woody tone, and thought this really is the best Irish flute I have tried. I have tried many, and always felt frustrated with the instrument or myself, they never seemed to fit. So now I have been in contact with Stephane, his waiting list is at least a year but he says he can make me a flute by September (at least that is what I think he said - I am relying on Google translator as he has no English and I have no French -it took me a while to realise I was sending him emails saying "I really like your groove!" as the translator substituted cannelure for flute! Maybe that's why he put me forward on the waiting list!)
It would in fact be possible to do the whole course on a silver flute but I feel that would be pointless for me - I want to go deeper inside the Irish sound and I am not convinced that is possible on a concert flute which though obviously beautiful in tone and response is built to eradicate all idiosyncrasies. The Irish flute as we now know it has a different harmonic shape, if you like, a tapered bore gives you two octaves rather than three and the quality of the sound is so different - you can hear the air in it. Like other "World "flutes, the Bansurai or the Nez, there is a mystery in the sound for me that has been partially eradicated with the silver flute. I am not decrying the silver flute, it is my main instrument and I love it and appreciate the phenomenal engineering that has created it, but I feel the wooden flute is the instrument of evolution for Irish music
The Uilleann Pipes
The hunt for the pipes is also on! The Uilleann pipes are a
fantastic instrument, and it would be the perfect adjunct to my
flute-playing, as well as a wonderful sound to mix with other world
musics. Until now this has been literally a pipe-dream.(!) Now I
have taken my first step by joining the Pipers Club at the Irish
Cultural Centre - this is a free weekly group for anyone interested
in the Uilleann pipes, run by a generous and patient group of pipers
who lend you pipes, teach you what to do with them to begin with
(this is all done by ear) and give you ideas about approaching
makers. All in order to keep the instrument going, and with no
payment. I am on the hunt to buy a "practise set" at the moment -
this comprises bag, bellow and chanter without the drones or
regulators. I am hoping during the course of this year to find a
full set of Uilleann pipes which I feel the same way about as the
Morvan flute, and then I can go to Limerick with a grounding in this
breath-taking instrument (twenty-four years to go!!)
Studying at The Irish Cultural Centre
This year studying in London also gives me the opportunity to build
up my Irish repertoire (there are over two thousand tunes notated in
O'Neills, the "Bible" of Irish music of which I have taught myself
around a hundred - a tiny drop in the Irish Sea)
My "Taraba" Irish/World music project took place at Hammersmith
Irish centre (now the Irish Cultural Centre) and I have played many
support gigs there. (This is where the Pipers Club is held) There is
a resident tutor there, Brendan Mulkere, and I am joining his course
for a year. Many of the finest Irish musicians started with him at a
very young age, and continued into adulthood. He teaches in groups,
by ear, which is the traditional Irish way. He also teaches you ways
to "turn" the tune with ornamentations and variations which really
breathe life into them. It also turns out he is a visiting tutor at
Limerick, so he is the ideal tutor for my foundation year. I will
also be seeing Niall Keegan the course director at Limerick
throughout the year, so it is all now in motion and very exciting. Blog Coming Soon!
Andrew Clark: Signalling Horn Change
I thought to myself, as I was coming to the end of my course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1986, that perhaps I would manage to earn a living for ten years playing a horn professionally. Then I would turn to something else, perhaps try teaching Maths and English in a school.
After 21 years of playing horns of many different shapes and sizes and nationalities, I realise that my prediction was a little wide of the mark. I was unable to hold back my curiosity into the sounds, sensations and temperaments of the different types of horns that have existed over the last 300 years. Despite my initial self-deception that I was only academically interested in the types of instruments used by and written for by great composers of the past, I found myself relishing the challenge of mastering instruments whose playing techniques and style required resourcefulness and research. I found it more interesting to play in different styles on different horns for different periods of music than to play it all on the same one. This has lead to a varied career playing principal horn with many different ensembles and orchestras and a number a solo engagements and recordings. (For more information, please see www.naturallyhorns.co.uk )
During this time I have gathered information on and about horns and gained experience in how to play them and service them. Some of this gets disseminated in my teaching at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall, but the time has come for me to put some ideas into action and build some of my own instruments. To this end I am excited to be supported by Katherine McGillivray’s Get a Life Fund to begin a collaboration and apprenticeship with top horn maker Keith Berg in Canada in May, 2008. This gives me a chance to take a rest from playing professionally for four months whilst pursuing an interest that should provide improved horns to play on and give me better skills to make them.
The plan is to work on two historical models and one new: an English classical hand horn after Sandbach, the instrument used in the Covent Garden Opera Orchestra 1810-1830 when Weber’s opera Oberon was premiered; a romantic period 3-valve horn after Ottensteiner, the horn played by Richard Strauss’s father Franz under Wagner at the Munich Opera; and a new model using my own design of valve. In the long term I hope to able to be able to provide better horns for horn players. More immediately I will use all of these horns professionally, and in particular the romantic model will be needed for performances of Schumann’s Konzertstück in May 2009 with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Read Andrew's Blog
Paul Medd: A 2nd Bite at the (Big) Apple
My name is Paul Medd and I'm proud to be one of the first recipients
of the Katherine McGillivray Get a Life Trust.
I've been a full time violinist with the Royal Scottish National
Orchestra for almost 13 years now. Over a long period of time I've
developed a very bad case of stage fright and despite trying many
"tried and tested" cures to recover, I found that none worked for me.
Worrying I was stagnating in the job I applied for positions
elsewhere, but again the nerves got in the way. So after playing to
what felt like a myriad of violin teachers I came to the conclusion
that THE way to tackle this deep-rooted problem was to take a year
away from my life AND the orchestra, and concentrate on my playing!
First violinist of the respected Orion quartet Daniel Phillips was
recommended to me and after countless emails of encouragement from him
I set up a microphone in my kitchen and recorded an honest un-nervous
account of my playing! He was impressed and accepted me as one of his
pupils at Queens College (City University of New York). When I visited
Mr Phillips in April I was amazed by his ability to recognise
immediately the technical problems that had crept into my bowing arm
that were the initial cause of my stage fright. After just 4 hours of
lessons we went through many exercises that really freed up my elbow
and shoulder, almost instantly improving my sound by halving my effort.
I'm going to study with Mr Phillips at the end of August for a year
and I'm excited to see just what he could improve in my playing in
that time. Stage fright is an illness that can take a long time to
recover from, but I'm confident that after my studies I will come back
to the orchestra a much more confident player that is able to deal
with any problems performing constantly can throw at me!
I'm so grateful to the trust fund for helping me well on my way to New
York and look for forward to keeping you all updated with a regular
blog throughout the year. Read Paul's Blog