In a new partnership the Feis Ceoil has staged its first Comórtas Larchet for choral work in the Irish language. The competition was sponsored by the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies with the premiere held Thursday, March 19, in the RDS Grand Hall in Dublin.
Post-primary choirs were invited to compete in performing Norah Constance Walsh’s new setting of the poem “Filleadh ar an gCathair” by Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, a contemporary poet from Tralee in Co. Kerry.
In this inaugural competition, the first prize of €750 and Certificate to Conductor went to Wesley College (conductor Helen Doyle) and second prize to King’s Hospital (conductor Ciarán Kelly).
Laura Gilsenan has been CEO of Feis Ceoil for almost two decades, having joined the organization from a human resources role as it transitioned into a company.
Gilsenan said that this year is the 130th anniversary of Feis Ceoil. “Composition has been part of Feis Ceoil since the very beginning,” she says. “We wanted to do a couple of things that would reignite some of the fundamental principles of why the Feis Ceoil was set up in the first place. There is a very strong composition tradition in Ireland.”
Founded in 1896 by Dr. Annie Patterson from Lurgan, Co. Armagh, a composer, organist and Gaelic League member, the Feis Ceoil takes place annually with 200 different competitions over March and June, and almost 5,000 students from as young as age seven performing for international adjudicators.
Ireland’s premier music competition, the Feis is a rite of passage for classical musicians in Ireland, having turned out many notable performers including singers Claudia Boyle, Tara Erraught, Celine Byrne, pianists John O’Conor and Finghin Collins, and violinist Cora Venus Lunny.
Going further back, a 22-year-old James Joyce won (to his disappointment) the bronze medal in the tenor solo competition in 1904, having been persuaded by gold-medal winner Count John McCormack to take part. Joyce’s bronze medal is in the possession of dancer Michael Flatley.
Irish rebel Eamonn Ceannt played uilleann pipes and adjudicated the piping competitions in 1915. Set to judge the competition again the following year, he was executed in Kilmainham Gaol in 1916 for his part in the Easter Rising.
The Feis has survived, says Gilsenan, because “the standard here is high. Adjudicators come from abroad, so people are not only being benchmarked against their peers, they’re being benchmarked internationally.”
Many participants go on to populate choirs, orchestras and opera houses in Europe and the US. “The vast majority of classical musicians working in Ireland have been through the Feis.” Of the competitions, “People find it hard to comprehend the scale of it,” says Gilsenan.
The founder’s vision was to revive Irish music through a classical repertoire and this is the key principle of the new Comórtas Larchet, named after the prominent Irish musician and teacher John F. Larchet.
Gilsenan may be busy with the hands-on running of the sprawling competitions, while keeping the company afloat, but she has also been a choral singer her whole life. When selecting the poem, “I had an idea what might be of interest to people of the level we’re looking at, aged between 14 and 17.”
She says, “We noticed that the numbers of Irish-language choirs were going down. We thought we could introduce interesting choral repertoire in the Irish language that would hopefully reignite people’s passion for it.”
A ‘green wave’ of Irish-speaking musicians
From the Belfast Irish-language rappers Kneecap to pop star CMAT (who mixes Irish-language lyrics in her latest album, “Euro-Country”) to bilingual artists like Lankum and Róis, there seems to be a “green wave” of Irish-speaking musicians shaping international taste.
“I think we’re lucky with Kneecap and those kinds of people creating an Irish-language resurgence,” says Gilsenan. “A bit of a zeitgeist that we have inadvertently tapped.”
The poem by Ní Ghearbhuigh, “Filleadh ar an gCathair,” translated as “Returning to the City,” is a vibrant and tactile celebration of coming home to the bustle, heat and petrol fumes of a beloved city. It is a rewriting of Máirtín Ó Direáin’s poem “The Islander” with many accolades, chosen as Ireland's EU Presidency poem in 2013 and shortlisted in 2015 for RTE's “A Poem for Ireland.”
Norah Constance Walsh is a composer, musician and the artistic director of Dublin-based choirs The Mellow Tonics and the Forget Me Nots. She is also a former Feis entrant who performed on piano, before setting aside her musical career for a while.
“My journey was a little bit unusual because I had a career as a corporate banker before I went back to do a degree in music,” says Walsh. “I’d always been a musician. When I decided I wanted to take a break from one career, I didn’t return to the other. Composition has always been something I’d wanted to do.”
Walsh has set the works of numerous poets to music, including Dermot Bolger, Catherine Ann Cullen, Moya Cannon, Peter Sirr and Tony Curtis, and has composed short operas alongside her career as a conductor and musical director for such televised events as the 2018 Papal visit. “Vocal works are a core part of my compositional output because I love the ability to communicate a narrative and a feeling,” she says.
First contacted by the Contemporary Music Centre, Walsh was involved in selecting the poem from a list of 10 compiled by Gilsenan and others, including Notre Dame’s Professor Brian Ó Conchubhair. Of receiving the commission, she says, “An initial reading inspires a lot of instant ideas and thoughts.”
“The text was a particularly good choice for the competition because it was written by a young adult and the themes are those of young adults, although they ring absolutely true with me as an older adult. I thought the fit was good, it’s about returning to the city, full of life and vitality. It was so relatable to younger people. I had an image of these rows of young singers coming back to the city full of life, and how they’ve missed it.”
The poem is about Bordeaux, where Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh spent time, though anyone who has journeyed home from an airport through their city streets will find very personal resonances in the poem.
What Walsh most liked about it was “this idea of coming back to the city, instead of some pastoral landscape or tumultuous seas.”
“The language she uses in describing the elements of the city is beautiful and yet slightly crude in places. She’s talking about the heat of the city, the taste of sweat which she finds to be pleasant, the neon lights that are lighting up her heart, the song of the traffic. We normally associate traffic with noise, with negative adjectives. Also this idea that ‘preabann an Aimsir Láithreach,’ the present tense, is throbbing or pulsating.”
“I was delighted to have the opportunity to set a poem in Irish,” she adds. “My son went to a Gaelscoil, and we speak a little at home. It’s a very rich part of my heritage.”
Gilsenan, who was involved in selecting the piece and in commissioning Walsh, hopes it may become part of the canon of repertoire in Irish choral singing. “When we come to next year we’ll hopefully have more people taking it up.”
She believes the Feis Ceoil has a greater reach than in fostering musical talent in its participants. “We are not only training musicians, but we’re training the audiences of the future as well. A lot of people come to music through their school choir or orchestra and hopefully retain a love of it.”
This year, along with the Comórtas Larchet, the Feis has added Community Choirs to its competitions. Ireland has a very strong choir culture, with long-running regional choir competitions and community choirs emerging throughout the country in recent years.
“There is a great benefit to people’s mental health with singing. A lot of people might have a memory of school choirs where they were told to mime because their voices weren’t strong enough, so to be able to participate fully is very empowering,” says Gilsenan.
“The sense of collaboration creates enormous well-being. Fostering that love of music will stay with people.”
‘An iconic aspect of Irish culture’
Ó Conchubhair is a faculty fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. He has been a key figure in the revival of the Irish language, and he was involved in selecting the poem and commissioning Walsh.
“The Keough-Naughton Institute is well known for its visual arts and academic support, and the Feis Ceoil seemed a natural extension,” he says.
“The Feis Ceoil is an iconic aspect of Irish culture that predates the formation of the Irish state. It has a unique selling point that captures that tension where you might ask is Irish identity part of the high European classical music tradition or is it closer to some form of wild exotic Sean Nós singing?”
For Ó Conchubhair, “Filleadh ar an gCathair” is “a modern classic text.”
“There is something about a child alone learning the words, lines and verses. Then their voice being subsumed by the music and group as they come together in society,” he says.
“The more exposure that we can give children in Ireland to choral singing the richer life is,” he believes. He is passionate about a tradition “intertwining music, composition, Irish language, performance, and cutting across genres.”
For Gilsenan, the partnership with the Keough-Naughton Institute has elevated the Feis to a high standard as it faces an uncertain future. Funded by the ESB for 10 years up to 2018, the Feis has since partnered with the RDS but received reduced funding. “If in the next 18 months we don’t get a committed funder we are simply not going to be able to continue,” says Gilsenan.
“The first thing people assume is that we’re government funded, we’re not,” she says. “The Arts Council doesn’t fund competitive organizations. Because we are 130 years old people just assume you’re there for the duration, which is understandable, but the reality is very different.”
Sponsorship from the Keough-Naughton Institute, says Gilsenan, “injected a little bit of self-belief when we needed it.”
The Feis is a mainstay of Irish culture, with a value that goes far beyond the pursuit of academic success, she believes. “In these years with kids being on their phones so much and having a short attention span, learning an instrument is especially important. It can still only be achieved exactly the same way as it was it was 100 years ago. You have to put in the hours, the focus and the dedication. There is no new technology to replace that.”
Watch the performances from the Comórtas Larchet on the Feis Ceoil Vimeo channel.