Since 1982 John Schaefer has presented New Sounds, an eclectic journey through new and unusual music on New York's WNYC radio. In 2009, Schaefer invited Irish composer Dave Flynn into WNYC studios for an edition of New Sounds; a decade later, Schaefer has written the liner notes for Flynn's new album Irish Minimalism. Read an extended extract from Schaefer's essay below.
With the title Irish Minimalism, composer Dave Flynn has laid down a marker. Minimalism is associated with America, and specifically with composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. But the hallmarks of the style – repetition; gradual, incremental changes that accrue over time; steady rhythms, often drawn from popular or traditional music; and a restrained sense of harmonic movement – are all compatible with Irish traditional music.
After years spent as both a composer and performer working in the dual worlds of contemporary classical music and traditional song, Flynn has fashioned a personal musical language by recognizing that the differences between those two styles are not nearly as great, and certainly not as useful, as the similarities.
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You can probably hear this most clearly in the two works here that feature uilleann piper Mick O'Brien. The Cutting, intended to be Flynn’s String Quartet #4, has now become his Quintet #1 with the addition of the pipes. The IMO Quartet that accompanies O’Brien consists of four folk musicians who are also classically trained. So when Flynn subtitles the three movements with terms like "Cutting and Rolling," "Churning and Sliding," or "Lilting and Reeling," these are musicians who are at home with each of those traditional music techniques.
With the title Irish Minimalism, composer Dave Flynn has laid down a marker.
The Cutting is closely related to the other piece with uilleann pipes, Stories from the Old World. Here Flynn takes some of the unexpurgated tales of Peig Sayers – full of bawdy humour and all manner of bad (yet entertaining) behaviour – and sets them to music in a startling collision of Western art song with Irish storytelling, as Breanndán Begley glides easily between speech and song, all of it in the local Kerry Gaelic dialect.
The pipes do not appear in The Cranning, which is Flynn's String Quartet #2, but the title refers to a type of piping ornamentation, taken up by the strings in the work’s last movement. The Cranning is full of striking textures; right from the start, the strings offer a determined, thumping statement, followed immediately by a quizzical gesture that subverts what you’ve just heard and suggests that this will not be a well-behaved, genteel piece of chamber music.
Both The Cranning and the String Quartet #3, An Caoineadh/The Keening have been recorded here by the Contempo Quartet, and are more clearly in the classical style, although again, it’s impossible to miss the skirls and slides that signal the music’s Irish roots.
The last ten years have seen an explosion of music with what I can only describe as an Irish accent: the Irish-American chamber-folk ensemble The Gloaming, for example, or the sean nos-derived works of Donnacha Dennehy. But this recording, of works composed in the ten years prior to that, demonstrates that Dave Flynn’s music has been cutting and cranning and sliding and reeling, celebrating its Irish roots, well before such things became fashionable.
Irish Minimalism by Dave Flynn is out now - find out more here.
