O my deir hert, young Jesus sweit
Prepare thy creddil in my spreit
And I sall rock thee in my hert
And never mair from thee depart
From Balulalow, A Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten
There comes a point during the bustle and bling, the all-out assault of the December build up, when you may reflect, where did it go? That sense of pure wonder you once felt, way, way back, when the world drifted into silence, to a stillness which held something indescribable... breathless joy, centred in mystery.
Is that the feeling which they call the Divine? Or maybe you’d call it the Spirit - Higher Power, Buddha, Great Mother... heck, call it God, by all means. For the Revd. Dr. Anne-Marie O’Farrell, the title’s not an issue. "I’m referring a lot to the Divine," she explains during our chat, "because if you say God, people are like "Are you talking about the old guy with the big beard"? So the term 'the Divine’ is, I think, a little easier, because we will understand. People might find a way in a little more easily, under the word 'Divine'".
Anne-Marie O’Farrell is one of Ireland’s best-known figures in music. An artist with more strings to her harp than, well, a harp, she’s a widely acclaimed performer in both classical and Irish trad genres, and a leading practitioner of the lever and pedal harp. A noted academic, Anne-Marie recently took up the prestigious position of Head of Harp at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester; she speaks warmly of the enrichment that teaching brings to her life.
Balanced with all that is her career as an eminent Irish composer. Among O’Farrell’s works is a celebratory harp concerto written for RTÉ lyric fm’s 20th birthday; her accolades take in an array of prestigious awards and commissions, while her music is regularly performed by Irish and international orchestras, choirs and chamber groups. And she’s a priest. For the past fourteen years, Rev. Dr. Anne-Marie O’Farrell has served as a non-stipendiary Church of Ireland minister, at the Dublin parish of Sandford and St. Philip’s Milltown. Her new job in Britain draws a line under Anne-Marie’s Dublin tenure, but she hopes to pursue her priestly ministry, including in Manchester, under the auspices of the the Church of England.
I caught up with Anne-Marie, partly for her views on A Ceremony of Carols - composer Benjamin Britten’s transcendent Christmas work for children’s voices and harp, a distillation of antique purity - and mostly, to address this matter of the Divine, in her art and daily life. Eloquent and matter-of-fact, she brings it home that, for her, spirit and substance are intrinsically linked: the Divine doesn’t exist at some unapproachable remove, but it’s found in the wonder of tactile, everyday happenings.
Watch: Anne-Marie O'Farrell live from St Philip's Church, Milltown
"It’s just very symbiotic," O’Farrell says of her different vocations. "Each thing bounces off the other. I love to bring in aspects of my theological understanding, or maybe how I perceive aspects of the Divine - or our experience in trying to be in contact with it, or integrate it into our lives. I’m fascinated by how physical music is," she smiles. Now we’re in musicological territory, as Anne-Marie explains the magic of the harmonic series: "As an analogy, I use the colour white, which contains the presence of all other colours: and in music, the harmonic series, this single fundamental note, contains the presence of a series of other notes. And that, then, becomes the basis of how many instruments make their sound.#
"It was always there, what some people might call a vocation, a sense of wanting to do something with an element of devotion, an element of service".
"So," she continues, "that’s just given to us in physics, that just exists; and every single time I come to teach about that, I just get goose pimples about that: how do we get born into a world which has the harmonic series? I just think that’s one of the most incredible things."
This curiosity about the nuts-and-bolts of creation, a practical approach to pushing at boundaries, and inventing new methods, is another recurring feature in our conversation. 2022 saw the release of Anne-Marie O’Farrell’s latest recording, a selection of works for solo Irish harp. Titled Embrace, it was designed to extend the potential of the instrument.
"I think it’s capable of so much, and in some cases, of so much more, than what we often hear," she explains. In fact, in her pursuit of this goal, Anne-Marie got involved in the actual mechanics of harp design, prompting the eminent manufacturer Salvi Harps to redesign their lever harps according to her findings. Featuring works by Dowland and Bach, alongside Irish composers Kinsella, Trimble and O’Farrell herself, Embrace opens up new directions for harp repertoire, far beyond its usual comfort zone of the late romantic ‘Impressionist’ soundworld.
This same absorption in the mechanics of sound cropped up in another major project this year: O’Farrell’s Civil War Cantata, Who’d Ever Think It Would Come to This? Commissioned in association with UCD, and crafted from documents curated by UCD’s head archivist Kate Manning, this was a challenging project on many levels, starting with, how to represent musically one of the most traumatic periods in Ireland’s history.
"One of the things that struck me so forcibly about the material was how ordinary violence became." O’Farrell remembers. "It was just so ordinary that they were shooting people; and the other thing that I think strikes us in relation to the Civil War is that, people knew who they were killing. It wasn’t a different ethnic group, or people who’d come in from some other part of the world. It wasn’t the kind of obvious differences". Her intention, she says, was to represent the situations of the people caught in the conflict - to sidestep the politics of the pro- or anti-treaty sides.
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Listen via RTÉ lyric fm: Who'd ever think it would come to this? A Civil War Cantata
As for the tools required to convey this extraordinary drama, Anne-Marie describes the mechanics of her sound adventures. To portray the sound of shots firing, she discovered that a bungee, tied across the skin of a timpani, gives a violent, deep slap sound, one "very evocative of shooting". For other effects, like walking across gravel in a prison, large tubs were filled with different kinds of gravel, poked or stirred for different sounds, while a percussionist was set to walk around the auditorium, scraping sandblocks, to evoke a ticking clock of death. "There’s nothing like the time spent with an orchestra", she remarks, in relation to her sound experiments. "It’s one of the best investments, when people are dreaming up projects". She happily remembers working with the Contemporary Music Centre and National Symphony Orchestra’s Composer Lab, with practical tips gleaned from the musicians: "I’m certainly at ease with the orchestra as my instrument of choice, if you like, in composition".
"There are times when music can say something, when we might not be able to say the words."
With a subject like the Civil War, and its legacy of death and torment, wouldn’t that challenge her faith in humanity, in the Divine itself? No, Anne-Marie smiles. "There’s plenty of violence in the Bible!" she quips. Woven amidst the brutality of the Civil War narrative, she found stories of startling kindness and bravery. "Some amazing things," she says, "like the time some anti-Treatyites escape from prison, they come upon a house and Republican activist Frank O’Beirne says ‘I know you don’t agree with us, but could you just let us in to dry ourselves?’ And the response from the woman there is, "Ye who have escaped, you have the welcome of the world"".
Her own journey in faith and music began early: "I've always been interested in the God stuff!" she grins, and credits her parents for this openness to a Higher calling - in particular, her mother’s approach of healthy inquiry in relation to matters of faith. "My dad would go around Dublin looking or the shortest mass, and mam, she would go and hear so-and-so speak here, or so-and-so there, and she’d suss out the good sermons!"
Watch: Sir Festus Burke, played by Anne-Marie O'Farrell & Cormac De Barra
Unlike her brothers, Anne-Marie and her sister were denied the opportunity to sing in a cathedral choir - "It’s really great that cathedrals are at least on it now, finally, about girls’ choirs," she says. That aside, she enjoyed a rich music education, with a particular focus on singing from a young age, alongside a growing interest in spiritual life. "It was always there," she says, "what some people might call a vocation, a sense of wanting to do something with an element of devotion, an element of service".
Priesthood wasn’t (and isn’t) an option for a Roman Catholic woman, so Anne-Marie joined the Loreto Order as a nun, but soon she realised she was in the wrong place. "And so, over a period of many years, I ran away from God and religion," she says. "At that time the scandals in the Church were starting to come out. But gently, gently, the Divine started nudging me back". It was after starting a family with her husband Ray that Anne-Marie addressed the question of her vocation again, and found her answer in the Church of Ireland. A non-stipendiary ministry grants full ordination and practice, while allowing for the 'day job’ as part of one’s calling.
And there's an almost tangible sense of this connection as we chat, one between spirit, art and our mundane lives. "The sheer physical aspect, it’s what my Alexander Technique teacher Don Weed called 'The wonder of us’," Anne-Marie says. "These are all things where these different areas integrate into one another". She draws a connection between harp strings, made from cow intestines, and her own skin: "I like [my fingers] to be in a certain condition, with nice calluses formed for a good sound and comfortable playing." And there was a recent visit to the Bow Brand Harp Strings Factory in Norfolk: "… and they allowed me to handle the intestine. It sounds really gross! But for me it was very profound."
"This question of the wood of the instrument," she continues, "the material from a creature being stretched on wood; of course, it has a resonance of the Christian image, of what Jesus did in his death on the cross. So for me, there is some kind of resonance of those things, in relation to Jesus and the death he went through as a public demonstration of love."
It’s only towards the end of this wide-ranging conversation that we arrive at A Ceremony of Carols: a wintry pastoral of nine Middle English carol settings, crafted by Benjamin Britten at the height of World War II. Originally scored for children’s voices and harp, it sings of transcendent innocence, and the tender bond between mother and child. At the centre of the Ceremony is an Interlude for solo harp: it’s a piece which fascinates Anne-Marie, as musician and theologian. "Britten uses the plainchant Hodie Christus Natus Est/ Today Christ is Born - it’s used in harmonics, in these slightly sparkly right hand chords," she explains.
"He has them written in very irregular time lengths across the bar. Then, in the left hand you have this kind of… My personal interpretation of this is of footsteps. And the two ideas together, they grow and grow until the chords get absolutely huge, and you’re leaping from the bottom of the harp right up to the top - and it’s utterly glorious. Then later in glissandos, the two registers are joined together, and it’s as if the glory of the angels singing this news comes together with the footsteps."
Listen: A Winter's Prayer by Anne-Marie O'Farrell
She takes another example: "There’s this beautiful movement, There is no rose, with little Latin medieval carols. How does their theology speak to us now? Well, looking at these little Latin refrains, the first one is Res miranda/wonderful thing: the next one is Pares forma/equal in form. I mean, that’s mind blowing, that God and humans would be equal, that God took human form. Gaudeamus/we rejoice, Transeamus/We Travel On. You know? So, that’s putting it up to us."
A feature of Christmas Day is the inevitable pile-up for vigil or morning masses and services, swelled by those among us who’d rarely darken a church door the rest of the year. For Anne-Marie O’Farrell, your track record in attendance makes no difference. "For me, Christmas is getting my head around the notion that the Divine has come to earth, and it’s up to us to foster that continued interchange, or exchange," she says firmly. "And I think for a lot of people, they might have walked far away from religion, but there’s some aspect of wonder at Christmas, and that’s what they’re seeking out again".
So we end where we began, with the concept of wonder: one which Anne-Marie O’Farrell carries in her ongoing journey of art and of faith. "How do I describe music’s ability to express the spiritual or Divine?" she responds to my question. "I often find myself coming to the idea of wordlessness, for there are times when words are just - they’re amazing, and my beloved late husband Ray Comiskey was a wordsmith - but music is another genre, and there are times when the wordlessness can allow a space where things maybe can’t be said. There are times when music can say something, when we might not be able to say the words." She finishes, "I think to me, the wonder of the fact that music exists is something I find - I sound very naïve here, but it does fill me with awe, it really does."
Find out more about A Civil War Cantata: Who'd Ever Think it Would Come to This? here. Tune into to The Full Score with Liz Nolan on RTÉ lyric fm, every Mon-Thu from 1pm - 4pm - listen back here.
