Ceara Conway: Transcript
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Ceara Conway:
It's a beautiful, beautiful lament, and it was composed by Antoine Ó Raifteiri, the blind poet, quite renowned in Ireland, and actually is buried not very far from me, which is quite auspicious, I found .It was during Covid actually, that I realized that he was buried near me, and that was the time that I was doing a lot of preparatory work for the album as well. And I first heard my brother sing it and his way of singing it I found so beautiful. I actually borrowed his intonation. And for me as well, it was a learning curve for me in terms of singing out a song or actually being a little bit more quiet with it in terms of not performing it outwards, but really being with it and being with the feeling of it.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. Ceara Conway is an Irish contemporary vocalist and visual artist, and this episode features music from her beautiful album CAOIN, as well as excerpts from some of her other contemporary art projects. I find Ceara's curiosity about so many important topics around arts and culture really inspiring. And this conversation circled around to her explorations of different languages and cultures as well as her rootedness as an Irish speaker. She's had many interesting commissions where she uses traditional and contemporary song performance and visual art to explore social issues such as the ecological crisis, migration, and feminist concerns. She also spoke to me about some of her roles working with the Clare Arts office, with artists with disabilities, and how she started her career as a glassblower in Rome and how her upbringing has helped her navigate the world as a freelance artist. This podcast is available wherever you listen to podcasts, as well as a video on my YouTube. Everything is linked on my website, leahroseman.com, where you can explore past episodes and support the show through my Ko-fi page linked in the description.
Ceara, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Ceara Conway:
I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Leah Roseman:
I was just telling you before we started recording that a pretty high percentage of the podcast listeners actually live in Ireland because my episode with Martin Hayes was very popular.
Ceara Conway:
Great. Do you know what regions? Yeah, my neighbors, many neighbors would be listening,
Leah Roseman:
But many people of course all over the world listen and don't know anything about Irish language or culture. So perhaps we'll touch on some of that.
Ceara Conway:
Okay, lovely.
Leah Roseman:
I thought it'd be nice to start with your life as a singer, because of course you do so much as an artist and I want to go into different aspects, but your beautiful album, I believe it's pronounced "queen" (CAOIN)
Ceara Conway:
CAOIN, that's correct, yes,
Leah Roseman:
Yes. Incredible laments. Can you speak to that album? I know when you started to think it through, it wasn't how it ended up.
Ceara Conway:
No. Took a long journey to get to CAOIN because primarily I started out as a visual artist, and then over the years I had a public art practice and I still do in a socially engaged practice using a lot of visual art and sculpture, but around 14 years ago or so, I learned I could sing, so singing wasn't something that I knew I could do growing up. I come from Connemara in the Gaeltacht, west coast of Ireland outside Galway, and it's a Gaelic Gaeltacht speaking region, and I grew up speaking Irish. My mother is from Carraroe, my father's from Wicklow. But singing wasn't something that we did in our family, and if anything, I kind of grew up knowing Sarah Grealish and Nan Grealish and Nan Tam Tamin and being aware of their Sean-nós tradition, and coming from Carraroe, you would've known that certain families had this tradition in their family, whereas I would never have considered myself to have had that.
It came to me much later, I was actually working in Rome as a glassblower, and my friend and my flatmate in Rome one day said to me, do you realize you have a beautiful voice? Have you any idea how beautiful it is? And I was like, oh, go away with yourself. But she kept at me in terms of believing her and at social occaisions in Rome, she would always encourage me to sing a song, and that was really the beginning for me, discovering that I had a voice and I always had an interest in world music, and for me, it made natural sense. Research is a huge part of my practice, so it made natural sense to start researching Sean-nós and the tradition of Sean-nós, and I started singing it then. So it's not something I grew up with and people are always surprised at that they think that I grew up singing in the Oireachtas and all the national competitions.
But no, it was new for me, but once I took to it, it felt like I had always been doing it. It felt very natural to me. So a lot of the projects that I had been working on, once I realized I could sing kind of centered on the theme of loss. The first project that I did using my voice was commissioned by CREATE and funded by the Arts Council and that was in 2013. And I was working with a group of asylum seekers for two years, and we were working together to kind of look at, well, what themes or what issues did they want to explore in this project? And they wanted to look at grief, the theme of grief, the grief of having left their countries, their families not being able to return, and also the grief that they were experiencing living within the direct provision in Ireland.
So in 2013, that was a system that wasn't spoken about a lot. It's a lot more visible now, but then it wasn't. So they were cut off from the community within Ireland. They weren't allowed to work, they weren't allowed to engage with education very much isolated. And for them that was an added grief, another trauma having had to leave their own place. So I did a lot of research on the practice of lament and also on the traditional role of the bean coineadh. So the bean coineadh, the lamenting woman or the keening woman within the Irish tradition, she had several roles. One was to perform and host the kind of keening ceremony for the deceased, where they would be eulogized, sometimes often criticized as well, which is interesting in our day and age when we eulogize somebody at their funeral, we have nothing but good things to say.
But in the Irish tradition, it was also used as an opportunity to maybe name things that they had done that weren't great, which is fascinating. I find that fascinating. And Dr. Angela De Bourke talks about that a lot as well. She's done a lot of research on the keening practices and the role of the bean caointe. It wasn't singing then it was the use of recitation and rhythm and text where she would've known a certain amount, how do I say? There would've been a motif. So there would've been a certain motif to performing lament, for example, the lineage of the person where they came from certain attributes, both positives and negatives, things that they had done or achieved, and she might then have improvised a little as well. So it was unique, but there were similar things in each lament that was performed, and she was paid often through whiskey or sugar or flour.
They wouldn't have had money to change hands in those times. So I used that tradition. I drew upon it within a contemporary context. So I devised a series of public lamentations where the beginning or the intro to that performance was calling on the community to realize that they were complicit in what was happening for these individuals living within the direct provision. And then a number of laments were composed and performed, and also some testimonies were performed as that as well. So it was almost like a theatrical stroke music, but very politically driven type of performance. And that was the first of its kind that I had ever done in my own arts practice. But I found it so powerful and so engaging on various levels that it propelled me into working in that way since I've been working that way over the last 15, 16 years.
So a lot of my projects focus on how we experience and express loss as communities and individuals in response to issues like the environmental crisis or how we experience death and dying today in these days, what are our rituals and traditions or even losses in response to illnesses or the loss of language. So there's many losses as there are so many losses that we can speak to, but I use music and I use visual art to respond to these questions. So what happened was over the years, I had a number of laments that were growing nearly a body of lament that had been used in these projects. And at the same time, I was being invited to perform for what I would call traditional events on stage, which was very new for me. I had only ever performed in galleries or site-specific works. When I say site specific, like in one project, we performed a series of events up to our necks and water in the sea, or I might perform in a hospital.
So I'm very interested in site specific works. So for me, the stage was a new context, very, very different because you can't frame the work in the same way. But I wanted to was the first time in my life that I had thought, okay, it's time for an album. It's time to bring these laments together. And what changed for me, I suppose, was that I had set out to do an album of global lamentations because I sing in a variety of languages, but as we worked on the pieces, it was the Irish ones that seemed to have a body of their own. It was almost like they needed to be on their own. And then the next step maybe would be to introduce the global ones. So that's how CAOIN came about, and it was funded through Creative Ireland. And then I was very blessed. I got further funding to tour it nationally. We performed it in the National Concert Hall and all over Ireland. And it was an amazing experience for me in a variety of ways. Quite often as a visual contemporary artist, you'll get funding to present a performance and it'll be a once off, whereas to do a tour, I had the experience of what it meant to reflect night after night and to hone my craft as a singer. And it's a completely different craft, but they add to each other. They definitely add to each other. Yeah. Sorry, I went off on a mad tangent there.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. This will be a wonderful place to share a track from your album. And you had sent me a couple. One of them was about the boating accident, and I hesitate to pronounce any of the Irish.
Ceara Conway:
Oh, Anach Cuain is it? Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So can you tell a little bit of the story for people that don't understand Irish? Yeah.
Ceara Conway:
Anach Cuain is a beautiful, beautiful lament, and it was composed by Antoine Ó Raifteiri the blind poet, quite renowned in Ireland, and actually is buried not very far from me, which is quite auspicious. I found it was during Covid actually, that I realized that he was buried near me, and that was the time that I was doing a lot of preparatory work for the album as well. And I first heard my brother sing it and his way of singing it I found so beautiful. I actually borrowed his intonation. And for me as well, it was a learning curve for me in terms of singing out a song or actually being a little bit more quiet with it in terms of not performing it outwards, but really being with it and being with the feeling of it. And it's based on a true story of a lot of men, women, and children who were on a boat and the boat capsized on a still day, they say that it happened because a sheep or an animal put its foot through the boat that the actual making of the boat was weak, but it was a huge tragedy.
And during performances, I often bring it up and talk to the audiences about how many years ago they had no means of recording what sound was like, what through songs and stories and historical narratives, through how people described sound, we can maybe get a sense of the sounds people made or what the landscape sounded like. And within the song, there are quite a number of descriptions around how people expressed their grief. So people were tearing at their hair and the grief was shared. So I do very much so believe, and it still happens in certain tribes and cultures today, maybe more in African countries or Arabic countries where the expressions of grief are more collective and they are more physical and probably more outward orally in terms of groups of women coming together and lamenting together collectively, which is quite powerful in itself
(music) Ma fhaighimse sláinte is fada a bheas trocht aran mhéid a báthadh as Anach Cuan.Mo thrua amhrach gach athair is mathairbean is páiste atá ag síleadh síl.A RÌ na nGrásta, a cheap neamh is Páthas,nár bheag an bhacht d™inn beirt nó triúr?Ach chomh breá leis gan gaoth gan bí isteachis lán an bháid acu a scuabadh ar shiúil. Nár mhór an t-íonadh os comhair na ndaoinea bhfeiscint sínte ar chúl a gcinn?Screadadh is caoineadh a scanradh daoine,gruaig cíoradh is an chreach roinn.Bhí buachaillí óga ann, tiocht an fhómhair,Síneadh ar chróchar is tabhairt go cill.Is gurbh é gléas a pósta a bhí turramhIs, a Dhia na Glóire, nór mhór an feall? Loscadh sléibhte agus scalladh cléibhear an áit ar Éagadur is milleán crua,mar is iomaí críatúr a d'fhág sé ag géar-ghol,ag sileadh is ag Éagaoin gach maidin Luain.Ní diabháil eolais a chuir i dtreoir iadach mí-ádh mór a bhí sa gCaisleán Nua.Is é críochnú an amhráin gur báthadh móránis d'fhág ábhar dól is ag Anach Cuan
Leah Roseman:
I am embarrassed to say I've looked it up at one point, but I forget what does Sean-nós actually mean?
Ceara Conway:
It just means the old way. So sean means old and nos means way, and yeah, it's a form of acapella singing unaccompanied and would've been sung traditionally in Ireland in Irish.
Leah Roseman:
It's such a powerful album, and I had actually listened to it several times before I found out what it was about, but I felt the sadness and it was interesting not knowing the words or what any of the title, I hadn't looked anything up.
Ceara Conway:
Interesting.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Yes. It's so beautiful. And I wanted to ask you, so you arranged with Sean
Ceara Conway:
MacErlaine? That's correct. Yeah, Sean is amazing. I've never worked with him before. I was aware of his work already. His background is in jazz and in improvisation and just the caliber of his work and also his sensitivity, what really drew me to him was nearly his minimal approach in terms of arranging. I personally don't think shadows works if it's overly arranged, it needs space because it's so melodic and ornamented already that I find that, I mean, I could be proved wrong, but if too much is done with it, it gets in the way of the song I feel. And Sean was very, very sensitive to that. And I also worked with Kevin Murphy on cello. He's unbelievable cello player, and also Ultan O'Brien on violin, viola. And we had Francesco Turrisi playing on piano well, the inside of a piano, which was amazing for the track called An Caoineadh, which was one of my favorite laments, decided he didn't want to play the piano.
He stood up and he opened the piano itself and started playing the inside of it. And it was exquisite what he did, very sensitive. And Sean also added the clarinet and very minimal use of synth and electronic music as well. But I enjoyed the process because it was my first album. I was probably too precious. And I've yet to meet a musician who has made an album who doesn't say the same thing. When you've done your first one, you look back and you think, okay, next time I'll loosen up a little bit more because you wanted to be perfect. And sometimes it needs a little bit more room to breathe, the needs a little bit more room to breathe, but that's a learning curve for any artist.
Leah Roseman:
I knew that you sung in different languages, but I haven't heard that. Which languages have you sung in
Ceara Conway:
Arabic, Latin, Georgian, Portuguese, Fado. And basically I can sing nearly any language I put my ear to for some interesting reason. I have an ear for sound, and if I listen to a song long enough, which is a lovely meditation in itself because it entails listening and listening and down to the most minute sound and mimicking it. And not just mimicking it, but getting into the feeling of it. So it's a beautiful exercise in itself, and I'm very interested in how perhaps you can embody physically another culture through singing. So I mightn't obviously understand everything. I'll have a translation, but yeah, I love singing songs in other languages. It's definitely a huge grow of mine. And actually, sometimes in performances, people get confused. They don't know which is the Irish or which is another language, because I usually sing traditional folk songs from other cultures, and there's huge similarity between African and Portuguese sometimes, and even Georgian. I've had people say, that was a great Irish song, and it's an African song actually, I recorded Djorolen by Oumou Sangaré, and I sent it to her and through a musician called Cheick Hamala Diabate, he came to Connemara recently, and I had the opportunity to be invited to explore sean nos and African music with him, and he knows Oumou quite well, and he sent it to her and she was like, she thinks it's amazing. I was like, so I was delighted. That was the biggest thumbs up for me.
Leah Roseman:
I'm not familiar with her.
Ceara Conway:
So Oumou Sangaré she would be considered of the Wassoulou singers, from Mali. She's done a lot of work with - Oh, what's his name? The famous banjo player. He produced that film called Throw Down Your Heart, Béla Fleck. Yeah, she would've performed a lot with him, but in her own night, she's a very renowned world music singer. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
Béla Fleck came to Ottawa with that after I had seen Throw Down Your Heart, that's an amazing film. And then he actually came here with these musicians
Ceara Conway:
Wow.
Leah Roseman:
A number of years, years ago. That was incredible.
Ceara Conway:
I would love to go to that region specifically because the women still hold the women performers and singers still hold that position of being the voice for others who don't have a voice or speaking out to political situations and things like that. So they still see their role as being intertwined with the social responsibility very much so, which I really kind of admire and find very powerful.
Leah Roseman:
Now, it sounded in my research that you had a very free childhood creatively. Your parents were, your mom was an artist. You grew up by the sea.
Ceara Conway:
Yes. I know it sounds idyllic. It was, but when I think of it, so Connemara where I'm from in Carraroe, it's called An Cheathrú Rua, which means the red quarter because the land has quite a reddish hu to it. And we were surrounded by beaches. My father had a shop and my mother worked in the post office, and I think given in a different time and culture, they might've had creative careers, but the opportunities were not as I was going to say. They weren't as available then. But my mother did apply for and was offered a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Art when she was 17, but her parents didn't let her go. So she still often wonders what her life might've been like had she been allowed to do that. But I grew up around her tools. I would often steal them, but she was creative in everything that she touched her hands to, whether it was making salads or painting walls or painting in general.
She is a great watercolorist. And my father then was great with people in terms of communication, a great conversationalist, interested in everything and could talk to anybody no matter what area of life they came from. And that definitely came through his work in the shop. I think a lot of people came to the shop because they just love talking to him. And I think I drew upon those two aspects from both my parents and also the etiquette of business, being business-minded. I definitely think I've been able to survive as an artist because I grew up with two parents who were more or less, self-employed, and understanding the economics and also the logistics and the practicalities of being an artist. Not every artist has that, and sometimes unfortunately, artists who don't have it, who are brilliant don't have an opportunity to flourish as much. Yeah. So I was lucky that I grew up with that.
Leah Roseman:
Sorry, where do I want to go with this?
Ceara Conway:
The landscape probably. Well, yeah, having grown up in Connemara.
Leah Roseman:
Sure, if you want to speak to that.
Ceara Conway:
I definitely think contemporary art was not something that surrounded me in Connemara. Edward Delaney, actually, well, actually sometimes it doesn't take that much, but Edward Delaney was a contemporary sculptor and he lived in Carraroe, and again, we would've played on a tiny beach that was near his house, and it would've been okay for me, and I did it many times. I'd wander up and wander through his workshop. So his son actually has written a book and has said that it's like a scene from a Gabrielle Garcia Marquez book, this thing where a sculptor in a tiny rural village in Ireland is making these elaborate abstract sculptures that all of the locals don't understand, but somebody in India or New York does. So that was interesting to have those people in the community with whom I could probably identify with, even in secondary school, because abstract art was something that I was hugely interested in secondary school then, and I always knew I wanted to be an artist. And I suppose the first time I went to art college, I realized I wasn't that brilliant at drawing or painting. It took me a while to find my mediums. And contemporary art, I suppose, isn't as new or as old, sorry, as the traditional practices of storytelling and music in Ireland, which have been happening since the beginning of culture here. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Hi. Just a short break from the episode, which I hope you're enjoying so far. If you want to check out over a hundred episodes you may have missed in addition to your podcast player or YouTube, I have an extensive website, leahroseman.com with show notes, transcripts, the complete catalog of episodes, and you can sign up there for my weekly newsletter to get access to sneak peaks of upcoming guests. Please do share your favorite episodes with your friends, follow me on social media and share my posts. And if you can spare a few dollars to help support the series, that would be amazing. And you can find that link in the show notes. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Now, back to the episode.
So you studied glassblowing in Scotland. What was that experience like?
Ceara Conway:
So I studied fine art first, and then I learned there that I was much more an artist to preferred making things with their hands and in a collaborative way. So when I left college in Galway, I did an apprenticeship in a stained glass studio because I loved color, and I kind of made not a logical move, but somehow an organic move into stained glass thinking this was a great way to explore color and also through architecture in terms of scale. I was very excited by that and the fact that an opportunity to engage with the public. So when you're working in glass, it's quite work related to a degree, if that makes sense. Like the artist in the studio, to a degree has an isolated practice where I prefer practices that bring me in contact with the world. And from that apprenticeship, I realized I missed making sculptural work, and I decided to return to college in Scotland where I studied glass.
So I studied sculptural glass and glassblowing and stained glass there. And I have an adventurous spirit that then took me to Rome. I had a friend who, it was from Italy, she had a grant to set up a studio, and she didn't want to do it on her own. And I had finished college in Edinburgh, and I didn't know what to do next. So she was like, come over and help me set up the studio. So I did, and I wasn't the best glassblower, but we had fun and I loved collaborating with people. I enjoyed working with her. And actually when I was over there, I decided to apply for some exhibitions in Rome. That was the first time I had a solo exhibition with more contemporary work, was in Campo di Fiori in Rome. I actually challenged myself because at a point over there, at a point over there, I thought, what am I doing over here? And I'm not an amazing glass blower. And I was like, okay, you can't leave until you've achieved something. So I set that challenge for myself to have my first exhibition over there, and then I decided it was time to come back. And I reentered Ireland by applying to do a public art master's in Dublin in NCAD, and again, then moved into public art sculptures, which was another string. Another string to play.
Leah Roseman:
And you brought the singing back with you as well?
Ceara Conway:
I did. I brought the very beginning seeds of singing. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because even now when I meet people and they say, oh, I can't sing, but I'd love to, I'm like, honestly, go for it. Because it builds over time and it does take time. When I moved back, I met a man called Matthew Noone. He was a classical sarod player, and he set up an Indian fusion band and invited me to sing in his band. So I ended up singing ragas and shadows with Indian classical music, and it was my first time being in a band of any kind, great fun. I wasn't always very confident. I was still finding my voice and finding my performance self. But that was the beginning. That was the beginning of singing out loud in front of people. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, that's wonderful. Actually, tomorrow I have an interview with a sitar player who does a lot of interesting collaborations and
Ceara Conway:
Brilliant.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's interesting because they have this improvisatory tradition that can be a lot of different explorations with different cultures,
Ceara Conway:
And I love how they perform are composed depending on the time of day and all of these nuances. It's really, really interesting. I love intricate time patterns as well. They interest me, they interest my brain. I don't perform with Matthew anymore, but he's a dear friend and he now coordinates the world music course for the Irish World Academy in ul. He's always at me to go and do a PhD. Someday I might.
Leah Roseman:
Well, you'd mentioned your research and your love of reading. Are there books about creativity or culture or music or any of these topics that you could recommend to us? Oh,
Ceara Conway:
Stop. It's a hard question because my walls are lined with books I'm reading at the moment. It's in front of me by coincidence. It's called This Woman's Work by Sinead Gleeson. It's very, very good. I literally just got right now, oh, this one. This arrived in the post today, the Spirit of Intimacy, Ancient African Teachings, which I love. Oh yeah. And also I'm reading this, which seems to be everybody's go-to at the moment, Rick Rubin, the Creative Way. So Rick Rubin is a music producer, but doesn't have any technical ability, but is a lot of wisdom around process in terms of opening yourself open to process. But my research, for example, I'm very interested in - apologies now, I'm jumping all over the place. I'm interested in everything. So I'm raising this at the moment, Crowds and Power, and I'm fascinated by the choreography of crowds in terms of performance, in terms of the cavalcade, in terms of the audience, I've just opened this now, and coincidentally it's called the Lamenting Pack.
Again, looking at how people physically come together when they lament. He's talked about how in some cultures when the bereaved would fall down in their grief, that other people would jump on top of them nearly as a protective barrier, that they would hold them physically, which is really fascinating. I'm also reading Rachel Carson Silent Spring because I'm looking at the moment of composing a number of, I did a commission for a hospital recently, and I was looking at medicinal plants that are becoming extinct. And because they're becoming extinct, it means certain medicines won't be available. So the loss of that, so something as broad as Rachel Carson looking at the environmental crisis will inspire a song.
Leah Roseman:
That project, is it Veriditas.
Ceara Conway:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
So actually there's a clip from that that we'll be able to share - the idea of the noise in the hospital, which is quite disturbing.
Ceara Conway:
I met a senior engineer called Frank Curran, that was part of my research for the commission was I was invited to engage with the community of the hospital, and that meant everybody from the pastoral worker to palliative care workers, nurses, doctors, patients. I spoke to nearly 30 people. And then outside of the hospital, I met with sound healers, herbalist, lots of different, lots of different practitioners who engage with healing through sound. So I was looking at traditional medicine and also current medicine practices. But Frank had written a thesis and was doing current research on how sound adversely affects healing within hospitals. So his work is showing how at certain times in the hospital, the cleaners will start activating Hoovers mops, opening bins, and he can show through his research that at that band that time the healing, sorry, capacity of patient lowers because the body starts paying attention to sound instead of the body.
So it's using its energy to, I suppose, cope with the adverse stress feelings of sound. So all of that energy is being used on that instead of on the illness. So I found that fascinating, and I composed a piece of music around that, the track or the song that I composed called Veriditas, that was inspired by Hildegard von Bingen, who was really well known, abbess from the medieval times, who ran a nunnery, but also was very prolific in composing chants and also her writings. And she had a huge interest in the power of plants, and she actually coined the term Viriditas, which means the greening power. And so I just took that word in that song, Viriditas, and then the Latin words, potentia verde, the potential of green. For me, this was an exploratory phase around composing contemporary work where you might just take one or two words and explore melodies and see a bit like Meredith Monk. I really love Meredith Monk's work.
Leah Roseman:
This is a short excerpt from Viriditas (music)
I was just thinking maybe the way we evolved in a very quiet environment, that loud sounds meant danger generally so that our stress hormones.
Ceara Conway:
Absolutely. And when you're delicate and vulnerable and very raw when you're sick - God, one thing I can never understand is waiting rooms and doctor's offices with loud radios. The amount of times I've sat in a waiting room going when you're ill and there's a loud radio show on, and I'm like, does anybody realize that when you're sick, the last thing you can cope with is loud noise. I think you're extra sensitive to it when you're ill. Yeah, for sure. And then another piece that I composed was Plant Chant. And in each verse of Plant chant, I took a plant and I eulogize the medicinal qualities of that plant in the verse through Irish.
Leah Roseman:
This is Plant Chant from the album Viriditas. This plant eulogy poem is composed by Ceara Conway, and I'll link the Irish to the show notes on my website. (music)
Ceara Conway:
Beatha nua, lus mhaighdine mhuire Realtaí buí na talún, le sú fuil dhearg A leigheasann an dúlagar s an brón is doimhne Beatha Nua s’ Lus CholmcilleRí na luibheanna, Féirin SíAn mhéar diabhal a dhoirtíonn an chroíLus mór ,méaracán síLus cré, lús na mbán síLe súile glé gormaIs tú banríon luibheannaLus na mbanaltra, lusán na néanLus míonla, mo chara mílis dílO neantóg, cul faiche, folláin s ‘tanaí,Bí cinnte iad a ithe trí huaire sa laeBeatú s’ Ionú, glas s’ gruagachSeanóir, neantóg agus traonachMallacht Adamnán, ruin an laeBearnán Bríde, clog na gaoitheLeigheas uisciúl, fíon na greine,grá dom, grá dom nachBearnán, Beárnach
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. Thanks. I did want to talk a little bit about, you had an administrative job for many years with the Clare Arts Office, and you were involved with this program Embrace with Arts and Disabilities.
Ceara Conway:
Yeah, I actually just finished that post last week. I worked in the Clare Arts office as their coordinator for their arts and disability program called Embrace, and also the coordinator for the Arts and Schools program. I had huge, huge, an interest in both programs, but definitely probably slightly more in the arts and disability because there's so much to evolve in that area and to push and challenge. And in terms of the opportunities that we offer to artists with disabilities, the context in which we create for their work to be shown in terms of equity with other professional artists, and also supporting them so that they can apply for funding the same ways as anybody who might have more abilities in that area to make it far more equitable competitively. So one of the roles that I had was to support professional artists to facilitate workshops in daycare centers.
So that we did a lot of that in the beginning. We worked with over 300 participants and 30 different organizations in county Clare, and they have partnered the program for the last 18 years. I've only been there the last seven. But one thing that I did in my position was I tailored the award system a little bit more so that, for example, an artist who might not attend a daycare center but who had a professional practice could also apply for an award, or if somebody within the group, if the coordinator could identify that one or two or three people had skills and they could see that there was an interest beyond the hobby, that this individual wanted to progress a little bit further, perhaps with more one-to-one tuition that we created an award for that to happen. So kind of teasing out a little bit more the variety of interest, the variety of skill and ambition, and trying to meet all those very kind of nuanced needs within the program.
And every year we had an exhibition in Glor. It's a theater and an exhibition space in county Clare, a beautiful space. So that was an annual exhibition where participants could show their work and perform as well. It was across all art forms. And also we just recently commissioned a research piece mapping arts and disability practices in the West between Galway, Mayo and Clare. And that was an eyeopener to a degree. Sometimes when you commission reports, you know what needs to be done, but it's great to have it in detail. So there's still a lot to be done to be done in terms of access, in terms of how do you reach individuals who don't attend state governed daycare centers who might have more isolatery practices and who don't have the, how do I say it, the art world experience of checking certain websites for funding opportunities and things like that. And also, again, that thing of in the absence of diplomas or master programs that can support an individual with disability, how else can somebody enter these training opportunities like everybody else? Only recently the first person, the first artist in Ireland received an honorary diploma for his life's work as a visual artist from a university. That was the first time that ever happened, and I think we need more of that. Absolutely.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. Yeah, this topics come up in different ways with a few guests I've spoken with in Australia and Canada, and I'm always interested those were more, not just music specific, but a little more music specific.
Ceara Conway:
Yeah. Actually one project I can mention that we commissioned was, it was through the invitation to collaboration scheme with the Arts Council, and we approached the Irish Memory Orchestra. You might've heard of them, the director and the composers, Dave Flynn. So the Irish Memory Orchestra are unique. They used to be, actually, they're not called the Irish Memory Orchestra, they're just called the Memory Orchestra now. But they're unique in that they don't use sheet music, and they're a fully fledged orchestra in Ireland. And so we worked with a number of visually impaired professional musicians who don't have the opportunity to perform with an orchestra because they can't read the sheet music. So this project specifically brought the methods of the Memory Orchestra together with the visually impaired musicians to compose a new piece of work around the theme of vision. And they performed the premier of it in county Clare.
So it was, and we was very kind of, I suppose we had to really think outside the box in terms of how they learned the music. So there was a lot of preparatory work done in terms of braille music, in terms of the sheet music. Also, all of the orchestral pieces were recorded to midi and recorded in audio format, and we set up a specific website where the musicians could access all of that material. So we learned a lot from that. And as far as I'm aware, it's still continuing that that opportunity is still open and they're building on that.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. That's really great. Yeah, I had not heard of the Memory orchestra. There's a couple of really amazing pianists who had performed with my orchestra in the past year who were blind. Okay, interesting. Completely, not just visually impaired. So it's always very interesting to think about that.
If we could go back to CAOIN. So there's another one. There was a lullaby about the fairies and childhood mortality. And again, I cannot pronounce the title
Ceara Conway:
Seoithín Seothó. It's one of my favorite songs. I love it. And quite often audience members cry when they hear this. And I think my dreaming into it is, it's a tender song. There's something very beautiful in the melody, and I love singing it. I sang it for my sister's christening for her first daughter, and I was quite moved by it as well, because you're wishing blessings for the child and a presence of love (Irish) , that'll be by your side. Even now I get emotional. There's something beautiful about just imagining into, I'll be by your side praying for your blessings. And in terms of, I suppose the context of the lament, for me, it's not a lament, but during the famine times, the motif of fairies coming to take your child away was used as a symbol for death. So if the fairies came and took your child away, quite often that was around, sorry, what's the terminology? When a child dies in they're asleep. Is it caught death?
Leah Roseman:
Well, sudden infant death syndrome.
Ceara Conway:
That's it. Yes. And also from starvation. So that kind of use of the fairies taking children away was used a lot during the famine times. And it's an ancient thing, and we still do it. We create stories in order to make sense of the world. And also, I think to create a barrier of protection. It might be hugely difficult to sing about your child dying of starvation. So it's maybe a form of self-protection or a way of creating an art that helps you cope with it, that you say your child was taken by the fairies. In the same way that we say the angels take our loved ones away. For me, there's no difference.
Leah Roseman:
I'll link the Irish lyrics to the song and the English translation in the show notes on my website. Yeah, I remember many years ago talking to somebody about, I forget which community it was, but where they practiced infanticide because of these starvation. There was just too many children, and they had rituals around it that were
Ceara Conway:
Very, do you know what culture that was?
Leah Roseman:
I don't remember.
Ceara Conway:
Let me know if you can think of, it sounds really interesting.
Leah Roseman:
You had mentioned singing in Georgian and Arabic. You haven't traveled to all these places. Surely
Ceara Conway:
Not all these places. I've traveled a lot. I did go to Georgia specifically for that. So the Georgian singing, when I was doing research for the hospital project, I was looking at Georgian healing songs, and I applied for funding to go to Georgia to learn these songs from an ensemble called Ensemble Ialoni They're one of the forefront ensemble singers of traditional folk Georgian folk songs. They're exquisite singers, like unbelievable. Yeah. I spent two weeks over there living with Nino. She's the director of the ensemble, and she teaches in a conservator. And we sang together every day, and it was just gorgeous and a long lasting friendship has arisen from that. And during Covid, actually, I attended numerous Georgian singing workshops with her every week. That was something that I did to get through Covid, singing Georgian songs with everybody online. I love the Georgian practice of singing together, the harmonic practice.
It's interesting, when I learned I could sing, I was very much not interested in choirs. I think there was something there around, I've just discovered this and I want to be heard. And now that I've done that and probably grown a little bit more myself relationally and also in my practice now, I'm really loving the what choral ensembles can offer to a performance. I did a choral conducting course in UL during the summer, and it blew my heart open to sing every day with over 50 people. There wasn't a day where I don't think any of us weren't moved. There's just something very special about people singing together and what you can do vocally with a group of people as opposed to a solo voice as astonishing. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
A couple of previous guests I've had on part of their work has been working with community choirs, Kavisha Mazzella in Australia and Polina Shepherd in England, and non auditioned choirs or people's different abilities. And it's something, I'm a violinist and I play in ensembles, but I've never sung an choir. I've just never had that opportunity. It just seems great.
Ceara Conway:
Oh, it's beautiful. Yeah. I mean, I can't sight read. I'm trying to learn at the moment. So thankfully they had different levels. I was very level one, but we had the opportunity to observe level five, and they were at the top of their game. And when you really got to see the synthesis between an excellent conductor and obviously singers who could read sight music very well, you could see the symbiosis. You could see how it became an entity in itself. Yeah, it was very interesting to me also the choreography of conducting the dance. Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. I have a lot of learning to do. I want to learn how to sight read music. I think it's a superpower to be able to look at a sheet and just sing off it. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Well, you read all those books, you'll be able to get
Ceara Conway:
Yes. Be able to get it. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Before we leave Georgia, I know their script is so beautiful. I don't know, is that language part of the Indo-European language family?
Ceara Conway:
Yeah, I don't know. I do know they're considered a European country, but when I look at it, what's that word? I dunno why the word cyrillic is coming into my mind. I think it's not
Leah Roseman:
It's not cyrillic that they use
Ceara Conway:
There. No, it's not. No, no. I dunno what it is. No, no idea. But it's stunning to look at It nearly looks Arabic.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, you know what I mean. Finnish is not a Indo-European language. Hungarian is not, it's not every European country is part of that, but Irish is.
Ceara Conway:
Irish is,
Leah Roseman:
Yes. But it's a further cousin.
Ceara Conway:
Yeah, it's Euro Asian. Definitely. And that's what makes our culture so interesting is that in some level it's European and other levels, it's completely not. They had such a connection with the Silk Road and Yeah. Yeah. No, I found it fascinating over there. And also their history with Russia. Do you know in terms of trying to preserve their culture and their singing? Yeah, similar to the Irish I suppose as well, or any culture where another entity tried to colonize them.
Leah Roseman:
Let's talk about again, the pronunciation. Is it Dochas?
Ceara Conway:
Dochas? Yes. Dochas means hope. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
The water ensemble and all of that. That's
Ceara Conway:
It. Yeah. So I can't remember what year it was, but I was invited by Waterways, Ireland and Oireachtas na Gaelige to create a piece of work in response to a particular story. So myself and another artist were invited to create work in response to it. So the story was, and it's a true story of several fishermen from Carna, a tiny village in Connemara were given money by a company called Gael Linn. They produce albums of Irish music, but in the 1950s, they also supported of a lot of socioeconomic enterprises in the areas because they were experiencing a lot of, I suppose a lot of job losses, economic loss for a variety of reasons. But at the time, these fishermen were competing with the big trawlers. So they were given money to buy bigger boats and they left their village and they had to go up north to collect these boats, and they brought them back down through the waterways.
But what interested me most was that these men have never left their villages before, ever. So for them it was nearly like I likened it to the universal journey like Joseph Campbell or the Odyssey, where the individual sets out on a life-changing journey and they face trials and tribulations and they return. So it's kind of like a universal psychological journey that we all take. Sometimes it means leaving home and sometimes you don't have to. So I decided to follow their journey, these different places that they would've gone through, including the canals going through Naas and where they started their journey, obviously, which was in Carna. And they also went through the Ardnacrusha Lough, which was the Hydroelectrical Dam that was built in Shannon Ardnacrusha which was a massive, massive, massive enterprise in terms of architecture. It was a huge engineering feat for its time.
So I decided I would perform in each of these places and make a vocal kind of video performance. So in one of the videos I am singing or on the wall, which is la, but I'm in the boat as the dam is lowering. So you see my background changing as I'm going down and the performance kind of gestures that I take, I was exploring gestures that might've been used traditionally. So in traditional times when somebody sang sean nós, they would've covered their faces with their hands or they would've turned their backs and sang into the corner of the room. And people have different reasons or rationales for this. Some say that it was because of shyness, some say it was to that the emphasis wasn't on performing outward, it was bringing the person behind and letting the song come out further. But I was exploring it in more of a contemporary performative gesture.
And when I look at that video now, I think it looks quite amphibian. I look almost fish like, which fits with the dam. And then I decided as well, sometimes for me with each project, I think, okay, what can I try here that I've never done before that I'm interested in? I had never composed for an ensemble. So I formed the water ensemble with a group of singing students from the Irish World Academy. And for one of the pieces, I created kind of three movements, just using the two words and hope and composed three different melodies for that piece. So it was brilliant. And I hope now in work this year that I'm going to compose for more ensembles. I haven't done so since.
Leah Roseman:
This is a short excerpt from Dochas (Music) .
So you'd mentioned these workshops, learning Georgian chant. I know more recently you had Hanna Tuulikki taught you to do some bird sounds.
Ceara Conway:
Yes, yes, yes. That was great crack. I can't say I mastered it in one day. We certainly laughed a lot. But I'm fascinated by her practice. She has a longstanding practice, an interest in this area of what she calls, I can never say it or pronounce it properly,mimesis, the act of mimicking or mirroring animal sounds or sounds from nature. And she's been doing it a long, long, long time and has a beautiful practice. She shared with me some of her techniques and methods include to nearly learn how to vocalize like a seagull. She recommends putting the way you put water in your mouth to gargle. That's the kind of access point that you nearly need to be practicing to get to that kind of throat sound of the seagull reason, one of the reasons why I went to her was because I was invited by Orton House Cultural Center to respond to the corncrake.
So the corncrake is a bird in Ireland, and it is becoming distinct extinct, what am I saying, distinct. It is distinct but becoming extinct. And there is a conservation group called Corncrake LIFE, and they're doing everything they can and they're well funded by the EU to preserve the Corncrake. There's currently around 300 corncrakes in Ireland, which is quite a small number. So that's what brought me into wondering about vocalizing like a bird. Yes. And I haven't, the corncrake doesn't sound very melodic. It actually has a sound that years ago people used to curse each other. They used to curse, in Irish, it would be, they would say, the curse of the corncrake be on you and that you won't have a night's sleep because if there was a field of corncrakes, it was the loudest and most annoying sound that you could hear. And actually, if you want to hear what one sounds like, if you get a comb and you brush it, that's what a corncrake sounds like. Okay. Yeah. And the Latin name is onomatopoeic so if you say crex crex, enough times, you'll know what it sounds like.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah. Very cool. And it was interesting to learn about Hanna Tuulikki, i too, because I hadn't heard of her.
Ceara Conway:
Yeah, she's brilliant. Yeah, I really like her work a lot.
Leah Roseman:
There's one project we haven't spoken of yet, Time to say Goodbye. Oh yeah, I found that really compelling if you want to speak to that.
Ceara Conway:
Of course. So I was invited by the nerve center in Derry and the the Ulster Museum to create a piece of vocal work in response to World War 1. So it was very broad. I almost researched too much for that project. Sometimes you can read too much. So I was looking at so many different things in terms of how even they create these huge architectural concrete shapes to capture sound. I was looking at how they had tiny gramophones that they would bring out with them out into the field. And I was looking at a lot at conscription songs, how songs were utilized as a way of guilting or shaming people into joining the army or propaganda. And I came across that song Grace, which was composed around a similar time. And that Looking at Joseph, I think, I hope I could be completely wrong now, I'll be shot for saying it.
But Joseph Plunkett was executed and he had 15 minutes to say goodbye to his partner, Grace. And at the same time, it wasn't the same time, but my father had died. And I had a very kind of intimate understanding of what it's like to be told that you have a certain amount of time to say goodbye to somebody because he was on a machine. And then I started thinking more about saying goodbye within the context of a war or what that means and how many people would've said goodbye to each other, wives to husbands or children's to their parents, and not knowing whether you'd ever see somebody again. So I explored that with the Derry Traditional Singers in terms of that's the song. But then I break the song down into a more spoken word piece that is simply just talking to the words. You have 15 minutes, you have 15 minutes to say goodbye to somebody you love.
And kind of deconstructed that more and more and more. And I found it was quite powerful. The recording I made that I actually used was an exploratory session. But even sometimes you can be in the middle of doing something, and when you're doing it, you're like, this feels very strong. And I trusted my gut that that was enough, that this spoken word piece was enough around saying goodbye. I glad you liked it. I also decided in terms of the visual aspect of the work, to take casts of the gramophone horn that I had. And I made numerous casts using paper, the simple process of paper mache. So I had these beautiful shapes of gramophone horns, and I spray painted them white. And they ended up without intending to, they ended up looking like lilies, which somebody told me kind of are associated with funeric rites of passage sometimes. And so the piece played through these white lilies and the installation.
Leah Roseman:
This is a short excerpt from Time with the Derry Traditional Singers.(music)
Ceara Conway:
You love someone you love, someone that you love, someone you love one, love someone someone love, someone you love, say goodbye. Say goodbye. Say goodbye. Say goodbye, goodbye. Bye bye to someone you love. Say goodbye.
Leah Roseman:
So you grew up speaking Irish with your mother, if I understand.
Ceara Conway:
That's correct. Yeah. It was a bilingual family
Leah Roseman:
And all children in Ireland learned Irish in school. But do you think, has it gone down the percentage of families actually speaking it as their first language?
Ceara Conway:
It depends on the region, because not all Irish, not all schools in Ireland are Gaelscoils , as we call them. But I work with the Arts Council as a creative associate where I support schools to develop art programs that are unique to their interests and their needs. And only yesterday I was in a school called, Gaelscoil Mhic Amhlaigh which had 600 students, primary school students, and they all had beautiful Irish. So it was like a little microcosm of in this school alone. And also I went to a school called Scoil Einne where you'd nearly expect everybody to have Irish because they're in the Gaeltacht but not necessarily so in Galway. So it's very much alive, probably more so though in schools that are Gael schools or that are based in Gaeltacht places. And in the teacher, the principal was telling me yesterday that the children don't engage in any English classes or English language activities until they're in first class. So they keep it purely Irish, which is a great introduction, I think.
Leah Roseman:
How old are they when they are in first class?
Ceara Conway:
So they go from junior infants to senior into first class. So maybe 6, 6, 7. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Just your terms are different than we have to. Sure,
Ceara Conway:
Yes. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. We have a similar thing with French here in the English speaking parts of Canada, where we call it French immersion. So I was part of the first wave of those kids. We didn't have any English until a certain age, either
Ceara Conway:
Age,
Leah Roseman:
Although we were anglophone speakers at home. But it does work you and you learn language that young, it doesn't leave you.
Ceara Conway:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And I have to say, it's been such a privilege to have both languages. It's definitely formed me as a person. It's given me a lot in terms of richness, in terms of, a lot of people talk about how the poetic descriptions within the Irish language and whether or not I think that consciously. I think that when you have Irish and then you work in English, I think it informs my English work, if that makes sense. Yeah, definitely. I think it adds to it. Yeah. And I feel like a different person. I did a project on that once for, and I spoke to a lot of people and a lot about their being bilingual. And a lot of people say that they feel like two different people depending on what language they're speaking. And I would definitely feel the same. Do you feel it between French and English?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, I'm very interested in languages, and I've studied many languages as a hobby, but not to a very high level. But other people I've talked to about language, I mean, I think you think differently in different languages. And it's a beautiful way to get to know another culture. And in terms of your exploration of traditional Sean-nós and Irish music in general, since you came to it a little bit later in life, do you continue to dive into that? I mean, it's such a wealth.
Ceara Conway:
Yes, definitely. And I often find it's through collaborative work where new doors open, which is lovely. There are some things that you can't know until you bounce off somebody else. So for example, very recently I worked with an amazing musician called Matthew Nolan, and again, Kevin Murphy on cello. And we were invited to create a live score for a film called I Am Not Legend by Andrea Mastrovito. And Matthew had wild ideas, which I completely went for, including an Irish translation of a Joy Division song, but also, which worked was gorgeous, and we want to record it. But Matthew is a genius with synths and loop pedals, which I'm not at all. I'm not technically minded that way. And I sang Cain. It's also on the CAOIN album An Caoineadh. But what he did with it was like, wow, I need to record this iteration of it because it brought it somewhere else completely.
And I think that just recent project that I did with Matthew pulled me into singing Sean-nós in a darker way and a darker, slower way, and using a lower register of my voice that I probably mightn't have access to before. I'm very excited about that now. Even there is, I really love the old Irish poets {}, and I can't think of another name straight off the top of my head now. But for another project that I did called Weathering, I was looking at oligons. So an oligon is another word for lament, but it should be nearly like, it takes its oration from liturgy. The repetition of words that begin with the same letter or so it almost becomes chant like, chant like in order to iterate more and more emphasis on certain things. And one of the verses that we used for that film recently was it almost sounded like a curse. And yeah, so at the moment I'm looking at incantation. I'm trying actually to do a little bit of research on incantation in Irish traditional practices. I haven't found much material yet, but definitely that repetition and bardic way of a kind of powerful rhetoric. I'd like to explore that a little bit more in a contemporary way.
Leah Roseman:
Well, you're so creative and curious and it's wonderful how you go off on your tangents so deeply. I hope that you will make another traditional album.
Ceara Conway:
Yeah, I definitely, definitely want to. I definitely would love to. The thing that I find difficult is how to merge my contemporary work with the traditional. It's easier for me to bring traditional repertoire into the contemporary visual artwork than it is the other way around. And as time goes on, I'm thinking maybe that's just okay. It's not something I have to figure out. Maybe they just belong in different camps and I can enjoy both. The thing that people get confused by is if somebody comes to a concert of mine, they think that's all I do. And then they might later discover the more contemporary arts practice. And I think we live in a world of categories and it can be very difficult to be several things at the same time sometimes, but you just have to roll with it, don't you? Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Well, very inspiring, so thanks so
Ceara Conway:
Much. Thank you so much. Thank you. I really enjoyed chatting to you.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. There's such a fascinating variety to life and music and this series features wonderful musicians worldwide with in-depth conversations and great music. With over a hundred episodes to explore, many episodes feature guests playing music spontaneously as part of the episode, or sharing performances and albums. I hope that the inspiration and connection found in a meaningful creative life, the challenges faced and the stories from such a diversity of artists will draw you into this weekly series with many topics that will with all listeners. Please share your favorite episodes with your friends and do consider supporting this independent podcast. The link is in the description. Have a great week.
