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The DeKalb Choral Guild
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Georgia Council for the Arts

 

Ceílí! A Celtic Celebration

Bryan F. Black, Director
Leanne Elmer Herrmann, Accompanist

Saturday, March 5, 2005

Saturday, March 15, 2003
Embry Hills United Methodist Church
Tucker, Georgia

Céilí, pronounced "kay-lee", is a Gælic word that simply means "visit." However, legendary Celtic hospitality has transformed this simple visit into a full-blown party, complete with music and song, food and drink, dancing and friendship. Tonight we bring all elements of the Céilí together, treating you to a night of Celtic revelry!

Mouth Music (1997), Hebridean Tune arranged by Dolores Keane and John Faulkner
Ellery Trafford, bodhran

Lake Isle of Innisfree (2000) by Bill Douglas (b. 1944)
Poem by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

O My Luve's Like a Red, Red Rose (1998) René Clausen (b. 1953)
Words (1794) by Robert Burns (1759-1796)

The Gartan Mother's Lullaby (2000), Irish folk song Neil Ginsberg (b. 1969)
Bob Amar, recorder

"Sliabh Gallion Braes" performed by Terese Rabbitt and Bob Amar

I Know Where I'm Goin' (1999), Irish folk song Neil Ginsberg (b. 1969)

The Lark in the Clear Air (1994), Irish folk song arr. Andrew Carter (b. 1939)
Paul Scherr, flute

You've Got to Hide Your Love Away (1965, 1986) arr. Andrew Jackman
Traditional Liverpool melody and text by Sirs Paul McCartney and John Lennon

Wi' a Hundred Pipers (2002) arr. Ken Berg (b. 1956)
Scottish folk song by Carolina Oliphant, (Lady Nairne), 1766-1845
Bob Amar, recorder, and Ellery Trafford, bodhran

Intermission — You are cordially invited to enjoy our selection of desserts and beverages.

A Celtic Cabaret

Medley from Finnian's Rainbow, performed by Mary Gowing and Ben Bailey

"Annie Laurie" and "The Water is Wide" performed by The Celtic Troubadours, Terry Carpenter, Stephen Hall, Cliff Norris and John Scott

Scottish Country Dancing

Now you can work off those dessert calories as we push back the tables for Scottish dancing. Our friends from the Royal Scottish Country Dancing Society will teach us new steps from the highlands. Audience participation is welcome!

Program Notes

by Michaelene Gorney

Although one can perhaps name a few of the Celtic countries, recognize Celtic interweaving, and cite literary works influenced by Celtic mythology and spirituality – J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Anne McCaffrey's The Dragons of Pern and Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, to name a few – there is so much more to the word "Celtic" than popular culture implies. The six Celtic nations maintain their distinct identities through the conscientious propagation of traditions rooted in ancient custom and mythology, languages still spoken by at least some of its citizens, and the making of music in which melodic ornamentation and variation are highly regarded. These nations are: Scotland (Alba); Brittany (Breizh), a northwestern peninsula of France; Wales (Cymru); Ireland (Eire); Cornwall (Kernow), an Atlantic peninsula between Wales and Brittany; and the Isle of Mann (Mannin), located in the Irish Sea. Their languages are Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Welsh, Irish, Cornish, and Manx, respectively. Those interested in pursuing all things truly Celtic would do well to investigate the information published by the Celtic League and by IMBAS, an organization which promotes the spiritual path of Senistrognata, "based upon the home, the family, and the community/tribe in honoring the land, the ancestors, and the traditional Celtic gods and goddesses.

Of the music performed tonight, "Mouth Music," "The Gartan Mother's Lullaby," "I Know Where I'm Goin'," "The Lark and the Clear Air," and "Wi' a Hundred Pipers" are most authentically Celtic in terms of melody and text. "Mouth Music" also pays tribute to a Celtic style of performance, and Irish poetry is further celebrated in "Lake Isle of Innisfree" and "O My Luve's Like a Red, Red Rose." Add to the mix a drum and some Scottish dance and there you have it - the perfect caelidh! A gathering for the purpose of singing, dancing, and music-making. What better purpose could there be?

In this style, a Celtic and Gaelic tradition also referred to as lilting, diddling, or port-a-beul ("tunes from the mouth"), vocalists imitate instruments with the precision required for dancing. As Kenna Campbell puts it, "You can't just break off and have a pint at the end of a phrase – if you do, someone's left with a leg up in the air!" Heard tonight is a transcription by Joseph Byrd of a version sung by Irish musicians Dolores Keane and John Faulkner. The text as sung echoes words of the English poet Lord George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), taken from Don Juan, "Canto the Fifteenth," and printed at the end of the published music:

There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the rushing of a rill;
There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.

"Lake Isle of Innisfree" is a setting of a poem by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), the great Irish poet, dramatist and prose writer who studied mysticism and the occult, explored his heritage through folks tales, and worked toward the revival of Celtic identity. Yeats' poetry was inspired by the countryside of Northern Ireland, where he grew up in Galway and spent summers with his grandparents at Sligo, now a city of about 25,000. Wrote Yeats, "I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem ‘Innisfree,' my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music." Bill Douglas, who claims to love poetry as much as music, is a noted composer, jazz and classical pianist, bassoonist, and teacher at the progressive Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He has written music inspired by Yeats, Robert Burns, William Blake, and Alfred Grave, among others, and his choral work "Deep Peace," inspired by folk music traditions of the British Isles, was featured in the memorial service in New York at "ground zero" on the one-year anniversary of September 11, 2001.

René Clausen is the conductor of The Concordia Choir, Concordia College, Minnesota, and artistic director of the Concordia College Christmas Concerts broadcast on public television and radio. Well-known as a composer and clinician, he has written over 45 commissioned works; has conducted choral/orchestral performances, festivals, and workshops in over 35 states; and was honored with a Carnegie Hall concert of his compositions in 1996. "O My Luve's Like a Red, Red Rose" is a lyrical arrangement of the oft-quoted poem by the beloved Scottish poet and writer Robert Burns (1759-1796). Clausen composed the piece for his wife, Frankie. With due respect to the purists among us, the language spoken by Robbie Burns and immortalized in his poems was not a Celtic language. Nonetheless, we feel justified in paying tribute to him for almost single-handedly reviving the Scottish vernacular through his poetry and rescuing hundreds of Scottish folksongs from extinction.

Tonight's offerings include two arrangements by Neil Ginsberg (b. 1969), "The Gartan Mother's Lullaby" and "I Know Where I'm Goin.'" Ginsberg is a graduate of the Hartt School of Music, University of Hartford, and the University of Southern California, who has received grants and awards from The Temple Guild of Young Composers, Meet the Composer, North Carolina Arts Council, New York Foundation for Arts in Education, and BMI. His compositions for film, television and theater include works for The Juilliard School, Fordham University, Hartt Opera/Music Theater, Company One of Hartford, and My Name Is Pablo Picasso, presented Off Broadway.

Artist Alice Flynn claims "The Gartan Mother's Lullaby" as her own favorite, telling us that it was first published in 1904 in The Songs of Uladh [Ulster], arranged by musicologist Herbert Hughes with lyrics by Seosamh MacCathmhaiol (1879-1944), or Joseph Campbell. The lyrics heard here were adapted by Flynn, and brief definitions of some of the words may be helpful while listening: "Gartan" (literally "little garden") is both an area and a lake in County Donegal, located on the northwestern coast of Ireland; "banshee" refers to a ghost-like fairy woman who haunted the rock of Greaglea above Killaloe in County Clare, near the old palace of Kincora; "thrall" is an English word for a person held in bondage; "lyanvan" is an attempt to duplicate the Irish word "leanbhan" or "child."; "Green Man" refers to a medieval face with leaves growing out of it which represents the annual cycle of death and rebirth of life in nature; "sheevra," or "siabrha," is a particularly mischievous type of little fairy.

"I Know Where I'm Goin'," also arranged by Ginsberg, is a song from the northeastern county of Antrim in which Belfast is located. Antrim is one of the nine counties of Ulster, an historic region and ancient kingdom of Ireland which was annexed by the English during the reign of James I. Although Ulster ["Uladh" or "Uliad" in Celtic] is technically made up of nine counties, three in Ireland and six in Northern Ireland, the word "Ulster" is sometimes be used to denote only the six in Northern Ireland. In "I Know Where I'm Goin'," the words "dear knows," as in "dear knows who I'll marry," are the Ulster equivalent of "goodness knows."

"The Lark and the Clear Air" is a setting by Andrew Carter (b. 1939) of a poem by Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-1886), a Celtic scholar who lived in Belfast and who was hailed by Yeats as "the greatest poet Ireland has produced, because the most central and most Celtic," and thus a national author "unjustly neglected by his fellow-countrymen." Ferguson wrote "The Lark and the Clear Air" in the 1850s to a traditional tune, "Caisleán U, Néill," collected by Mrs. Ferguson in the west of Ireland. Andrew Carter, originally a bass soloist at York Minster and music director of the Chapter House Choir at York Minster for 17 years, since 1984 has concentrated on composition, with over fifty choral arrangements published by Oxford University Press and commissions from British choral societies, English college and cathedral choirs, American choirs, and Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral for its 1997 tercentenary celebration. He travels extensively as a composer and choir director in the United States, "where the art galleries and 32 flavours of ice cream prove irresistible attractions."

The lyrics of "Hey! You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," recorded in 1965, were written by John Lennon (1940-1980), the music by Lennon and Paul McCartney (b. 1942). These rock singers, songwriters, and guitarists born in Liverpool, England, along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, revived 1950s American rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues as the group called the Beatles. In the course of their careers, they infused new life into classic rock by incorporating non-Western musics, contemporary Classical music, psychedelic rock, and advanced studio techniques into their own work. This relatively early tune ("That's me in my Dylan period," said Lennon), with its easy 6/8 rhythm and its melodic/harmonic mix of major and mixolydian, is from the King's Singers Lennon & McCartney Collection. Arranger Andrew Jackman (1946-2003), a founding member of the rock group, Yes, enjoyed a stellar career as a composer, conductor, arranger, and producer, working with a broad range of artists, from the London Symphony to brass bands and choruses and schools to Evelyn Glennie to the Sex Pistols to Barbara Streisand to Elton John - just to name a few!

"Wi' a Hundred Pipers" is one of a set of six arrangements in the Scottish Folk Song Suite by Ken Berg. Berg, who considers himself a "functional" composer, writing for specific programs or commissions, holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Samford University, has been Choral Director and Fine Arts Chairman for John Carroll Catholic High School in Birmingham, Alabama since 1977, and with his wife, Susan, directs the Birmingham Boys Choir. He has served on the Training Courses Committee with the Royal School of Church Music in America and is currently the High School Resource & Standards Chair for the Alabama chapter of the American Choral Directors Association. He is also an active member of the Music Educator's National Conference and the Organization of American Kodaly Educators. His choirs have sung for State and National Music Conventions and have attended festivals all over North America.

"Wi' a Hundred Pipers," a tune written around 1814, tells of Scottish soldiers, 1000 strong, who swam the Esk River to battle the English. With 100 bagpipers playing with unco flair (unusual gusto) and contributing to the sodgers' (soldiers') pibrochs (rallying cries), the sound of the blaw (bagpipes) was such that the English imagined a much larger force and ran from the field with nary a sword being drawn. The battle described took place during the 1740s, as the Jacobites [Scottish and Irish supporters of the claim to the English throne by the deposed James I and his son James, known to his enemies as the "Old Pretender"], marching under "Bonnie Prince Charlie"

[Charles Edward Stuart, son of the second James and known as the "New Pretender"], invaded Carlisle in Cumbria [on the west coast of England] and took Carlisle Castle. Unfortunately for the Jacobites, help from supporters in England and France did not materialize as promised; they were forced back and slaughtered at the battle of Culloden, and Bonnie Prince Charlie became a fugitive. Thus was their cause ended, but not(!), as you will hear, forgotten.

The following sources were consulted in the preparation of these notes: