Collaborating Again

Gregory Harrington To Join Martin Hayes And Dennis Cahill At The Irish Arts Center

By Gwen Orel

Playing the fiddle requires as much heart and imagination as it does finger dexterity.

So says Clare fiddler Martin Hayes, who, with guitar collaborator Dennis Cahill, will play with young Irish classical violinist Gregory Harrington at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan this week as part of the third outing in the Masters in Collaboration series. Concerts are on Friday and Saturday - they are already sold out, but there is a wait list, and a third concert may be added due to demand!

Hayes and Cahill are teaching master classes on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, NEA Heritage Award recipient and folk icon Mick Moloney, who conceived the idea for the Masters in Collaboration series, will moderate a conversation between Hayes and Harrington.

Hayes and Harrington are both tops in their genres: Hayes was named Musician of the Year 2008 by Irish TV station TG4 and winner of six all-Ireland fiddle championships; Harrington won the Artists International Competition in New York in 2003, and was the first Irish born classical violinist to perform solo at Carnegie Hall. He teaches at the Spence and Nightingale-Barmford Schools in Manhattan. Newsweek has called his playing "sultry." Guitar player Dennis Cahill brings a restrained, subtle elegance and a spirit of jazz to the table.

If you've heard Hayes play, you'll understand his emphasis on the soul and heart of the music. Critics have described his collaborations with Dennis Cahill as "new age," "mystical," "zen-like." The Irish Times has described Hayes as "a sublime fiddler."

Hayes' immersion in the elements of a tune, combined with Cahill's nuanced playing, create a rare and haunting simplicity that grows in intensity until the sound becomes overwhelming. Last year, Hayes and Cahill released their first CD in almost a decade, Welcome Here Again, an outstanding album in which each track, unusually, is just one tune.

Hayes, who says he has "absolutely zero theoretical training," looks forward to working with Harrington on the premiere of David Flynn's "Music for the Departed," a 25-minute piece for "violin plus fiddle" and guitar.

Announcing in advance one of the pieces to be performed is new for the Masters in Collaboration series, which so far has included iconic Irish singer-songwriter Paul Brady and Nashville pop-folk singer Sarah Suskind in 2008, and Planxty legend Andy Irvine and rising star, singer-songwriter John Doyle, in 2009.

The fiddle and the violin are really the same instrument - but the repertoire, background and, often, technique and training, are very different (although some trad players, like Dana Lyn and Caitlin Warbelow, have a background in classical music). Working with a classical soloist is "a slightly new territory for me," explained Hayes.

"It's a little scary sometimes to go out of your comfort zone, but then that's something maybe I ought to do." Still, music is music," he says. "The main thing at the end of the day is imagination and heart and the desire to make things. Everyone has different methods of working and ways of getting to the bottom, some analytical, some emotional. Hopefully we'll work it out."

Hayes was given his first 1/4 size fiddle by Santa Clause at age 7. But his fiddle-playing father and uncle never gave him lessons. "I could see them playing, so that was important. I would listen to them and imitate what I heard. I got aesthetic and philosophical corrections. We had discussions about how certain kinds of things didn't make any sense, about things that were good and bad in music." But, he says, "I definitely wasn't a child prodigy! By the time I was 11 I knew only a handful of tunes. But at 12-13 I made a major leap of progress. Maybe it was puberty."

He can read music, but, "it's simply a tool, one of a number of tools available to you in composing, arranging, putting things together. Good musicians find a marriage between the technical know-how and the imaginative space in music, and place of feeling. When either of those are lacking, you have a deficiency. I worked hard to get my skill levels up to a point that would allow me to play the things I feel. From the other side, you have to be careful not to lose that childlike quality and that world of imagination."

When he teaches, he emphasizes the "more esoteric, philosophical side of music. How do you access feeling?" Admittedly this can seem "unrelated to the effort of playing a tune on an instrument, putting in rolls and triplets and all of this, but you can get so caught up - sometimes there are other questions holding you back." Aidan Connolly, Executive Director of the Irish Arts Center, describes Masters in Collaboration "high risk, high reward. We give artists a platform, and they take risks. This mixture of traditional and classical is exciting-we don't entirely know where it will go."