Transcript of the above article in The Living Tradition April / May 2021

Máire Ní Chathasaigh & Chris Newman

By Fiona Heywood

“Virtuosic, fascinating, dramatic, original, inspired, gloriously adventurous, dazzling, brilliant, stunning, impassioned, electrifying, bewitching, moving, achingly beautiful, influential, revered, unique...” This is how harper Máire Ní Chathasaigh and guitarist Chris Newman have been described over the years by the various musical publications that have featured their work. And those of us who have been lucky enough to experience their music first-hand know that this is no exaggeration. Máire and Chris are two awe-inspiring musicians whose music together is something very special indeed.

Coming from two very different backgrounds, they have found a way to be completely themselves in their music, and yet their synergy is quite breath-taking, making them very much in-demand in Ireland, in the UK, in the US, and all over the world. I asked them both a bit about their personal journeys in music, their introduction to traditional music in particular, and also about their journey together as a duo.

Máire goes first… She grew up in Ballinascarthy and then Bandon in Co Cork, steeped in the Irish tradition, her mother, grandmother and uncle being fine singers. “My mother (now 98) taught us songs from when we were really tiny, and taught us all simple Irish dancing steps too, and used to play slides and polkas on the mouth organ for us to dance to. My father wasn’t a great singer himself, but he had a large store of songs and poems in the Irish language and an amazing memory for the seanchas (traditional lore) and poetry that had been preserved in his family – he could remember 40-verse poems that he’d heard only a couple of times in the 1930s! There were a number of minor Irish-language poets in his family and we grew up imbibing lore about them and learning various poems they had written, both published and unpublished. We felt – and still feel that we are merely the most recent links in the transmission of traditional lore, song and music from many past generations and its bearers into the future.”

Máire has rightly been called “the doyenne of Irish harpers”, but the harp was not her first instrument – she began on the piano, and also played the fiddle and the whistle. “My parents were mad about music and my mother in particular was willing to buy us any instruments and pay for whatever tuition we wanted, within reason. Sometimes she bought instruments because she liked them herself and then left them lying about in case one of us decided to take a shine to them. The harp she bought worked out very well, but the banjo she bought languished unloved in a corner until she finally relinquished all hope of one of us taking it up and sold it again! My sister Nollaig and I both started playing the fiddle and the harp. She really took to the fiddle and I really took to the harp and we both ended up playing those instruments professionally! Our younger sister Mairéad plays both. We all played the piano and whistle and we all sang too (including my

brothers), so it was a noisy house, with people playing in practically every room and rows about whose turn it was to have access to a particular instrument!”

As a teenager, and with no harper role models, Máire began to work out ways of doing things a bit differently, breaking new ground in terms of the repertoire and the techniques she used on the harp, developments for which she is now widely renowned. Until Máire, harp music in Ireland was quite different. She explains more. “I wanted to find and develop a voice on the harp for the traditional music that I grew up with and that was in my heart and soul. At that time, the playing of Irish dance music on the harp in an authentically ornamented way and with the nuances of rhythm, tone and articulation essential to that style, was unheard of. The harp had long been used almost exclusively for song accompaniment and for some performance of the music of the old 17th and 18th century Irish harpers, played from the sources in a literal manner, and existed in a world apart to that of the oral tradition. So, fiddling and piping were what I listened to for inspiration in developing the new techniques - particularly in relation to ornamentation - that made it possible for the first time to play Irish traditional music on the harp in a stylistically accurate way.”

I wondered whether Máire’s new approach was well-received amongst the harp fraternity. “I actually got a great reception in traditional music circles,” she told me, “which was very gratifying for a painfully-shy teenager in the 1970s. People said to me many times that they had never thought what I was doing would be possible on the harp, and that they’d always, until that point, thought the harp to be a useless instrument for traditional music! I was made to feel that what I was doing was worthwhile and that I should continue along that path. Older musicians who were considered to be arbiters of taste at the time were hugely supportive and gave me lots of opportunities: people like Séamus Mac Mathúna, Joe Burke, Tony McMahon and so many others. I won the Senior All-Ireland at Fleadh Ceoil na h-Éireann three times in a row during the 1970s and was invited to run a harp class at the Scoil Éigse before the All-Ireland Fleadh in Buncrana in 1976 – the first time that the harp had been included in such an event. The harp world was immensely supportive too, particularly in the person of Gráinne Yeats (though her approach was, of course, very different to mine). I walked on air after she said in her adjudication of the Pan-Celtic Harp Competition that my playing seemed like a reincarnation of the bardic spirit.”

Though clearly coming from a traditional background and learning to play the music by ear, Máire had also learned to play classical music by reading the notes, and did both things side by side - something that she says was quite unusual at that time. As an adult, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to do that, as I believe the ability to learn equally well by ear or from written music is a big advantage to any musician,” she said. But it was only after Máire had developed her innovative new techniques for playing trad that she had any classical harp lessons. “I started these in my early twenties, when Denise Kelly came from Dublin once a fortnight to teach pedal harp in the Cork School of Music – it hadn’t been possible to get any such lessons in Munster until that time. She really sorted out my overall technique and stressed the importance of codifying fingering patterns. I then found a way of integrating classical techniques with my own ones.”

The combination of these classical techniques and Máire’s innovation with traditional forms has been so successful, in 2001 she won one of the highest accolades for an Irish traditional musician, the Gradam Ceoil for Traditional Musician of the Year - “for the excellence and pioneering force of her music, the remarkable growth she has brought to the music of the harp and the positive influence she has had on the young generation of harpers.” That positive influence has seen several other harpers follow where she led, and the scene today is a very different one.

“I had what seemed in the 1970s to be a romantic hope that the harp could be reintegrated into the oral Irish tradition,” Máire said. “I’m delighted that it has now happened in a big way; bringing it about has been a massive voluntary communal effort by many unsung heroines of the harp world. When I started playing the harp, nobody played Irish traditional dance music on the harp, whereas now it seems to be impossible to find an Irish harper that doesn’t play dance music! Laoise Kelly, Gráinne Hambly and Marta Cook are lovely players of dance music, with a deep knowledge and love of the tradition and their own distinctive styles. And of course, there are hundreds of other very fine harper players of dance music in Ireland alone, and teachers can be found pretty much everywhere. There’s been an explosion of interest in the harp in the last number of years, culminating in the establishment of the umbrella body, Harp Ireland, and the inscription of the Irish harp on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2019 – driven largely by the herculean efforts of the Chair of Harp Ireland, Aibhlín McCrann, and its various committees. So, the future is very bright.”

While Máire was re-inventing harping in Ireland, Chris Newman was over the sea in England, getting a different grounding in music. Born in Hertfordshire, he spent most of his life in the north of England, and with his mother being a professional actress, he was no stranger to performing – he was already playing the guitar by the age of four! Chris told me a bit of his back story… “I have a brother who’s 10 years older than me. He got a guitar for his birthday one September and I badgered my parents into getting me one for my birthday the following month. I had been ‘put to the piano’ when I was five but really disliked it and preferred the guitar. My parents allowed me to leave the piano behind and concentrate on the guitar. By the time my brother was in his mid-teens, he was well into the guitar and was going to the many folk clubs that existed around that time in the Leeds and Bradford areas. He used to come back from the clubs with new things he’d heard, and initially I simply copied them.”

Chris played his first paid gig in a folk club at the age of 14, and from there went on to play with an amazing array of musicians, in the folk world but also beyond it. He met the terrific Django-style guitar player Diz Disley while still in his teens, and played extensively with him in many of the UK’s folk clubs. “He introduced me to the whole swing jazz world and I learned a great deal from him when I was still pretty young,” said Chris. Through Diz he also met Stéphane Grappelli, and Chris played in his band for a time. He later worked with the west country folk comedian, Fred Wedlock, for eight years, composing the tune for his 1981 hit song, ‘The Oldest Swinger In Town’, producing his records, running his touring band and making many appearances with him on TV and radio. He also worked with such luminaries as Brenda Wootton, Kathryn Tickell and Boys Of The Lough amongst many others.

Describing the kind of music that he plays as “a variety with a capital V,” Chris has been able to master several different styles – from swing jazz to bluegrass to Celtic – and he’s also a mean mandolin player. He began playing fingerstyle guitar (i.e. using his thumb and fingers without any picks) but over the years has moved to a flatpicking style (i.e. with a plectrum). “I played exclusively fingerstyle until I was about 16 when someone gave me a plectrum. I took to it like a proverbial duck to water and over about a 10-year period moved away from fingerstyle. I simply preferred the much greater power available with a flatpick, and I no longer had to worry about breaking nails!” he said.

In 1984, Chris was with Cornish singer Brenda Wootton playing at a Celtic festival in Galicia in north-west Spain. Máire was booked as a soloist at the same festival. They met, and a few years later, in 1987, began playing together, which led to Chris adding yet another style of music to his arsenal – traditional Irish. I wondered how he adapted to that style, who he listened to, and what techniques he had to learn that were different to those he was already using.

Obviously Máire was his first port of call for any questions about the music and the way it was played, and Chris was lucky to learn from someone as immersed in it as she is. “Apart from Máire,” he said, “I spent a great deal of time listening to Mary Bergin (the Galway whistle player) recordings. She’s a fantastic example of how to use ornamentation and variation really well and extremely imaginatively. I used to tape her recordings at 15ips in the studio then play them back at 7½ - this meant the key was maintained, although the whistle pitch was reduced by an octave, but the main thing was that the speed was halved so I had a sporting chance of figuring out what was going on!”

“Learning about cuts, rolls and triplets was an eye-opener, but ultimately was just another technique to add to the armoury. In recent years, I’ve spent lots of time working on different technical aspects of playing as I firmly believe they are the key to everything. For the past 20 years or so I’ve been the principal guitar and mandolin tutor at the folk degree course at the University of Newcastle and, as I’m often teaching people who are already pretty advanced players, I’ve found myself looking very carefully at my own techniques and improving them accordingly. I certainly wouldn’t want to be seen as being a slave to technique, but without the basics it’s virtually impossible to play really well in any style.”

Chris says he has always enjoyed playing lots of different types of music, which makes him very difficult to ‘pigeon-hole’ for those who might want to. This comes with some benefits, but also drawbacks. “The core of what Máire and I do together is traditional music,” he said, “but every couple of years since 2003 I’ve been teaching at a huge music camp in east Tennessee which is, to all intents and purposes, a bluegrass festival. I’m not a bluegrass specialist but I enjoy my time there very much, and I just about hold my own! I guess the main benefit is that I’ve never been out of work since leaving school as I’ve always been versatile enough to fit in with most situations. Drawbacks? I’ve found that people like to pigeon-hole musicians – ‘Oh, he’s a Celtic player, she’s into old time,’ etc. I’ve always quite deliberately avoided that. One LP I made with Fred had ‘File under Opera/Punk’ on the back of the sleeve.”

And just when you thought you knew what to expect from Chris, he starts working on something entirely new again. This time it’s the music of J. S. Bach! “This has been my lockdown project,” he told me. “Some years ago, I saw a video on YouTube of a fantastic American mandolinist called Chris Thile playing the Preludio from Bach’s Partita No 3. It’s a really well-known piece written for the violin, so the translation to mandolin would have been relatively straightforward, although still fiendishly difficult to play as well as he did. It got me thinking about whether it’d be possible to flatpick the tune on the guitar in much the same way. This presented a few quite tricky technical issues, but after several months I was able to record it.” (You can watch it if you search for ‘Chris Newman Flatpicking The Partitas’ on YouTube).

Chris is currently working towards releasing a new CD featuring the music of Bach. “When the first lockdown started in March 2020, all our gigs (along with the rest of the planet’s) were cancelled so I found myself with a huge amount of unexpected time on my hands. I trawled the web looking for Bach pieces written for largely monophonic instruments and have spent the past 11 months or so happily working my way through partitas and sonatas written for either violin, flute or cello. The recording’s actually complete, but I still haven’t decided what to put on the sleeve, though I hope to be able to release it soon. Having all this free time has been a fantastic opportunity to really get to grips with this stuff. It’s brilliant music and has been a real challenge.”

I had heard that Chris doesn’t read music, so wondered how he managed to handle something as complex as a piece of Bach by ear. “With difficulty!” he said. “I can’t read music, so the studio Mac’s been an important part of the process as it’s possible to take a recording and slow it down without altering the pitch. It’s not that far removed from what I used to do with the Mary Bergin recordings back in the eighties! I also have a pretty good musical memory.”

In terms of Chris and Máire’s joint performances and recordings, they have successfully managed to incorporate all these different genres, styles and techniques into something that, as Máire says, is “more than the sum of its parts”, and anyone who has heard them perform can attest to that.

“Once we decided we’d have a go it really wasn’t too bad,” said Chris. “The thing we both had to do was compromise, in the sense that I’d sometimes be obliged to play a line which was not at all guitaristic, and Máire often had to do things that most certainly were not harp-like!” Máire continues: “We did a lot of experimentation in the early years, with both repertoire and arrangement. Though Chris had been playing on the English folk scene since he was a teenager, we were really from different musical worlds and put effort into learning about each other’s music. Chris is a fantastic improviser, so we needed to find a way of enabling his abilities in this area to shine. So our sets together have always been a mixture of straight traditional music, the various forms of music that Chris plays, and tunes we’ve composed. We don’t mix the genres together – it’s not ‘cross-over’ music.”

Chris and Máire suspect they were the first harp and guitar duo on the scene, a combination that was certainly unusual then. “According to our agent at the time,” said Máire, “festival and venue promoters were very suspicious initially, as they just couldn’t envisage what a harp and guitar were going to sound like played together. Once they made the leap of booking us, they usually liked what we were doing and thankfully we got more and more work. We really had to create a market from scratch for what we were doing though!”

Both instruments are traditionally seen as instruments for accompaniment, but Chris and Máire take that notion and turn it on its head. They both take the lead, and both also allow the other space to do their thing. It sounds like it happens so naturally but, as is often the case, it is the result of a lot of work. Chris explains: “In the early days we’d spend a long time working out arrangements, giving each instrument space and trying to avoid constantly climbing over each other. In more recent times it’s a much faster process; one of us will come up with a tune and we’ll pretty much instinctively know what to play, and when. And when to play nothing at all!” Máire agrees: “We’re both keen arrangers and are very conscious of textures and of making room for the other person sonically. If I’m playing a busy bass line, Chris will stay out of my way, and vice-versa.”

While their joint repertoire started out being mostly based on Máire’s traditional material, it is now much wider than that and a typical concert consists of quite a few traditional sets from Ireland and Scotland, a bluegrass piece or two, maybe a swing tune, some original compositions that could be in virtually any style, and even an excerpt from a Handel violin sonata. Máire has had to learn to navigate the genres in the same way Chris has, and that has brought its own challenges. The harp is tuned diatonically (i.e. like the white keys on a piano, without sharps and flats). To get those extra notes the harp uses levers at the top of each string, and you can see harp players moving them up and down to get the notes they want - difficult enough in any situation, but a real feat when done often and done at speed, as is often the case with Máire when she is playing some of the swing jazz stuff. “I had to work at developing very fast lever-changing to facilitate all that chromaticism!” she says. Just watch her playing on YouTube to see how amazing she is at this – it’s astonishing.

In another important phase of their career, Chris and Máire joined forces with Máire’s sister, fiddle player Nollaig Casey, and her husband, the now sadly missed Arty McGlynn, in The Heartstring Quartet. Máire has also played as a trio with Nollaig and her other sister, Mairéad. A recent ‘SéMo Laoch’ documentary on TG4 celebrated Máire and Nollaig’s musical achievements and shows just how well-respected each  of them is. The programme can still be viewed on the TG4 Player.

Obviously, life as busy touring musicians has been quite different of late, and Chris and Máire have had to adapt to life in COVID times. Chris has been working on his Bach project, and continues to teach his University of Newcastle students via Zoom. “It’s better than nothing,” he said, “but still not as useful as being in the same room as the student. However, the plus side is that I no longer have a 2½ hour commute to and from Newcastle. I can make it into the studio in about 90 seconds!” The duo did a gig for an organisation called Irish Music And Dance in London, as part of their series of online concerts in February and March. This concert was filmed on location at The Courthouse Arts Centre in Otley. “It was really fun to do a gig with stage, lights, PA etc,” said Máire. “The only thing missing was a live audience. Like all musicians, we’re so much looking forward to getting to play for live audiences again, whenever that might be!”

That is the question everyone wants the answer to. What happens next for Chris and Máire will very much depend on what happens, not just in the UK, but globally. “We were four weeks into a six-week tour of the USA when the pandemic struck,” Chris told me. “How long it’s going to be before we can tour the USA again is anyone’s guess. As for Europe…”

But luckily for the pair, though they still need to survive, they determined long ago that money was not going to be the main motivating factor in their career plans. Back in the 80s, Chris said that he’d “rather play interesting music than pursue interesting pay checks” and since then he has spent his time playing the music he loves rather than chasing commercial success. Together, Chris and Máire have created a career doing this, in many ways carving a new niche, and have managed to travel the world doing it – playing in around 23 countries up until now. Have they chosen the right career path? “Overall it’s been fine,” says Chris. “The commercial world that occupied much of my time until the mid- eighties was not by any means my favourite thing. It paid very well, but musically was not particularly interesting. Life since 1988 or so has been a lot more rewarding. We’re lucky really as we don’t owe anybody anything and generally have a pretty nice time.”

One of Chris’ solo CDs is called ‘Still Getting Away With It’. This may well be a tongue in cheek reference to his choice of career path. I’d argue that Chris Newman and Máire Ní Chathasaigh are doing far more than just getting away with it. They are setting the standard, and they are setting it high.

www.maireandchris.com

Photos: Con Kelleher

Transcript of the above article (cover feature) in Folk Magazin (Germany) June / July 2017

Máire Ní Chathasaigh

By Gabriele Haefs

Vielleicht erinnern sich noch einige an den ersten Auftritt dieser großartigen Harfespielerin in Deutschland - oder eher die Auftritte. Es war nämlich 1978, im Rahmen des Irish Folk Festivals, das damals im Frühjahr stattfand. Sie war nicht allein, sondern gehörte der Gruppe Comhluadar an, und mit der ist sie auch auf der damals aufgenommenen LP (mit Cover von Gertrude Degenhardt!) und der viel später erschienenen Querschnitt-CD der ersten Jahre des IFF zu hören. Es war ihr erster Auftritt in Deutschland, aber nicht ihr letzter, wie sie erzählen kann: „Seit damals war ich immer so gern in Deutschland.” Später war sie mehrmals mit ihrem Partner Chris Newman beim IFF dabei, und mit ihm zusammen kann sie auch auf etliche Auftritte zwischen 1996 und 2008 zurückblicken.

Seit 1978 ist viel passiert, in Rezensionen wird sie heute bisweilen als „Doyenne des irischen Harfenspiels" bezeichnet. Doyenne klingt erst mal beeindruckend und beunruhigend zugleich - man denkt doch an eine furchterregende ältere Dame, so eine Art Mischung aus Agatha Christie und Margaret Rutherford als Miss Marple - und dann die fröhliche lachende Máire Ni Chathasaigh? Aber sie sieht das nicht so düster: 

„Es ist doch sehr nett, als Doyenne bezeichnet zu werden, eigentlich ist es eine Ehre, und vielleicht eine Anerkennung der Tatsache, dass ich als erste traditionelle irische Tanzmusik im korrekten Stil auf der Harfe gespielt habe. Damals war ich die Einzige, die das machte, aber inzwischen gibt es viele von uns.”

Die Frage ist natürlich, wie sie dazu gekommen ist, zur Musik, zur Harfe, zu allem. Und das lag an ihrem Elternhaus. Die Familie wohnte in der Nähe von Cork, und da gab es eine reiche Musikszene. Máire sagt dazu: „Meine Mutter war eine wunderbare Sängerin und spielte Harmonika - das tut sie übrigens noch immer, im Alter von 94! Bei uns zu Hause wurde deshalb immer gesungen, angeblich konnten wir Kinder erst singen und danach dann laufen. Meine Mutter wusste eben, wie man Prioritäten setzt! Eine meiner frühesten Erinnerungen ist, dass ich für meine Oma, The Star of the County Down' gesungen habe, da war ich so um die zwei. Meine Eltern haben damals alles Geld, was sie übrig hatten, für Musikinstrumente und Musikunterricht ausgegeben. Was immer wir spielen und lernen wollten, durften wir lernen.” Aber warum Harfe, damals eher ein mit klassischen Konzerten assoziiertes Instrument und zudem arg teuer? Das scheint ihr im Blut gelegen zu haben. „Offenbar wollte ich immer schon Harfe spielen, und als sie dann bei einem Ausverkauf in einem Musikgeschäft in Cork eine Harfe entdeckten, haben sie die für mich gekauft. Da war ich elf. Mit sechs hatte ich Klavier gelernt und Geige mit zehn.

Meine Schwester Nollaig und ich fingen gleichzeitig mit Geige an, gleichzeitig mit Harfe und dann später gleichzeitig mit Tin Whistle. Aber mein Lieblingsinstrument war die Harfe und ihres die Geige, und wir haben dann so richtig professionell zusammen gespielt. Unsere Schwester Mairéad spielt Geige und Harfe, und wir alle drei eben Whistle..."

Jetzt sind die Schwestern erwähnt worden, Nollaig Casey (die die englische Variante des Nachnamens benutzt) und Mairéad und Máire Ní Chathasaigh haben 2015 zusammen die CD „Sibling Revelry" herausgebracht. Sie spielen alle drei zusammen, klar, und jede singt ein Lied. Singen können sie nämlich auch, diese Familie ist wirklich beneidenswert hoch begabt. Im FM wurde die CD gewaltig gelobt, aber nicht nur hier. Natürlich darf nun die Frage nach weiteren CD-Plänen nicht ausbleiben. „Sibling Revelry war so eine persönliche CD für uns, und dass sie so gut aufgenommen worden ist, bedeutet uns wirklich sehr viel." Aber wann es eine neue Produktion der drei Schwestern gibt, steht noch längst nicht fest. Mit Chris Newman allerdings ist eine CD halb fertig, und Máire hat ungefähr zwei Drittel einer Solo-CD eingespielt. Wir werden berichten!

Neben ihren CDs (und da gibt es Solo-Produktionen und solche mit anderen zusammen) hat Máire Ní Chathasaigh zwei Bücher mit Harfenmusik veröffentlicht. Das erste erschien 1991 und enthielt mehrere für die Harfe arrangierte Stücke irischer Tanzmusik, mit sehr detaillierten Anweisungen für Griffe und Rhythmus, die ein Spielen im authentischen Stil ermöglichen sollten. „Es war das erste Buch dieser Art, das je veröffentlicht wurde. Mein zweites Buch hatte dann vierundzwanzig Arrangements von Kompositionen von Turlough O’Carolan. Ich habe eigentlich genug Material für drei weitere Bücher, aber ich habe sie noch nicht einmal in irgendeine brauchbare Reihenfolge gebracht. Ich hoffe, ich werde in diesem Jahr die Zeit dazu finden." Hm. Klingt nicht gut, wo derzeit alle Welt Kriminalromane schreibt, wäre da nicht ein Harfenkrimi wunderbar? Máire lacht, ihr fehlt die Zeit, es gibt noch keine Pläne für den großen Harfenroman des 21. Jahrhunderts.

Neben der Musik ist in ihrem Leben die irische Sprache wichtig, eine Sprache, in der sie viele Lieder singt. Dieser Sprache gehört ihre Liebe, so sehr wie der Musik. „Sie ist ein Teil meiner Identität, ein Teil meiner Seele. Es ist eine wunderschöne, vielseitige und ausdrucksstarke Sprache, die ich sehr liebe. Ich bin zwei-sprachig aufgewachsen, und das betrachte ich als großes Geschenk. Alle zweisprachigen Menschen wissen aus eigener Erfahrung, dass jede Sprache ihre ganz eigene Art zu denken hervorruft. Deshalb sollten sich meiner Ansicht nach alle vernünftigen Menschen überall um das Überleben von gefährdeten Sprachen ebenso sorgen wie um das von gefährdeten Arten."

Und endlich bleibt die Frage nicht aus, wie sie damals zu Comhluadar geriet. Ganz einfach, durch einen Telefonan-ruf. „Ganz unerwartet rief mich Pádraig O Carra an und fragte, ob ich mit Comhluadar auf Tour gehen wollte, da ihre bisherige Harfnerin verhindert war. Ich war damals noch sehr jung, und die Tour hat mir wirklich die Augen geöffnet. Pádraig war einfach ein reizender Mann, und er hat dafür gesorgt, dass ich mich in den Band sehr wohl gefühlt habe. Bei der Tour war auch Mairtín O'Connor vorübergehend dabei - es war wunderbar, mit den beiden zu spielen. Ich bin damals zum ersten Mal vor tausenden von Menschen aufgetreten, und das war doch eine umwerfende Erfahrung.” Dass sie immer sehr gern in Deutschland ist, hat sie schon gesagt, sie sagt es wieder und fügt hinzu: „Wir können es gar aufzutreten. Wir hoffen, dass es bald so weit sein wird."

Also ihr Veranstalter, gebt euch mal einen Ruck!

Infos über Tourdaten, die CDS usw. auf der Website!

http://www.mairenichathasaigh.com/aboutmaire.html

Transcript of the above article in RnR Magazine January - February 2022

Chris Newman

By Trevor Hodgett

“It was an ideal lockdown project,” says Chris Newman of his remarkable Breaking Bach album on which he flatpicks, on steel-strung acoustic guitar, a selection of J.S. Bach’s partitas and sonatas. “It’s been in the back of my mind for years that it would be lovely to do but years ago I worked out one of the pieces and it took me ten months! So I thought, unless I live to be 130, it’s never going to happen. Then along comes lockdown and there was nothing else to do and I thought: this is the opportunity.

“We’ve got a studio on the top floor of the house so every morning after my corn flakes I went upstairs and worked away.” Newman explains why he felt drawn to the music: “I’m a great fan of classical music and Bach’s stuff has great melodies and they go off in directions you don’t expect and then somehow resolve. That fascinates me.”

Newman’s inability to read music made the project almost impossibly difficult. “I had to listen to the tunes over and over and memorise them,” he says. “Having done that you work out where you’re going to play certain parts on the guitar because, unlike the piano [where] if you want to play middle C there’s only one key you can hit, on guitar you’ve got four or five different strings where you can get the same note at the same pitch. So you have to work out positioning – you don’t want to find yourself going from first position to twelfth and back because if you’re shooting up and down the neck you’re more likely to make mistakes.”

Newman admits he has previously tried to learn to read. “When I was eighteen I bought Teach Yourself How To Read Music For Guitar, or something. I pursued it for a week and lost patience. And I’ve done that since, when I was thirty and when I was fifty, and I’ve got to the point now where I think, ‘It’s never going to happen!’ It just doesn’t resonate with me.”

One can imagine some classical critics being sniffy about a folkie intruding into their world. “I’ve been holding my breath [in case] somebody says, ‘This charlatan is ruining our music!’ It hasn’t happened yet – but there’s still time,” laughs Newman. Newman’s style, of course, is completely different from that of a classical guitarist. “Classical guitar is played on nylon strings and with a thumb and three fingers so you’re able to play more than one note at the same time. Flatpicked guitar is a single-line instrument, which is why it’s suited to things like the flute partitas because the flute at any one time can only play one

note.”

Newman is totally self-taught and became a professional weeks after leaving school. “It was only years later I would listen to flatpickers, principally Americans, and think, ‘Why do they sound so much better than I do?’ And I realised it was sloppy technique. I’d never studied. I’d just play along with a record and I realised I was full of bad habits. It comes down to fingering and positioning and you realise the way you’re doing it is inefficient. If you play efficiently it’s going to sound nicer.”

One of Newman’s early mentors was Diz Disley. “I met him when I was seventeen and gigged with him for years. Disley lived and breathed Django Reinhardt and I learnt an enormous amount from him, principally swing rhythm guitar with the multiple chords and voicings and inversions, which has stood me in fantastic stead.”

When Disley toured with Stéphane Grappelli, Newman got involved. “I’d drive them around,” he reminisces. “Then Disley would say, ‘Bring your guitar’ and I’d go on at the end and do two or three numbers. Then five or six. Then all the second half. It was a fantastic experience but one I wish I could do now because when I was eighteen I knew so little about that stuff it was a bit of a wasted opportunity.”

Grappelli’s band-leading style was relaxed. “There were no precise instructions, no arrangements, no rehearsal, nothing. You’d just play a tune and he’d point to Denny Wright, the other guitar player, or Disley and say, ‘Take a solo’. Then he’d point at me and it’s sink or swim. So you’d play something and hope it wasn’t too terrible.”

Newman first toured internationally with The Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra. “It was a comedy outfit: the washboard player would solo on garden shears and a banana… It was great fun.” He subsequently joined comedy folk singer Fred Wedlock for whom he co-wrote the 1981 hit, ‘Oldest Swinger In Town’. “Noel Edmonds played it [on BBC Radio 1] and said, ‘I like that so much I’m going to play it again!’ And he instantly played it again. And then things just went crazy.” Newman even appeared on Top Of The Pops with Wedlock. “That was a dream because I’d been watching that since I was a kid. But we knew it couldn’t last. As long as the record was riding high, people in the record company would do anything for you. The moment it started to drop, it was ‘Fred Who?’”

Newman had by now developed a passion for Irish traditional music. “I remember hearing Planxty in 1973 or ’74, the first time I ever heard uilleann pipes. It was a fantastic sound. So from then I bought all the Planxty andChieftains and Bothy Band albums

and learned to play a lot of the tunes. But I wasn’t playing them stylistically correctly. I’d just put the record on and play along.”

His relationship with Máire Ní Chathasaigh, a multiple All-Ireland harp champion, with whom he began playing as a duo in 1987, proved transformative. “Her background is ninety-nine percent traditional Irish stuff. When I started playing with her she’d point out [my] stylistic errors and from then on I listened to a huge number of Irish traditional records, [by, for example] tin whistle players, over and over, trying to nail the style.”

In fact Newman and Ní Chathasaigh also include in their sets swing music and bluegrass. “Me having

to learn the Irish style was nothing compared to what Máire had to do [to play other styles],” reflects Newman. “She was a fish out of water but gradually figured out how it worked. And we play a lot of village halls so you’re not playing to folkies, just people

in the village who fancy a night out. We always start off playing a few Irish jigs, then sling in a bluegrass tune and people perk up. It gives them a bit of variety.”

Newman’s musical partnership with Ní Chathasaigh is ongoing but over the years he has worked with many other artists including Boys Of The Lough, with whom he played for three years in the 90s. “Friends thought I’d be bored playing rhythm guitar all night,” he recalls. “But playing rhythm guitar can be fantastic as long as you’re the only person playing chords – and nobody else in the band was – because you can make all the decisions. If you fancy slinging in a B minor in a piece, go for it; which meant that some nights if you were tired you could play very acceptably without any effort. But if you wanted to go for it, you could stick ten times more things in. And as long as the rhythm’s right, the other guys don’t care.”

In 1996, on New Year’s Eve, the band played before over 300,000 people in Edinburgh. “It was the BBC TV Hogmanay show and we finished at about twelve minutes to midnight. It was really cold, I was sitting there with my fingers going blue but it was really good fun: as soon as we finished the Band of the Royal Scots Dragoons started up and then the fireworks. “That was the biggest crowd I ever played to. But it isn’t nerve-wracking because you can’t see anybody. It’s more terrifying playing in a folk club to twenty people because you can see every one of them. And you know if you play something they don’t like you’re going to instantly see the disapproval on those faces!”

Newman and Ní Chathasaigh both play, with Martin Carthy, on ‘Bratacha Dubha’, on Rory Gallagher’s posthumously released, 2003 acoustic album Wheels Within Wheels. “Máire and I were playing once in the Troubadour in London and Rory came and really enjoyed it and afterwards had a chat. It was the only time I ever met him. But after he died his brother Dónal came up with old tapes Rory had recorded, sometimes in studios, sometimes on boom boxes. We got a boom box tape! And Dónal asked if I

could do anything with it.

“If you heard the original cassette you’d think, ‘This isn’t usable,’ because of the wow and flutter. But I put the tape on the computer and using computer editing you find where, for example, the tape slows and, ‘What was he playing at that point? A G chord.’ So you find a G chord he’s playing elsewhere which is clean and you cut it out and substitute the good bit for the

dodgy bit. So I chopped [the tune] up and made an arrangement and then Máire recorded her part, I recorded mine and we sent Martin an MP3 and he played along to that. It took a long time but turned out remarkably well.”

Newman and Ní Chathasaigh have managed to survive the challenges of the pandemic. “In the last eighteen months our income has fallen off a cliff. But so have our expenses,” he says. “The previous year we spent £3,800 on diesel for the vehicle and this year [2021] it’s going to be about fifty quid! So financially it hasn’t been too bad. And the mortgage is paid; we have no dependents and don’t owe anybody anything. And we’re not eating beans on toast every day – we’re able to live quite well.”

Crucial to the couple’s financial stability is running their own record label, Old Bridge Music. “Every time we sell a CD we make quite a lot of money because we are the distributor, the wholesaler, the retailer, everything,” Newman points out. “We don’t need to sell tens of thousands of CDs to make a reasonable amount. So if after a couple of years I’ve sold 3,000 of [Breaking

Bach] I’ll be over the moon.”

Transcript of the above article in Akustik Gitarre Magazine September 2022

Chris Newman: Keltisches Flatpicking mit Bach und Django

Von Michael Lohr

Hausbesitzer sanieren bis in die letzte Abstellkammer. Musiker entdecken nach erster Schockstarre den Lockdown als Freiraum für stets Verschobenes. Chris Newman zieht etwas

durch, dessen Vollendung zu Lebzeiten er einst als völlig unmöglich ausgeschlossen hatte: die komplette Transkription von Bachs ,Partitas' für Flatpicking-Gitarre. Ein Unterfangen britischer Exzentrik, wie es im Buche steht. Und damit genau das Richtige für Newman. Mit vier bekommt der Sohn einer nordenglischen Künstlerfamilie seine erste Gitarre; mit 14 hat der Autodidakt seinen ersten bezahlten Kneipenauftritt und ist mit dem Tag seiner Schulentlassung Profimusiker.

Als Teenager tourt er mit dem Jazzer und Django-Fan Diz Disley durch ganz England. Dieser bringt dem Jungen nicht nur al die wunderbaren Jazz-Akkorde samt Umkehrungen bei, sondern bewirkt indirekt und zufällig, dass Newman selbst bei Auftritten mit Jazz- Geigen-Legende Stephane Grapelli spontan Soli improvisieren muss. „Viel zu früh", sagt Newman später, der überhaupt nach Jahren der Praxis erstmals bei US-Flatpickern reinhört und entsetzt erkennt, wie schlecht er gegen diese abschneidet: schlimmer Sound, falsche Angewohnheiten, schlechte Fingersätze, schlampige Technik. Er arbeitet daran, während er als Komponist für Comedy-Sänger Fred Wedlock einen Nummer-1-Hit in einigen europäischen Staaten landet und als musikalischer Leiter verschiedener Sängerinnen durch Frankreich und England tourt - vor stets vollen, großen Häusern.

Doch dann will Newman, gerade 30, künftig „gute Musik anstreben" statt guter Tantiemen.

Er wendet sich dem Folk zu. Die Feinheiten, die er daran zunächst nicht versteht oder umsetzt, bringt ihm seine Partnerin Maire Ni Chathasaigh bei. Was der Mann von der irischen Harfenistin lernen muss, sei aber geradezu nichts gegen das, was sie sich zugleich von ihm an Bluegrass und Jazz (auf der Harfe!) draufschaffen muss. Bis heute bieten sie, auch privat ein Paar, als Duo ein berauschendes Musikerlebnis, bei dem keltische Mystik plötzlich abbiegen kann Richtung Bluegrass oder Gypsy.

Das ist freilich nicht Newmans einziger Tummelplatz. Man erlebt ihn bei Steve Kaufmans Flatpicking-Camp in Tennessee als kongenialen Duet-Partner eines Dan Crary, als Gitarrist der Boys of the Lough, auf Solo-Alben (Folk, Jazz, Bluegrass und westafrikanische High-Life-Musik!) X auf Parlor-Gitarren, OMs und Dreadnoughts verschiedener Marken. Als vielbeschäftigter Produzent sorgt er für das Albumdebüt eines Studenten namens Clive Carroll und lehrt an englischen, irischen und nordirischen Universitäten.

Trotz der sogar akademischen Tätigkeit startet er sein Bach-Projekt mit einem unvermuteten Handicap, das die Verrücktheit des Ganzen wohl endgültig beweist: Newman kann keine Noten lesen; Versuche mit 18, 30 und 50 hat er mangels Geduld abgebrochen und resümiert: „Das ist einfach nichts für mich." So muss er also Bach Ton für Ton heraushören und komplett memorieren, bevor es an die Gitarre geht - eine Steelstring natürlich, als Flatpicker, der auch sonst (Plektrum!) gegen fast alle klassischen Regeln verstößt. Dass bisher trotzdem alle Kritiken geradezu enthusiastisch ausfallen, kommentiert er mit typisch britisch-fatalistischem Humor: „Die Klassiker haben ja immer noch Zeit für ihre gnadenlosen Verisse.”

    ⁃    von Michael Lohr, Akustik Gitarre, September, 2022

Interview with Máire for Listen to the World, a program of the Sacred Bridge Foundation, Jakarta,  Indonesia

Máire Ní Chathasaigh: The Harp’s Desire

Being called “Virtuosic, fascinating, dramatic, original, inspired, gloriously adventurous, dazzling, brilliant, stunning, impassioned, electrifying, bewitching, moving, achingly beautiful, influential, revered, unique...” by well-respected media such as The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Scotsman, and Folk Roots, or “the most interesting and original player of the Irish harp today” by the late Derek Bell—Northern Irish harpist virtuoso—should already speak enough of a musician. Máire Ni Chathasaigh is certainly one of Ireland’s most influential harpers of our time.

Born 1956 in Cork City, Ireland, Máire was familiar with and interested in music since a very young age. She started from playing the piano at the age of six, the violin when she was ten, and finally the harp at the age of eleven. And having a self-conviction as a full-time professional harper in times like now—instead of any other ‘popular’ instrument—has certainly made her a true artist. She also has earned recognitions such as won a first prize in All-Ireland and Pan-Celtic Harp Competitions on a number of occasions, and received Irish music's most prestigious award, that of Traditional Musician of the Year - Gradam Cheoil TG4 - "for the excellence and pioneering force of her music, the remarkable growth she has brought to the music of the harp and for the positive influence she has had on the young generation of harpers” in 2001.

Now once again, we are proudly pleased to present you this interview session with one remarkable musician, yet a very humble woman.

LTTW: First of all, we’d like to know a bit of your background. At what age did you get interested in (playing) music? And at what age do you decide that music is your thing?

Máire: I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in music. My mother tells me that I could sing before I could walk! I’ve therefore been singing since I was tiny. I started to play the piano when I was six, the violin when I was ten and the harp when I was eleven.

When at school, I was interested in everything and studied as wide a range of subjects as I possibly could. I was very fortunate that the school facilitated this, as Irish schools these days would be far too concerned with the accumulation of the maximum number of points towards university entrance to allow me to get such a broad exposure to so many diverse disciplines. I was accepted into the Medical School in University College Cork, but changed my mind on the day of registration when I realised that medical studies would leave very little time for playing music! I decided upon Celtic Studies – the study of Irish, Welsh and early Irish history – instead. After completion of a post-graduate teaching diploma, I embarked on a music degree, but after one year of this my parents “suggested” that I might like to get a job! I taught in a second-level school for three years, during which time I became convinced that the creative life was for me not a choice but a necessity. I therefore resigned from what was a very well-paid position and embarked on the insecure but rewarding career of a professional musician.

Where did you have your musical training?

I was fortunate to grow up playing both traditional Irish music and classical music in parallel – it has been a great advantage in life to have the ability both to learn by ear and to sight-read. My earliest musical training was provided by my mother. Traditional music education was provided within the family and through membership of the Cork Pipers’ Club. Classical music education on piano was provided by a private teacher, followed by teaching in the Cork Municipal School of Music. Good harp teaching was very hard to find outside of Dublin at that time, so I had to make do with rudimentary teaching from a lady who taught singing to harp accompaniment. I wanted to be able to play traditional Irish dance music on the harp – tunes that I had been playing on the tin whistle and fiddle – so during my teens I developed the special techniques necessary to perform it in an authentic-sounding style, which I still use to this day. I didn’t get “proper” harp tuition until I was 21, when a wonderful pedal harpist called Denise Kelly came to Cork to teach at the SchoolMusic. The great grounding which she gave me in classical harping enabled me to refine and polish my approach to the traditional music I really wanted to play of.

OK, now in the subject of Celtic music; Celtic music is found in many areas across Europe, from Spain, France, England, Wales, Scotland to Ireland. What is the common denominator(s) among them, and what are the unique features of each?

Linguistically, the Celtic languages can be divided into two branches: P-Celtic and Q-Celtic. The languages currently spoken in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, and in the past in the Isle of Man, belong to the Q-Celtic branch and are closely related. Welsh, Cornish and Breton belong to the P-Celtic branch and are closely related. Though there would be no mutual comprehension between the speakers of Irish and Welsh, for example, the languages when examined are similar in grammar and syntax. The civilisation of medieval Wales was however similar to that of Ireland in social organisation, literature, myth and legend and in the primacy of the harp in musical expression.

Irish and Scottish musical traditions are closely related, but are very different to Welsh, Cornish and Breton musical traditions – certainly in the form in which they’ve survived into modern times. There are no obvious common denominators.

So, strictly speaking, one can speak of Pan-Celtic language, culture, civilisation, art – but not of a Pan-Celtic musical language. In the music market, Celtic is one of the most well-known among the world’s roots music with Latin and African as perhaps the main “competitors”. How do you think Celtic music reaches that level in the world?

Even though “Celtic” is not a good or accurate label artistically or historically, as a commercial construct it has been inspired! It’s the best marketing wheeze ever thought up by a record company.

What does Celtic music means to its people? And what does it mean to you personally?

I can only talk about Irish music, which is immensely important to Irish people and intimately bound up with our sense of self. It is hugely important to me personally and is the conduit through which I choose to express myself artistically.

What kind of influence and/or contribution do you think that Celtic music has given to the world of music?

It has a special aesthetic that even in diluted form sparks the imagination of so many people. Musical languages, like languages, encapsulate and represent the spirit of a people and the greater the number of them that flourish, the more they enrich us all. It’s fascinating to see how our particular musical language has moved from a peripheral and endangered position to a prominent one. I’m sure practitioners of currently obscure forms of music will be heartened by this and will be emboldened to introduce themselves to the wider musical world…

There are quite a few women in Celtic music, but only a handful playing the Celtic Harp that includes you of course. Why is that? What made you decide to take on the harp?

My mother tells me that I’d always wanted to play the harp (though I have no recollection of this), so therefore they bought me one when the opportunity arose. I was eleven at the time. There are now lots of female harpers in Ireland, but only a handful who play professionally.

How different is the Celtic harp compare to other harps, physically? Does it require specific playing techniques as well?

There isn’t really such a thing as a Celtic Harp, historically speaking. A very specific type of harp – usually referred to as the Ancient Irish Harp - was played in Ireland and Scotland for over a thousand years, until the beginning of the nineteenth century. It had several unique features: its forepillar had a pronounced curve and was T-shaped in section; its soundbox was hollowed out of one piece of solid willow attached to a soundboard; it was strung with brass and played with long nails; it was held on the left shoulder; the melody was played with the left hand and the accompaniment with the right; since it was very reverberant, the harpers used very complex stopping techniques to shape phrases. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this harp was replaced by what is often called the Neo-Irish Harp. This looked superficially like the old Irish harp in that it had a curved forepillar, but it was constructed in a modern manner and played with the pads of the fingers and is the harp, with the addition of modern refinements, that we still play today. It is the harp people normally mean when they refer to the Celtic Harp.

The Welsh harp, by contrast, was always physically very different, and still is so today, though it too was played on the left shoulder.

The Irish/Scottish harp in itself does not require specific performance techniques. However, the stylistically correct performance of Irish dance music does require the use of specific techniques. The techniques I developed for this purpose in the 1970s – there had hitherto been no tradition of dance music performance on the Irish harp - have since then been widely adopted and adapted.

Music in general has transformed into a subject that is merely treated as entertaining and income generating activity. Its other roles and functions, along with its ritual side, continue to disappear. Does this happen to Celtic music as well? Shall musicians and societies accept this change as the future way of looking at music?

Traditional Irish music’s “other roles and functions, along with its ritual side” do seem to be “continuing to disappear”. A number of older musicians in Ireland feel despondent about this change, which from their point of view dates from the creation of the “Celtic Music” marketing brand and the subsumation of Irish music into that. I am much more optimistic, however. I know from personal experience that it is possible to be a professional musician (i.e., “entertain and generate income”) and be true to oneself artistically. It’s unfortunately the case that many musicians for whom commercial success is of over-riding importance do abandon any ambition to touch the heart – with the result that music which is heavily hyped and expensively marketed tends so often to lack soul. But I have a lot of faith in people’s capacity to be moved by music and am constantly amazed by it. Music is the most abstract of all art forms, while at the same time being the most emotionally transfixing. I know that certain 17th century Irish harp airs have the capacity to pierce the heart of the most unpromising audience. Such moments can’t be faked or forced and are what make performance so endlessly rewarding.

We must never accept the commodification of music. As artists we must make common cause with and draw strength from others with the same ethic and world view - and remember that the environmental movement was once considered to be hopelessly romantic and impractical!

Fame and fortune also seem to replace passion as the instrument in measuring the “success” of an artist. How do you reply to this matter?

To me, passion is all-important.

How do the young in UK perceives and (un)appreciates Celtic music?

The young in England are generally speaking uninterested in Celtic music. Large numbers of older people like it very much, I’m happy to say, as our concerts in England are usually very well-attended! They are however perhaps not so emotionally attached to it, as England is not a Celtic country. A good percentage of the young in Celtic countries like Scotland and Ireland are very interested and engaged with the music.

Roots music such as Celtic is very much associated with acoustic instruments. Do the growing use of electric instruments and digitalization affect the acoustic features of Celtic music?

I don’t think that the use of electric instruments in any way affects the essence of the music. The equating of “acoustic” with “authentic” is to me a complete red herring. I myself use an electro-acoustic Camac harp in my duo performances with Chris – the harp sounds the same as it does acoustically, only louder! An instrument is just a vehicle which conveys musical thought and feeling and the fetishisation of its acoustic properties by those I dub “acoustic fundamentalists” is to me simply wrong-headed, and largely to miss the point of music…

You have travelled distances to perform, and have had many chances in getting acquainted with music of other cultures. Are there any of them that inspire or impress you more than the others? And why?

Even the most cheerful Irish music often has a melancholy undertow: I love this duality of mood in music, so am naturally attracted to other music which shares these characteristics – Swedish, Old-Time American, Eastern European, Middle- and Far-Eastern… Traditional African music has a gentle, limpid quality that is immensely attractive.

Who influence and/or inspire you the most, and why them?

So many things inspire me – not just music, but poetry, art… I’ve always been drawn to the music of Bach: so intricate and perfectly balanced. In terms of traditional music, I’ve always loved the singing of Máire Áine Nic Dhonncha (d.1991) and the piping of Willie Clancy (d. 1973): their music is endlessly subtle and creative.

Did you have a dream(s) that you have lived it? Anymore is yet you would like to live in?

I have many dreams!

It’s great that you still remember Sacred Ryhthm Festival at the Nijo Castle in Kyoto. Would you join again if Sacred Bridge Foundation organized another cultural event?

Absolutely! We would love to take part in another such cultural event! Our trip to Kyoto was extraordinarily memorable, from so many different points of view…

Any messages you would like to say to the audience?

Trust your instincts. Don’t allow marketing men to convince you that black is white: beauty in music is life-enhancing and its absence saps the spirit.

…And any words of wisdom for Listen To The World?

No words of wisdom, I’m afraid! I will simply say that I love Listen to the World’s ethos and its ambition to present the real, the true and the beautiful in music.

(The above interview is accessible at http://www.listentotheworld.net/interviews/maire-ni-chathasaigh-harps-desire/

When I first heard Chris Newman play the guitar in a concert with his musical partner, Irish harpist Máire Ní Chathasaigh, about two years ago I was stunned. He moved around the fingerboard with tremendous fluidity and ease. He played phrases that were totally foreign to my ear, and thus extremely captivating. I remember, in my guitar player's brain, watching him play and thinking how complex his playing seemed. I was thinking, 'I would never be able to do that!' Yet, at the same time there was such simplicity, elegance, and tastefulness to the music he was making that it boggled my mind. Chris is one of those rare players that have a very high degree of technical skill and proficiency, yet remain extremely musical and tasteful.

Raised in the North of England, Yorkshire, it was sibling rivalry that brought Chris his first guitar when he was just five years old. He recalls, "I have a brother who is ten years older than me. In the 50s he was into Buddy Holly and skiffle, which was a big thing in England at the time. He got a guitar for his birthday. His birthday is in September and mine is in October. After he got this guitar, I badgered my parents and said, 'I want one, I want one.' I got a little guitar, that I still remember quite well."

Initially Chris learned everything 'second hand' from his brother. Both he and his brother were playing nylon string acoustic guitars. Chris said, "He was always into acoustic stuff. Neither one of us have either been into electric stuff that much. He was old enough to go to the folk clubs, so he would go there and come back with all of the things that he had sort of memorized. And then I would learn them off of him." Other than a very short 'electric phase' when he was 16 or 17 years old, Chris has always played the acoustic guitar.

When Chris first started he learned to play fingerstyle with his thumb and three fingers (no finger picks). But he says, "I was also sort of playing a flatpick style, but without a flatpick. I would put my thumb behind my index finger and I used the nail of my index finger to pick with. But I was always breaking my nail, even on nylon stringed guitars. It wasn't until I was about 15 years old that a friend at school said, 'You know I think you can get a thing that you can hold.' I didn't know. That weekend I went to the music store and they had this big tray of plectrums. I bought one of those and I have not put it down since. I hardly ever play fingerstyle now."

When asked about his early influences, Chris said, "I remember that there were two records that I got that I sat down and completely ripped off. One was by a guy named Davey Graham and it was an album called Folk, Blues and Beyond. Bearing in mind when it was made, it is just a fantastic record. I still have it. I remember listening to that and saying 'Wow, this is it!' The other record was Down Home by Chet Atkins, which my sister bought me for my tenth birthday."

In addition to learning the fingerstyle licks on these two albums, Chris said that he was a huge Beatles fan. He remembers, "The new Beatles records were always released on a Friday. I'd save up my pocket money, buy the record on Saturday, and have learned the tunes by Sunday. That is what I used to do. So, a lot of the guitar solos that I learned on my nylon string guitar using my index fingernail as a flatpick were George Harrison solos from Beatles records."

A little while after learning how to play with an actual pick, Chris got his first steel string guitar. He said, "That made a big difference. And it wasn't too far after that that I heard Clarence White. I heard him on a record and I didn't have any idea who he was. I was playing with a band, actually, and we were playing in this nightclub in the north of England. They decided that they were going to put on acoustic bands every once in a while. I was playing with this group and the DJ there, rather than playing a rock and roll track at the end of the night put on this acoustic record that someone had given him. It was actually Don't Give Up Your Day Job. The song he played was Huckleberry Hornpipe. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was packing up the gear and I suddenly heard this fiddle playing. I thought 'Well, that is nice.' Then all of the sudden came Clarence's solo. I thought 'What on earth is this!' I had never heard anything like it in my life. I went over to the DJ and said 'What is that?' He said, 'It's this thing here' and he actually gave me the record. I still have it."

Chris took the record home and started learning Clarence White solos, starting with Huckleberry Hornpipe. He played the recording for a friend of his who he knew had a great record collection. His friend was not only familiar with Clarence, but had several Kentucky Colonels recordings. He also told Chris that he ought to listen 'to this guy called Doc Watson.' Chris said, "I though this was fantastic. There was something going on in America that I ought to know about! My friend said, 'Well, while your at it...' and he started pulling out records by Norman Blake and all these people that I had never heard of. It was amazing. He made me a load of cassettes and for ages I would listen to these tapes and it was always something stupendous. I heard the Clarence White recording and thought, 'this guy is really one off.' Then I found out that there really were a ton of these guys out there and that it was quite a thing [laughs]."

Chris has never 'had a real job,' having always made his living playing the guitar. When asked about the kind of music that he has played, he said, "It has been a variety with a capital V." He has done everything from folk, blues, jazz, swing, to commercial music. He has backed up everyone from commercial singers, to comedians, to Celtic performers, to bluegrass fiddler Richard Greene and played in small clubs to huge theaters.

Although Chris achieved a great deal of success playing the guitar professionally during the early part of his career, in about 1985 he reach a point where he decided 'he'd rather play interesting music than pursue interesting pay checks.' He immersed himself in traditional Irish and Scottish music and began touring with Irish harpist Máire Ní Chathasaigh in 1988. Chris said that he discovered Celtic music in very much the same way he discovered Clarence White and bluegrass. He remembers, "I was playing in a bar in Belgium in the seventies and during the break a guy put on a record on the house system and it was this fantastic music. It was an Irish band called Planxty. It was the first time I'd heard Irish music played in that way. I went on and bought the records and started playing the tunes. So, I'd been playing Irish music along with the records, but never playing out. When I started with Máire it involved an enormous amount of work for me to get the style nailed. There is nothing particularly complicated about the tunes, but all of the triplets and ornaments are tough to get right. It is question of feeling your way. You have to know where to put the triplets, cuts, and rolls to give it the right feel. It is really a bit of a minefield."

Because the 'feel' of the music is not something that can be written down and studied through a book, Chris said that he had to listen to a lot of flute and fiddle players. He said, "There is a great recording made by a lady named Mary Bergin who is just the greatest tin whistle player on the planet. I couldn't believe the range of different sounds coming out of this tin whistle. What I did was record this album at 15 ips and then slowed it down to seven-half, then three and three quarters. That way I could dissect the ornaments. I then tried to adapt that to guitar. Of course, working with Máire was great because she knows that stuff inside out and backwards. She'd say, "No, not there!" I'd say, "Why not?" She'd say, "I don't know. You just shouldn't." [laughs]

When Chris and Máire first began working together, they started with her repertoire. She made a tape, and Chris learned the tunes. He says that he listened to the tape over and over and over and learned how to adapt her harp tunes to the guitar. Since then he says that they later began to incorporate other kinds of music, like swing jazz, that made her work a bit harder to adapt to the harp. Today Chris and Máire's repertoire incorporates a wide variety of music from swing, to bluegrass, to Irish and Scottish music. They continue to tour extensively in both Europe and the United States.

Because Chris did not start out his musical career playing Irish music, and because he had such a wide and diverse background prior to playing Irish music, Flatpicking Guitar Magazine conducted the following interview with Chris regarding the technical aspects of learning Irish music on guitar.

FGM: What would you recommend to flatpickers who wanted to incorporate more Irish music into their playing style?

CN: To be honest, the first thing you do is just listen, and don't try to listen to just guitar players because there aren't that many. Listen to flute players, fiddle players, and harp players. The next thing they could do is to enrol in some kind of summer school like the Milwaukee Irish Fest Summer School or the Gaelic Roots at Boston College.

FGM: I know that you have taught at these schools yourself. What kind of things do you teach and what kind of players do you find are attending your classes?

CN: I had a half a dozen people in my group and they were all intermediate to advanced players. They were all pretty decent players, playing with flatpicks and coming from the bluegrass end of things. They wanted to learn how to apply what they do into the Irish/Scottish context. We spent a lot of time working on the rhythm and working to learn where you should put the triplet and where you shouldn't put it.

FGM: Do you find that people coming from a bluegrass context have trouble getting into the rhythm of Irish music?

CN: They very often have trouble with jigs. Reels are similar to something like Blackberry Blossom so they don't usually have trouble with reels. But when you get them started on 6/8 tunes or 9/8 tunes they have a lot of trouble just getting their head around the idea. It is just a different thing.

FGM: Is there a way that you have found that helps students overcome that difficulty?

CN: Just simply by example. Just getting them playing it. Sooner or later the penny drops. You see people struggling and trying really hard and all of the sudden it is like "Ahh!" Once you get the rhythm right with the right hand, when it comes to playing the tunes it actually becomes easy and where you put all the ornaments will become more evident if you have got the rhythm right in the first place. If you try and learn the tunes with all of the ornaments before you get the rhythm right, you are banging your head against a wall.

When I do these classes I spend a lot of time doing straight technical stuff as well. I know my left hand technique is pretty good, but I know that there are lots of ways that I can improve it. One thing I can do, within five minutes of watching someone, is to tell him or her 'what you really should be working on is this.'

FGM: Do you spend time in the workshops watching the students play and then offering some suggestions regarding their technique?

CN: Absolutely. If you have 25 people in a group it is harder to do that. But I will try to do it whenever I can.

FGM: Tell us about your instructional book.

CN: There are a lot of technical exercises in there. It is aimed at the intermediate to advanced level student. The exercises have the dots and tab and under the tab I also included the fingerings. That is the thing that took me the most time, but it was important because a lot of these tunes, especially the Scottish tunes, have got fantastic jumps, like three octave arpeggios. If you finger them properly, they are not particularly difficult, but if you don't finger them properly you've got no chance at all.

FGM: Is the book all Irish and Scottish music?

CN: No, quite a lot of the tunes I made up myself. It originally started out as an aid to workshops so that I could have some hardcopy to give out to people for the technical stuff. Then someone suggested that I write some tunes out as well.

FGM: When you say 'technical stuff,' what are you referring to?

CN: Finger exercises, loads and loads of them - mostly left hand positioning things because that is where people generally fall down. I used to work with a guitar player years ago, we did little swing jazz gigs together. He was a really good singer and a decent player. He was a very musical player and had great ideas for solos, but he could never play them because he didn't have the technical facility. It was really sad because I¹d be sitting with him and we'd swap leads and he'd play some solo. You could see where he was going and it was really nice, but then it would just fall down. I used to say to him, "If you would just spend a little bit of time on technique anything you want to play is going to be possible."

I don't want you to get the impression that all I am concerned with is technique, but without the basic technique you will do nothing. With this pal of mine it was really sad because it is really easy to teach someone technique, there is nothing magical about it, you basically sit down and just do it and you will improve. But it is almost impossible to teach someone how to be musical. You get people that are fantastic technicians, they can play anything, but they are boring players. It is clean as a whistle, but it is boring. I can think of a million people I've heard like that. This pal of mine was a fantastically musical player, which is the tough bit, but he didn't have the technical ability. I used to say, "You really should do it. It is criminal not to!" He'd say, "Well I can't be bothered with technique" and so he'd stumble away. It is a real shame.

FGM: What would you describe as the difference between Irish tunes and Scottish tunes?

CN: Not huge actually. There are certain types of tunes, like strathspeys, that appear in Scotland and not in Ireland. It all comes down to the ornamentation. The Irish tunes tend to be more heavily ornamented. But even then, that is a generalization because it depends on which part of Ireland you are talking about. There is a definite difference in say people from Donegal and people from Clare. The further north you get in Ireland, the more like Scottish music it becomes, which is not really surprising.

FGM: When you talk about knowing when to use the ornamentation and when not to use the ornamentation, does that come down to an experience and feel thing?

CN: Exactly. As far as I'm aware, no one has ever written it down. For me I had a good mentor in Máire because we'd be sitting at home practicing something and she'd say, "No, you can¹t do that!" The first few times I'd say, "Well, why not?" After a while you can sort of just tell when it is right. I would recommend that anyone interested in learning that sort of thing listen to fiddle players and flute players.

The other thing I tell people at workshops is that the guitar is fairly new to all this. I mean it is a relatively recent addition. It isnt a traditional instrument. A guitar player's role in that kind of thing is really as a rhythm instrument first and a harmonic instrument second.

I have played with a lot of fiddle players and flute players and I know full well that if a tune is in D, for example, and you start the B part in D or if you start it in Bm and then turn it around different ways depending on where the melody is, the person you are accompanying will not care one hoot. But if you get the rhythm wrong, they will go completely nuts and absolutely hate it. As long as they have that strong rhythm, that is all they are interested in. To evidence this you only have to listen to any recordings made in the 1920s and 1930s by fiddle players like James Morrison or Michel Coleman. They made these incredible fiddle recordings but they were always accompanied by the worst piano player that you have ever heard in your life. But all they wanted behind them was this very percussive 'bash-crash' on the piano. They couldn't care less that the guy was completely playing the wrong chords. You listen to any recordings from that time period and you will find Hapless Harry on the piano! It will just make your teeth ache.

FGM: Since there are not too many lead guitar players in Irish and Scottish music, do you find that other musicians will typically want you to stay in a rhythm role when you get together to jam?

CN: Absolutely. It is one of the reasons I don't play sessions in pubs and things like that. Sessions in pubs on guitar playing Irish and Scottish music is the most boring job in the world. I've got no objection at all to playing rhythm all night. I actually enjoy doing that. But playing rhythm to eight fiddle players who are all trying to play louder than you, I can't be bothered. I hate all that and avoid it like the plague. But in a good situation with a couple of other musicians, especially if you are the only guitar or only chord player there, is great fun.

FGM: In terms of lead guitar work in the Irish music genre, who would you recommend that people listen to?

CN: Arty McGlynn is somebody you really ought to listen to because he has been doing it for a long time and he is a terrific player. He really is very good. He has been on a million records.

If you have the opportunity to listen to Chris Newman play the guitar live or on CD, you ought to treat yourself to it. He is also a talented instructor. His book of tunes, tips and technical advice ‘Adventures with a Flatpick’ was published by Old Bridge Music in 2001. He is principal guitar tutor to Newcastle University's Folk Music degree course and is much in demand at summer schools: within the last couple of years he has been a guitar instructor at Steve Kaufman's Flatpicking Kamp in Maryville, Tennessee, at Milwaukee Irish Fest Summer School and at Boston College's famed Gaelic Roots.

Transcript of feature in The West Australian, Saturday December 6, 1997

Repertoire gets the music fans reeling

Since their last tour around this bottom right-hand corner of the world map, this gifted duo of Chris Newman and Maire Ni Chathasaigh seem to have been all over the top left-hand bits, dazzling crowds of music fans with sore feet from trying to keep up with the blistering, jazz-infected reels and jigs that are a part of their repertoire.

Ni Chathasaigh is one of the top few harp virtuosi working in the field of Celtic music. She is an innovative technician with a feel for the stately, yet personal, dedication tunes (or planxtys) of the great 18th century blind harpist Turlough O’Carolan.

Chris Newman, from Watford in England, is an amazing guitarist for whom the fretboard has no dusty bits. He is at home with the late Stéphane Grappelli, whom he knew and played with on the British jazz scene in his teens, as with the Scottish-Irish folk band The Boys of the Lough, with whom he played until recently.

This is the tenth year of the duo’s fertile collaboration - one that has seen concerts and acclaim throughout the world. In the past year they have visited Germany, Italy, Scotland and more than 20 European festivals.

Their continuing and growing popularity is based on the breathtaking, fast and furious empathy of their playing, the emotional depth of their slower pieces, particularly the O’Carolans, the self-deprecating wit of Newman’s introductions and their obvious delight in the whole thing.

Their latest album Live in the Highlands, has been acclaimed as their best, capturing all the fizz and fun, the songs and tunes - the live experience they pull together so well. 

See them at the Fly By Night Club in Fremantle on December 13 at 8.30pm. Tickets are available from Zenith Music, Mills, 78s, Red Tickets, or the Fly.

Transcript of feature about Máire and Chris in The Irish Examiner, 11 September 1996.

Traditional limitations are ignored: Classy twin act hits a high note

Light and shade ... Máire Ní Chathasaigh and Chris Newman explore new music territory with unusual pairing of harp and guitar.

by Pat Aherne: Between the Jigs and the Reels

FIRST, lest there be any further confusion, Máire Ní Chathasaigh is the same person as

Miriam Casey, harp player extraordinaire from Bandon.

Generally known as Miriam when she lived in Cork, she has used the Irish form throughout her professional career, hence the occasional bafflement.

It was difficult to avoid Máire/Miriam on RTÉ television last Sunday night. She appeared not once, but twice: on the promising new traditional music series, The High Reel (both solo and in duet with her sister Nollaig/Noelle on fiddle), and, later, Cursaí Ealaíne with the English guitarist, Chris Newman.

Together, Máire and Chris have created a new existence for the unusual pairing of harp and guitar. Their music is firmly based in the Irish tradition, with a particular emphasis on Turlough O'Carolan, but it encompasses influences that range from classical through jazz to bluegrass. Both have ignored the conventional limitations placed on their instruments and have explored fresh and exciting paths, often developing new techniques in order to achieve their goals.

Máire and Chris are a classy double act whose music, for all its subtlety and elegance, lacks nothing in power. Their back catalogue is impressive: The Living Wood, The Carolan Album, Out of Court and last year's Live in the Highlands all give evidence of their extraordinary virtuosity. However, they know better than to confuse virtuosity with musicality. There is a sure-footed confidence, bordering on bravado, even in the most technically demanding passages.

Máire Ní Chathasaigh and Chris Newman are at present in the middle of an Irish tour. The remaining dates are:Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann Theatre, Monkstown, Co. Dublin, 8 pm, Tuesday September 24; Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, 8 pm, Wednesday September 25; Ulster Canal Stores, Clones, Co. Monaghan, 8.30 pm, Thursday 26 September; Clifden Community Arts Week, Clifden, Co. Galway, 8.30 pm, Friday September 27; and Ballymena Arts Festival, Ballymena, Co. Antrim, 7.30 pm, Saturday September 28.

Transcript of feature / interview in The Irish Examiner, 11 January 1996

The traditional harp on the net: String stars Maire Ni Chathasaigh and Chris Newman

Between the jigs and the reels with Diarmuid O'Flynn

HARPIST Máire Ní Chathasaigh, or Miriam Casey as she is better known [in Cork], is strongly independent woman with persuasive and considered views on traditional music and, in particular, on her instrument, the harp.

Growing up in Bandon in the '60s and '70s as part of a musical family, she faced both the taunts of 'diddly-aye-diddy' from local youngsters and an awkward instrument that carried with it an array of cultural baggage.

In the context of the time, the harp was associated with Bunratty banquets, Kathleen Watkins and Mary O'Hara - a ladylike, if dull, accompaniment to ladylike, if dull, songs.

From the time she started, however, Máire was determined to play traditional dance tunes, rather than bland accompaniments.

“There was nobody to copy," she says. "Nobody was doing it at the time. I had to develop a technique from scratch. Every instrument uses different techniques to produce the same effect. The whole point is to create the 'aural illusion' that the effect is the same.

By the end of her teens the method had taken shape.

"I had an idealistic view of wanting to create a new tradition for the harp in Ireland. The only way you can do that is to teach people and not just teach by rote, not just ‘this is what you do’, but ‘this why is you're doing it’ she says.

For many, the absence of any reference to Máire Ní Chathasaigh was a glaring omission in the episode of ‘A River of Sound’ dealing with the harp. Indeed, the impression was given that the playing of instrumental traditional music on the harp was a recent development, evolved by players such as Laoise Kelly. For someone such as Máire, who has always shared her knowledge and techniques generously, this lack of acknowledgement must have been galling.

Máire's 1986 solo album ‘The New Strung Harp', was a collection of tunes she had played for some time. "I should have done it years before. But the attitude - I'll be better next year' - is a stupid kind of perfectionism. You feel that ‘this is my defining statement’, but, in fact, it's like a chapter in your life."

The following year saw the opening of a new chapter and a particularly fruitful collaboration with English guitarist, Chris Newman. Together, they developed a highly attractive blend of harp and guitar, based on traditional Irish music but with influences ranging from classical to jazz.

"Outside Ireland,” says Máire, "people have completely open minds about harp and guitar. The first time they come out of interest: the second time, they bring their friends."

It's difficult for some, particularly within Ireland, to accept that it is possible to travel the world, as Máire and Chris do, filling concert halls, rather than playing background music in restaurants.

Máire and Chris have released four albums together to date, the most recent ‘Live in the

Highlands’ (OBMCD08, distributed in Ireland by Claddagh Records) was recorded during a tour that took in Inverness and the Western Isles of Skye, Harris, Benbeculla and Mull. This gave them the opportunity to present their live set in intimate surroundings, with the added bonus that the recording equipment could safely be left in the car overnight.

The result is a warm and thoroughly accomplished album that balances virtuosity with a deep respect for the music.

Traditional musicians, generally, do not analyse their craft in any great detail, and some, almost superstitiously, have a fear that such an exercise would rob their music of much of its magic. Máire, on the other hand, believes that it’s most important that traditional music is explained properly.

She explains the differences between classical music - which she describes as “a misnomer, a catch-all covering phrase many different types and styles of music” - and traditional music by drawing on an analogy from the visual arts.

"Beethoven and the Romantic composers of the 19th century and, later, Mahler, composed landscape paintings with bold, broad strokes on a huge canvas; traditional music is more like a miniature painting”, she says.

"If you think of the broad strokes in classical music as macrodynamics, then the dynamics in traditional music are microdynamics - everything happens on a very small scale. Subtlety is highly prized in traditional music. There is something deep in the Irish psyche, in our way of expressing ourselves, that values subtlety in every art form."

When Máire started, she was alone, now hundreds of harpists in Ireland use the techniques she invented.

That is an extraordinary legacy.

Chris and Máire are on the Internet at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/obm

Transcript of feature about Máire in ‘Treoir’ Magazine, 1989

FOR THE RECORD

By John Lynch

The name of Máire Ní Chathasaigh is by now as synonymous with the Irish harp as that of the last of the bardic exponents of that instrument, Turlough O'Carolan. In recent years she has done trojan work towards reviving the playing and teaching of one of the oldest symbols of our heritage, whilst simultaneously effacing the nauseating stage-Irish image all too long associated with this celestial emblem.

[The New Strung Harp] TP019 was recorded in Modlothian, Scotland, at the close of 1985, featuring Máire herself on harp and synthesizer, with guest appearances on fiddle, whistle and vocals by her sisters Nollaig and Máiréad and brother Greg. We hear a wide variety of material, ranging from songs to reels, jigs and hornpipes, with four tunes by the aforementioned O' Carolan, the final one of which

"Planxty Sudley" I recall Máire informing Pat Butler in an interview for "Saturday Folk" (RTE Radio 1) in April of 1986 that she would have liked to use a string quartet, but couldn't due to lack of money; whereat Mr. Butler aptly replied, "Well, I don't think the lack of money comes across in your music.” Instead, the strings are provided on this track by Nollaig with Maire accompanying with good effect on synthesizer. Perhaps the songs, of which there are three, could have been more centralised on the album, rather than occupying the second and final tracks on side one and the opener to side two, thus giving a better balance to the record. "Hinderó Hóro" has a nice flavour to it, with, I would imagine from the extensive sleevenotes, an equally interesting story, while her version of "The Bantry Girls’ Lament” is the best arrangement in my view of the many recent recordings of that popular song.

Most of the material on this album has probably been recorded by other musicians on different instruments, but much of it has never before been given a harp treatment, especially where the dance music is concerned. "An Spéig Seoigheach" is a slow air which Máire found in a Bunting collection, and this to my knowledge is its first recording. The two jig and reel selections in addition to the brace of hornpipes are a delight to listen to, and verify Máire's unique and original skills as she was the first person to adapt fiddle and pipe music to this instrument.

More of the same from Máire can be found in a Bunting collection, and this found on "The Living Wood", (Green Linnet, FIFI090), but this time in the company of Englishman, Chris Newman, operating on guitar, mandolin, bass and percussion, thus giving a more contemporary feel to the album. 

Again, a work of good variety, with a sprinkling of American material, "Beating Around The Bush", "Fiddler's Dream and Whiskey Before Breakfast" with both instrumentalists combining their masterful talents very effectively throughout. Side one draws to a close with some brilliant reel playing, commencing with "The Flax In Bloom", and on this track Máire can be heard vamping in fine form on piano. Of the three songs - this time more centrally situated - "An Páistín Fionn" is probably the best known, and as always, she makes a great job of it. “Walsh's Hornpipe & The Peacock's Feather" sees harp and mandolin blending beautifully note-for-note, and given the fact that Chris Newman comes from a jazz-oriented background, his ability and understanding of Irish trad. music is in itself no mean achievement. Another favouring factor on this record is the very high quality of production, so often found lacking, especially and unfortunately, in the field of music of this type on cassette tape or vinyl.

Both these albums make for pleasant listening, and a refreshing change from the many fossilised-sounding group albums who seem obliged to record in accordance with contractual agreement. I would have no hesitation in putting the former into my top ten favourite L.Ps, though personally, I know very little about the harp as regards playing technique, tuning, etc. But to return to my opening comments and to put matters in perspective, allow me conclude by opining that Máire Ní Chathasaigh is to harping as Christy Ring was to hurling: the best, the most gifted, the greatest.