Recently, a couple of exceptional concerts demonstrated again the eclectic and constantly evolving nature of traditional music. The finest contemporary exponents of Irish and Celtic music are both steeped in the roots of their tradition, highly respectful of its past and yet open to an ever-widening range of external musical influences that keep the art form fresh and vital: creatively stimulating for the artists and enthralling for their audiences.
The first of these events was an appearance by the renowned Spanish Galician musician Carlos Núñez. As if to prove the point Núñez was appearing not at a traditional music festival but at the Limerick Early Music Week at the end of March. As well as being the foremost exponent of the Galician bagpipe, the gaita, Núñez is a keen researcher of Celtic music and passionate about early music. His ensemble for this concert brought together medieval bagpipes, fiddles, gitterns and harps – a sound-world closely related to that of traditional music of Celtic nations. The programme, entitled ‘Celtic Stories of the Cantigas’, was based around the 13th century song collection of Alfonso El Sabio, King of Castile. Leon and Galicia, one of the most important of such collections from medieval Europe.
Like many Irish musicians I suspect I first came across Carlos Nunez through his collaborations with Paddy Moloney and the Chieftains, who Nunez first met at the Lorient Inter-Celtic Festival in 1994. Having previously referred to Galicia as ‘the unknown Celtic country’, Moloney was keen to support Nunez in spreading the appeal of Galician music, much as the Chieftains had already been doing with Irish music for decades. The concert tours and recordings that Nunez and the Chieftains undertook together achieved exactly that – bringing the music of Northern Iberia to new audiences around the world, most notably in the USA. Of course, since then Nunez has gone on to be a global star in his own right , with the Los Angeles Times suggesting that “if it’s possible to become a pop star playing traditional music on bagpipes and recorder, Núñez could be the man” Perhaps Nunez interest in early music can help broaden the audience for another minority musical genre?
Talking of Paddy Moloney, he was a legendary musical collaborator across musical genres, moving far beyond Celtic music to include country, rock and roll , film and classical music. Arguably Paddy Moloney’s most notable successor in this regard is the fiddle player Martin Hayes. Firmly grounded in the music he grew up with in East County Clare, Hayes has worked at the highest creative level with extraordinary musicians in the classical, folk and contemporary music worlds, particularly with his seminal Irish American band The Gloaming. This brings me to the second of the recent concerts – Hayes’s most recent first collaboration with the National Symphony Orchestra at the National Concert Hall as part of the venue’s St. Patrick’s Day programme. The concert featured newly commissioned arrangements for orchestra and the Common Ground Ensemble, a group consisting of jazz pianist Cormac McCarthy, cellist Kate Ellis guitarist Kyle Sanna ad Martin Hayes himself. Hayes said of the project “I have come to regard traditional Irish music firstly as music and secondly as Irish and traditional . That might seem like a trivial distinction, but for me it is a way of viewing music as a universal expression without boundaries, freely interacting with other musical genres…….I view this collaboration as a moment where the uncompromised melodies of traditional music are elevated and transformed by their immersion in the rich, beautiful harmonic layering that only a great symphony orchestra can offer’.
The synthesis of Irish traditional music with a symphony orchestra is a whole other topic but there is no denying that Irish traditional music is achieving a status akin to the Western canon of orchestral music as ‘a universal expression without boundaries’.
Simon Taylor. April 2025
Simon Taylor is a musician and classical guitarist based in Dublin. Formerly the CEO of Dublin’s National Concert Hall he was previously CEO of Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra; Senior Producer classical music for BBC Northern Ireland and Head of Orchestras and Performing Groups at RTE (Ireland’s national broadcaster). He has performed and recorded widely as a guitarist, most recently two concerts in Malaga.
Fo the BBC he produced radio documentaries on Andres Segovia and Spanish music and culture.
Enviado por José Antonio Sierra
