[BEGIN ANN HEYMANN PART 01—Filename: A1009a EML Mmtc] DS: We’Re Here in the Celtic Junction

Ann Heymann Interview

Narrator: Ann Heymann

Interviewer: Dáithí Sproule

Date: January 3, 2018

DS: Dáithí Sproule AH: Ann Heymann

[BEGIN ANN HEYMANN PART 01—filename: A1009a_EML_mmtc] DS: We’re here in the Celtic Junction. I’m here with Ann Heymann. I was going to look at the date – is this the third of January?

AH: Yes, the third.

DS: The third of January, and we’re going to have a chat about Ann’s distinguished career and the music and so on. I already warned Ann that usually I ask people, I want to put people in their context, so are your parents both from here, or are they from somewhere else?

AH: My parents were both born in Minnesota, but my mother was born in Duluth, and her parents were both Swedish immigrants. Her dad came over, I think, when he was seventeen, her mother maybe sixteen. They met in Duluth. They were both from Sweden, and my mother’s mother died, she remembers her being only sick in bed. She had problems because of having had rheumatic fever, so her father worked selling draperies door to door in the Depression in Duluth, and the daughters sewed the draperies. He’d get the sales, and my mother and her two older sisters would sew the draperies. She was not Catholic, but she had Catholic friends, so she’d go to confession with them on their way to somewhere else. There was Irish music going on in Duluth then too.

DS: We’re talking about the 20s, 30s? Later, 40s?

AH: Let’s see. They were married in ’46. I should know the year my parents were born, but they never wanted to tell us their age. (laughter)

DS: I keep on asking questions during the thing to try and orient myself chronologically, and sometimes I get completely confused. There was a lot of Irish music in Duluth?

AH: Yea, yea. I don’t know really anything about it, and she’s remembering back to when she was a girl. She had her group of friends, and her mother died when she was eleven, so she just remembers her mother being in bed, but she tells me stories about how she always wanted to play the harp. This was after, after I started harp. She would take the top off a piano and play the strings individually, imagining it was a harp.

DS: It is funny how you can see some things being meant to be, you know, in retrospect. You can look and say, “Oh, that’s interesting.”

AH: Yea, I have more to say on that line.

DS: Your mother, did she have any Swedish still? Was the language gone, or did she sing anything in Swedish, or know any songs?

AH: No, she didn’t have any, but she was interested. Before she died, she was teaching herself Swedish and compiling an English-Swedish Dictionary on her own, when she was sick with multiple myeloma, probably a result of sewing those fabrics when she was a young girl. There’s a grouping of multiple myeloma in certain industries, and one is the textile industry, and I’m thinking freshly made fabrics and working with them, whatever the dies they were using. Both of her older sisters might have died of it as well. They didn’t get checked out fully, so it’s kind of interesting.

DS: So we already have a portent of the harp and a portent of the scholarly if your mother is almost dying and she’s making up a dictionary. It’s amazing.

AH: My dad, he came from a family of three, and his parents were both born in this country, but one generation later, and they were both from Sweden too. I hear there’s some Norwegian and a hint of the Russian prince somewhere, but who knows? My grandfather on my mother’s side, my mother’s father, his father, they lived at the palace in Stockholm. He was doing something there, and they sent him off because he got a maid pregnant. Of course, I didn’t learn about that from my family. (laughs) And I didn’t seek it out either, I wasn’t very interested. I never found it all that interesting, their line.

DS: Did your father play any music or sing?

AH: That’s how he started talking about it. His own father was a really nice tenor, and my grandmother was a piano player and teacher, and she’d play piano, and he’d sing with a soprano. There’s a recording somewhere of him, but my grandmother wouldn’t teach my father because he had to wear glasses, and she thought it would be bad for his eyes. It’s odd he never played an instrument. He became enamored with the pipe organ, and he would go to church every week and he had his seat where he could watch the pipe organist play, and all of his kids would have to be stationed. We’d have to go to Sunday school, but we’d have to be stationed to get him into his favorite seat. We’d be positioned at various doors to get in there and hoard his seat so he could watch the organist play. (laughs) He bought himself a pipe organ and built a house around it so sixteen foot pipes in the house, and some shutters. The house was built so the shutters would open and send the noise of the pipes into the living room and into the dining room. He taught himself to play hymns on the organ. He just got teased – we kids were terrible – I didn’t do the teasing, I had teasing brothers, and they teased him all the time. Both my parents, they weren’t brought up really with music, and yet they made sure we had lessons, so there was a piano in the house. Before lessons I remember playing with sounds on the piano and making up stories. It was in the basement with centipedes, so you can imagine the nature of the stories. (laughs) I started piano lessons when I was four.

DS: Where were you in the Twin Cities area?

AH: Saint Louis Park.

DS: Did you enjoy the lessons? Did you enjoy going to the lessons, or was it a chore?

AH: it wasn’t too bad. It was something to do, and I walked there, but my brothers had their way of dropping out of things, and I was good enough, I didn’t, you know. I behaved a little better than they did.

DS: Did you keep up the piano lessons up to, you know, all these grades and things?

AH: I did, and then they started me on pipe organ lessons, so I studied with the Mount Olivet Lutheran Church organist, Diana Lee Metzker. She was a Ph.D. in pipe organ performance.

DS: What age were you when you started the pipe organ? 3

AH: I think maybe fourteen, something like that. I wasn’t into it at all, so I sight-read through my lessons. That’s pretty much what I did. I had respect for it, I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t want to do it. And before that with piano lessons, I didn’t want to go to summer school, church summer school – I didn’t want to do that. So I got out of it by practicing three hours a day on those Sunday school days, but the practice consisted of a piece by some Russian composer. It was very banging and strong, and I played in full anger and full strength on a grand piano for three hours, angry. Another thing I did – they’d get me up in the middle of the night if I hadn’t practiced the organ, so I would really play it loud then to wake up the whole house in the middle of the night. I wasn’t happy about it. When I did practice during the day, I wasn’t really practicing, I was reading a book, and I’d have it ready, I’d be pretending with my foot a pedal passage or a hand, and I’d be reading a book. And I’d hear someone coming along and I’d turn the page. I pretty much resisted it all. And I was looking for a music, I was trying to imagine a music that I liked. The music on the radio, the melody wasn’t loud enough, it was all way too much bass, drums, rhythm guitar.

DS: The pop music of the day?

AH: Yea, a lot of it was bothering me, and I was trying to imagine a music where the melody and the rhythm could be – the rhythm and the harmony could be suggested in the melody. When I first heard Irish music – and this was through my friend Barbara van Vorst, who became Barbara Suess Dahill. I knew her through horses. I always wanted to ride horses.

DS: What age were you when you met Barbara?

AH: I don’t know, I was in tenth grade, ninth grade.

DS: Was she already playing Irish music, or interested in Irish music?

AH: No, we met through horses. I ended up riding at the same barn. She was a year ahead of me in school. She went to Washburn in Minneapolis, and I went to Hopkins High School -- well, that would be tenth grade. She would come and she had a car, and she’d come and pick me up, and I was very good at skipping school. So we’d do that a lot. This was Vietnam War days, and I had a social science instructor who would give me a pass whenever there was a demonstration down at the University of Minnesota. I didn’t actually demonstrate, but I supported

demonstrating and I wanted to be there and watch, but I wasn’t a joiner, giving my moral support. I can’t go in a group and start yelling and stuff.

DS: It’s interesting because the era that we’re talking to people about is the Vietnam War era, so it’s very interesting – I’ve a long series of question marks in my head – and one is talking to people, or even knowing people for decades, and some people never mention politics. I’ve certain friends, I don’t think they’ve ever mentioned what was going on in the world. So then there are people when I’m doing these oral history interviews, and only one or two of them have ever mentioned the Vietnam War, and yet it was the biggest thing in American life for a formative period in their lives. Anyhow, that’s interesting to me.

AH: And I met Tom Dahill – Tom Suess then – back before I met Barbara – before she met Tom. Maybe not before I met Barbara – I met him when I was out on a date with the drummer of their band, The Poor Boys, that he played in. Tom was the lead singer of the Poor Boys.

DS: Were they a rock band?

AH: Yea. He and Barbara, they both went to the University of Minnesota. I went to the University of Minnesota for one quarter, and I took three incompletes and dropped out. I registered for the next quarter, and I dropped out and took the money that my parents had paid and left town.

DS: Where did you go?

AH: I went to Milwaukee.

DS: By yourself?

AH: Yea. I had to get away from home. I wanted to go to the Sorbonne in Paris for University. The University of Minnesota was in the cards and live at home and drive there, and I didn’t have anything I really wanted to do there with that, and so I left home and worked at a psychiatric hospital, got a job. In about a year and a half I was back in Minnesota and got a job working with horses.

DS: So what year are we now?

AH: ’71. Barbara had married Tom. Actually she had married Tom, and they’d gone out to Boston, and they’d started playing, and they’d got requests for Irish pieces in the bars they were playing in, so they learned some songs – you know, the Clancy Brothers – and liked it better than what they were doing. Tom was doing his own songwriting and doing popular music. Barbara played flute. She was, I think, majoring in flute at the U. I backed up her recital, I played piano to back up her flute playing on something and sight-reading. I really wasn’t all that great with it. My whole thing was just one of not causing trouble taking lessons with my parents. I never wanted to do that particularly. So I heard Irish music anyhow. Barbara and Tom got into it. Then I heard early Seán Ó Sé, early Planxty, Ceoltóirí Laighean, and that was the music I’d been trying to imagine, where the melody was all important. The music was complete with the melody. It didn’t need more. So I really just fell for it, but I wasn’t going to play it – I just liked it. I was interested in riding horses. Then for Christmas Tom and Barbara gave me a tin whistle – that meant I was honor-bound to learn to play it. I taught myself by ear. I didn’t have any books. I did have O’Neill’s “Thousand and One”, I did have that, and I did have recordings. I taught myself rolls, how to finger, it was by ear.

DS: Did you latch onto any particular whistle players?

AH: No. Not really at all. I was playing whistle and it was for fun, and then – I don’t know how many people have mentioned the Plough and the Stars Céilí Band.

DS: Yea, a lot of people have.

AH: Ok.

DS: So you heard them?

AH: Well, I was with them.

DS: Oh, were you?

AH: Yea, for the few gigs we were doing – Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson and Sam Dillon and Mary and me. I don’t know if Jamie Gans got involved, I don’t think he was. And Martin, of course. But we didn’t have any…I don’t remember any…I mean we had posters or pictures, I’ve no idea where anything like that went. It was the Plough and Stars.

DS: You were playing céilís, were you? 6

AH: Yea, and the Cedar Riverside, the Commercial Club, various things. I’ve very little memory of where I was. (laughter) I would drive, but someone would give me directions.

DS: And sessions, where were the sessions at that time, or did you session much at that point, or party?

AH: Parties came through when Barbara and Tom came through. I lived out in Long Lake, and they ended up coming out to where I was. I lived in an old farmhouse a couple of blocks from where I worked with horses. So big blowout parties there, and then later I lived about a mile away across the highway – a converted tractor shed and chicken coop that had been moved together, and it was quite a rustic set-up, but it was perfect for me, and we had big parties out there too. This was all the time of drinking late too much, staying out, going out all night, dancing until you fell on the floor – a lot of just pure carry on. And it’s really through Barbara and Tom that I met Charlie, my husband.

DS: Had he already started playing with them, before you?

AH: I knew them well, and Kevin McElroy was a previous member that had come through. They’d gone to Ireland, and Kevin had brought his girlfriend along and not enough money, and they ran out of money -- Barbara and Tom had to start paying for him. Then they all ran out of money, so they had to leave Ireland early, take an earlier flight, and they could only get to Montreal. They wired me for money, they had no money, and they borrowed a dime to make the collect phone call. (laughter) So I wired them money. They needed me to wire money, and I did that the next day. Then they got home to Chicago, and they had gas in the car in Chicago, and it was Saturday and they had the night off, they didn’t have work there, home early. They went down to a session on the southside – they had enough petrol. Noel Rice put them on stage with Charlie to play at the dance. Tom said, “Do you know this, do you know that?” He played concertina and banjo, and he knew those numbers. After he played, they called him up the next day and said, “Would you join us?” He’d been trying to get a job. He’s a graduate of Northwestern University and had a teaching degree and had majored in history and took a lot of ethnomusicology courses because it was before they had it as a major. He had quite a bit of that in what he did. You’re going to talk with Charlie at another time so I won’t go on…

DS: Nice to get two different versions of everything. (laughs) 7

AH: Anyhow, so that’s how I met him. They asked him to join, and they gave him some CDs, three full CDs of music that they played, and he listened to them on his drive from Chicago out to Denver, and then he joined them for their gig. He plays accordion today from Tom Dahill’s suggestion to move up to accordion. They wanted that sound. And I’ve always been really sad that somehow my suggestion of playing the pipes didn’t take. He was already playing the box. I’d a line: I’d give my right arm to play the pipes. (laughter)

DS: In the earlier era there was really no one playing the uilleann pipes in the scene, so that was a gap in fact. Of course, people might say, “Isn’t a pity Laura didn’t play the uilleann pipes?” because she was interested in pipes, but nowadays there are plenty of good pipers. There’s a big interest now.

AH: It’s made quite a resurgence. You see though that Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann was founded, and part of their founding thing is revive the making and playing of pipes and harp.

DS: That’s sort of in their constitution or their…?

AH: Yea, yea.

DS: I didn’t know that.

AH: At least, it was unless they’ve changed it.

DS: No, it’s probably the same.

AH: It was part of their, I’ll say constitution – I can’t think of the right word. They ended up having the Pipers’ Club, which is a separate organization but a real serious group for pipes, and got pipes going that way. But with harp they went with the neo-Irish harp and didn’t worry about the other one. Cairde na Cruite, the Irish Harp Society, was basically lever harp with pedal harpists guiding the way with lever harp. Máire Ní Cathasaigh is the one who really put traditional music on the lever harp, on the modern Irish harp.

DS: We’ll come back to that in a sec. You haven’t taken up the harp yet in our story.

AH: So I played tin whistle in the céilí band, and then Barb and Tom gave up housekeeping, and I inherited their records and books when they went… They’d been living in Boston, and I got their books and record collection, as they went just to go touring. They had gotten a copy of

Edward Bunting’s “Ancient Music of Ireland”, a fairly early copy, and I wish somehow that we still had that. That’s how I got interested in the harp. I was asking Tom questions about it. Tom knew more about Irish music than I did. I was asking him questions about it, and he goes, “I don’t know – maybe you’ll be the one to play it.” I was asking, “Does anyone play this, Bunting’s description?” And I will say that, as a kid growing up, there were two instruments I actively disliked, and one was pedal harp and one was piano accordion. (laughs)

DS: There you go – that’s fate. And the pedal harp – you know, all this terminology – the pedal harp is the big concert harp, is that it, that you’d see in an orchestra?

AH: Yea, and I like to say pedal harp because I play my harp in concerts. (laughs) But yea, the big…

DS: Yea, it’s funny, just recently – do you know a little girl called Anna Loegering? Have you ever come across her? She’s about fourteen now, and she comes to me for fiddle and song. And she’s obviously very, very clever, a lovely girl. But people said, “Oh, she plays the harp.” And just a few months ago she was doing her recital, her class recital, and her mother invited me to come and see her playing the harp. I was delighted, and of course lovely when you get a chance to go and hear your student and support them, you know. It’s probably the first time or the only time I’ve seen someone playing the full orchestral harp – whatever you would call it – and she was great. She was fantastic and it sounded great, very, very good. So you were sort of sitting in your apartment, where you live, and you’ve got the book, and you’re getting interested in the tunes, but you didn’t have a harp. What did you do?

AH: Well, there weren’t any harps, and so I had Bunting, and I had the engravings of two harps, two broken harps in Bunting, and tried to figure out how I was going to get an instrument, because I think I earned about 27 cents an hour for the hours I put in, and I had just sort of a living salary that I was just able to do the work, but it was six days a week, fourteen hour days.

DS: What was the work?

AH: Training horses and giving riding lessons., and sometimes it would be seven days a week when driving to and from shows and things like that. It was pretty full on, but how could I afford a harp? But I was thinking of going to a luthier or a cabinet maker or a wood worker and saying,

“Can you make me something like this?” Charlie had music friends in Saint Louis who had a music store, and everyone knew I wanted a harp. He learned from them that they had heard of Jay Witcher, who had started making harps that were detailed with enough information in Robert Bruce Armstrong’s “Irish and Highland Harps”, a book that had been done in the early 1900s – a very good book for the time. Finally for the first time they’ve done work on the two medieval harps that survive in Scotland. A former student, Karen Loomis, now got her Ph.D. working on doing full organology on instruments and their repairs so you know the way their wood grain is, wood’s type. There’s still work to be coming out on it, but it’s fantastic to finally get that work done.

But anyhow Jay Witcher started making harps, so I got an early one of his. The music store purchased three from him and the first cláirseach I ever heard – and with my own fingernails I’d known to grow, I’d been reading for two years before I got a harp. In ’73 I got a harp, but I’d been interested and reading about it up until then. It was the sound I made myself. What had happened though is that I’d had a riding accident. I had a horse fall with me, and I’d broken my ankle, and my right leg was in a cast, and my left one was in a splint, and I was then on a forced vacation. So I took a plane to Chicago, and Charlie played with Barbara and Tom that night, and then we stayed out all night and then drove to Saint Louis. He bought me my harp. He had more money, I had no money as a horse trainer. He was an Irish musician, he was more flush – it sounds funny, but that’s how it was. We drove back home to my place in Minnesota then, and he was too tired, and I couldn’t drive -- he had a stick shift. So most of the way home he slept behind the wheel and I steered, and he was able – he was a pro sleeper, and he was able to keep his foot on the gas pedal. I would wake him up if I needed. I’d steer and I’d wake him up if I needed him to do something like slow or something major – I’d just wake him for a bit, and we got home that way.

DS: My god. (laughter) I’ve never heard that done before.

AH: There were some broken strings. He and I changed them together, and at first they broke. It was hard to get it going, so he helped me along the way.

DS: Those were metal strings then presumably?

AH: Yea, and it was a copy of the Castle Otway harp. You can count the survivors in different ways. I like to think roughly a dozen, because the later ones, where they’ve lost their construction standards, I don’t like to count. There’s different ways of looking at it. One is sort of the tradition, and then one is the organology – when is this a cláirseach and when is it modern harp that just has been strung and put wire strings on it? So it’s very different. And that’s why I don’t like using the term wire strung harp, because any harp that you put wire strings on is wire strung. And lever harp, I would complain about that because a lever harp without levers, that’s an odd one. So names are a real tough item.

DS: Terminology is difficult.

AH: It is, yes. It’s meaningful to me. Anyhow, that’s how I met Charlie. I always called him Chuck, but Barbara and Tom insisted that he go by Charlie.

DS: That’s funny. That would be a question mark, because I knew him as Chuck too first. I still think of him as Chuck.

AH: He was Chuck, but they wanted him, so on the recordings they did in Colorado with – oh, god, it’s escaped my mind right now – anyhow the recordings they did in Denver he was Charlie Heymann. They didn’t want him Chuck because Chuck wasn’t a nickname for Charles in Irish, and Chuck…

DS: It’s American.

AH: Yes, it’s a very American name, so he went by Charlie. He was ok to go along with it. That became his professional name, so I use that professionally, and then people were confused about the name and so to clarify I told people, “Well, when we’re in the bedroom, I call him Chuck.” (laughter) And then people stopped asking the question any more.

DS: Well, so many people have two names. In fact, almost invariably people have two names. Obviously I was David, my name is David, and then my teenage friends called me Davy – half a dozen people still – and then the day I went to the teacher in Saint Columb’s College in Derry to sign up for going to the Irish college in Rannafast in Donegal – you know the summer college to learn Irish when I was fourteen – he said, “What’s your name?” I said, “David Sproule.” He said,

“Right – Dáithí Ó Spróil.” And we’d never heard the name Dáithí. So you do come to these transitions. Seán Ó Riada of course was Johnny Reidy. Ringo Starr is Richie, Richie Starkey.

So that was you started with the harp. You had a harp…

AH: I had to teach myself.

DS: That’s what I was going to say. There was nobody to help, as it were, who was round you.

AH: No, but actually this is where those years of piano and even more so, I think, pipe organ… It’s really weird how many organ people got involved in the Irish harp, the early Irish harp, as Siobhan Armstrong in Ireland likes to call it, the Irish harp. In fact, in terminology it was always called Irish harp even when in Scotland, speaking in English language – it was always called Irish harp. And in the record keeping, when someone played the harp, it was a gut strung instrument. If they played the Irish harp, it was metal strung. If they played the cláirseach or the cruit, it was metal strung. That’s how it was used, but today you’ve got Comunn na Clàrsaich in Scotland – they use the Scottish spelling. It was cláirseach and they went to clàrsach, and they say it’s generic for harp, and they are using clàrsach when speaking English – “I play the clàrsach.” But you won’t hear people speaking English saying, “I play the pedal clàrsach,” or “I play the concert clàrsach.” They do use harp, they use clàrsach for their Scottish harp. And the Scottish harp is the same as the Irish harp as far as the modern instruments go. So it’s very funny. All the names…

DS: It’s very awkward.

AH: It’s very awkward. That’s why we, Charlie and I, called ourselves Cláirseach, because cruit was taken as the meaning for harp, was the other instrument, and to me it was very different. Having played organ, I had this ear for continued ringing notes, but on the organ you would hold the note down and play notes against it, but on the cláirseach it would stay down until you stopped it, or until it died out, you know, that kind of thing.

DS: Yea, that’s a nice thought. I never thought of that, you know, the common ground between the harp and the organ. The organ is a completely different instrument. It’s some other realm. I listen to Bach, an awful lot of Bach. When I listen to Bach on the organ, it’s like as if it’s from some other planet.

AH: I have appreciation for the music and I don’t dislike it. It’s just not what I would spend my life doing. Oh, I really love black music, rhythm and blues, and all of that. But I don’t need to play it – it’s fine for me for it to be a mystery.

DS: That’s my line exactly about jazz. I’ve listened to a lot of jazz, piano jazz and so on, over the years, and I’ve listened to a lot of classical music too, but, as you just said, I’m quite happy not to try and play it at all. But then there’s some other musics where you have an unstoppable urge to try and play it or sing it – like the Irish traditional or the old traditional songs, and chords, Beatle music, and also actually blues. I had to learn how to play blues for some reason, whereas jazz I’m happy to listen, but I don’t need to play it.

AH: So we got started. I got the harp and taught myself to play it. We got married – this is terrible – I’m trying to remember was it ’75 or ’76, and whether I was twenty-five or twenty-six. I think we probably got married in ’76, when I was twenty-five. We went right to Chicago where Charlie was playing with Barbara and Tom in Irish bars there, and I got worked into the group while doing that. I didn’t immediately join them. I would sit at the gigs and listen, and played later. I was playing, but I never played the harp in the Plough and the Stars Céilí Band. It was strictly whistle – I taught myself whistle.

DS: And when you started sitting in with the Dayhills, did you play the whistle?

AH: Some, but mostly harp. It was easy because it’s hard to mike, and they didn’t do anything new, so really all the bases were covered, so I could just sort of fit in.

DS: You could find your own space.

AH: Yea, yea.

[END ANN HEYMANN PART 01—filename: A1009a_EML_mmtc]

[BEGIN ANN HEYMANN PART 02—filename: A1009b_EML_mmtc] AH: I talked about when we got married and figured out it was ’76. We got married at my parents’ house, and for their friends dinner at Interlachen Country Club, and then my portion of the wedding we had a hooley at the Odd Fellows Hall in Saint Paul. Old friends decorated the 13

place, cleaned it up, and Chuck’s mom helped bring food for it, and his grandmother paid for drink for it, and it was wonderful. This was the period when all the music was together. There weren’t different factions. All of the people were pretty much together. So the Curtins were there, MacCaffertys were there, both sides. Everybody was there.

DS: The Plough and Star people were there?

AH: Yea. The Northern Stars hadn’t started up yet, I don’t believe.

DS: The title Northern Star didn’t start till ’79 or ’80. Yea, and I know that because by that time I was here.

AH: So it was great. Pete O’Brien from Connemara danced a broom dance. It was old style. Andy Vaughn, and Mary MacEachron’s parents were playing. He played a washtub bass, and she was on hammered dulcimer, and friends of Charlie’s, fiddle players, and a piper came, and a singer who sang “My Singing Bird”, and it was all acoustic as well. It was just gorgeous. We have photos of it. It was just lovely. That was what we did at our wedding. And our mindset: at the top of the cake we had a cláirseach and a concertina, and I think a mandocello was on the wedding cake. (laughs)

DS: Have you a photo of that?

AH: Yea.

DS: We’ll probably come round again to people and ask for photos -- can we scan some photos for the archive? – it would be lovely to have, you know.

AH: If it’s something that’s spoken of, yea. We have some good photos of that. So we went off, and then by early in ’79 Charlie and I split off. I think it was January. We’d been living this whole time, our married lives, without a home. Barbara and Tom had an apartment in her brother’s attic in Chicago, and we’d stay with Charlie’s folks when we were in Chicago. We’d stay with my family when we were in the Cities, and when we were in other places, the apartment where it was, and we’d play mostly Irish bars. Well, they had been touring the three of them in a Volvo, and when we got married we bought a Chevy Suburban, and the four of us traveled with a p.a. system and some cooking utensils and a mid-sized harp – it would be not too small – and all of these instruments. Chuck would do all of the driving. It was a pretty wild time, 14

but anyhow we decided we had to leave, and I was thinking of… Charlie was trained as a teacher, and he thought maybe he’d get into teaching, and we were thinking about having a family. Maybe I’d get back to riding. But right then it was like, “We’re ready to play music, and we haven’t done this, and we don’t have anything set up yet. Let’s play a bit of music.” We bought ourselves a half inch tape, four track recorder and recorded music in my parents’ basement on there. No one had ever heard the two of us play together, and we did it there and made this and went off as Cláirseach. It went really, really well. Barbara and Tom had been scheduled to do a gig – it was during the Renaissance Fair days in Wisconsin, at the University of Wisconsin, and it was an indoor folk festival at night, and they couldn’t make it. We’d played for dancers at the Ren Fair and then driven lickety-split. We had no time, it was a pick-up gig, because they couldn’t make it, and we’d been hired a week before to do it. Charlie was driving, and I change his pants for him, silly Ren Fair pants, or whatever we were doing – playing music on a hay bale with accordion, of course – Renaissance accordion – switched regular pants on and went there. And Scott Alarik, a folk singer from here, who now lives in Boston, he was backstage, and I was nervous. This was our first gig – I mean, playing on hay bales for dance tunes – this was our first gig, and it was a festival, you know, on a stage and all of this, and he had a flask of Irish whiskey, and I took a big belt on it before going on stage. Our first number was “The Shady Woods of Trugh” in English, and we’d recorded this, and we got a standing O on our first number, and they were all settled on the ground in indoor seating, and they got on their feet and just cheered. Never ever ever again has that ever happened. (laughter)

DS: You peaked with your first number of your first gig.

AH: It was downhill from there.

DS: Where was the venue of that? This was the Minnesota Folk Festival?

AH: It was in Wisconsin. I never know where I am – Charlie would be better at that. Yea, it was fun. So we did this, and then just sort of stayed with it because it was going somewhere. But the work was changing. We originally could play in bars and do serious material and listening material, more like what you’d think of as a coffee house nearly. But Irish bar music got louder, and there was always a problem with a loud table here or there, so if people who wanted to listen, it was always a little bit of a struggle. So my method of handling it was to start drinking a 15

lot, because I’d get really unhappy with noisy tables that weren’t paying attention to the music. I would keep my temper by drinking, and I drank a lot in those sets. I’d start drinking after I started playing by set two. And my rule was to be able to walk out of there and actually be able to put my flute away and carry my flute. Charlie could carry the harp and stuff – to get out of there under my own power…

DS: You had to be sober enough to carry your flute out…

AH: Yea, yea, yea. (laughter) That was my own personal rule. Charlie doesn’t set limits.

DS: As soon as you started talking about hiving off from the Dayhills, from Tom and Barb, I was very aware of, I was wondering how aware you would have been that this would have to be different, because Tom is a wonderful entertainer and he can project himself in any scene and entertain in any scene, Tom Dahill, whereas immediately I think of you and Charlie’s music, it’s more delicate, more subtle, and it’s not shooting for that – it’s not shooting for the same area at all.

AH: No, no.

DS: So immediately I’m sure you were aware of it too, and not to put words in your mouth, but the difficulty of slotting into the same kinds of venues you had been in – it was obvious you were going to be going a different path, is what I’m saying, to some extent.

AH: In hindsight it was really too that the bar scene changed. It really did change, but we managed for a while. It ended up, though, we were doing folk clubs and festivals – Irish festivals, folk festivals – along the way. You’d still play the bars and it was good money, five nights a week.

DS: It was more work too – you would be hired for weeks or whatever.

AH: Yea. When you’re running your business on the road and there’s no email, you have to use pay phones, there’s no easy way to do your press information. You can see, it’s tiring. And we lived on the road pretty hard. What we would do though – we’d earn enough money, and we’d go over to Ireland. At first – oh gosh, the going to Ireland was a big deal for us. My first time in Ireland was after I got married, and we pretty much went there every year. In 1982 they were having the 200th anniversary of the Granard harp meetings before Belfast – the Belfast harp 16

meeting in 1792. In 1782, ’83, and ’84 they had one in Granard. They were having a 200th anniversary, and for me that was really a big thing – I wanted to be at it. But I didn’t believe in competing in music, so I was just going to be at it. Meanwhile I had friends – a modern Irish harp player and a hammered dulcimer player in the Pacific northwest who were going – and they wanted to do a group competition, so that they could play, the wife could play. So I had two things – one rule is thou shalt not compete in music, and then the other one is thou shalt play with your friends when they ask you to. So I wasn’t going to compete, and I realized it was sort of bullshit, since I was going to be there and play with them, I needed to compete in the solo competition. So I did that. I had some really nice music prepared, but it was hellish trying to tune in this cold room. It was jam-packed the school hall, jam-packed, and really warm, and you had to tune in the outdoors, it was cold and all of the nylon harps playing real loud tuning, and I didn’t use a tuning device or anything like that because I was too purist then. I didn’t have an electronic tuner, you know, watching a gauge. Then you come into the hall, and you think you’re in tune, and the metal strings pick up the warm temperature and immediately start going. I played pretty well, but I was shaky, I wasn’t used to playing on my own. I performed, but it was always as two of us. I was shaking and I was playing some cool variations that actually Charlie had come up with on “The Three Sea Captains”, and I broke down. All I knew about competitions was with horses, and if things were going really poorly, and you decided this is it, I’m done, you would ask the judges to please be excused. So I stopped and, “May I please be excused?” (laughter) And they looked at each other and they said, “No.” (more laughter) So I had to keep going – oh, I was so humiliated because I had let the instrument down, you know, totally humiliated. We weren’t recording – it would have been wrong to record the competition, but we wanted to record the results, to be there, it was an historic moment. I sent Charlie out to the car to get the tape recorder, and he couldn’t get back in because it was too crowded. Anyhow, I was listening, and it took a long time to get the results. Finally it came up, and they came down to first place and it was me. And I couldn’t believe it. And it was wrong. I told everyone, “This is wrong, this is wrong, I shouldn’t have it, I shouldn’t have it,” all the way up there. And they explained why I got it – what I was doing was really exciting, and it superseded the mistake.

DS: Great.

AH: I mean, they had their opinions about it. Anyhow, by then I realized that harp wasn’t getting any attention in Ireland. Before, when we’d come to Ireland, we’d never worked, but now we came to Ireland, and I would do research and I also wanted to promote the instrument. It changed that way, and I was also very aware that the wire strung harp – and I’ll call it that because that’s what people were calling it here – was in a minor revival to the revival of all harp, folk harp revival, I’ll say, but it was the poor cousin to it. I was very concerned if it became a thing over here before it became a thing in Ireland and in Scotland because then it would no longer…Ireland couldn’t own it. You see what I mean? It had to come from Ireland. I purposefully thought that I did not want to start an organization that promoted the instrument here – it had to be there first. Only now, and it is getting a strong foot, I’m so grateful to have been a part of building that and still going over every year. It’s really great to see.

DS: So there was an organization started in Ireland? And you were involved with starting an organization?

AH: Yea. We had two daughters finally. We travelled for twelve years on the road and were married for twelve years before daughter number one. Then when she was coming five, we had to get a home. When we weren’t traveling, we’d live at my parents’ house, so it wasn’t on the road at that time twelve months a year, but maybe more like eight, coming and going. We ended up being out in the country because it was what we could afford. We ended up where we are, and I’m not supposed to complain about it. My girls tell me, “Don’t you like who we are?” (laughter) This is how it went. I wanted to raise them in Ireland, couldn’t manage that. So I can’t remember where I was going with this.

DS: You had mentioned wanting the revival to be from Ireland, and I wasn’t quite following. Were you saying that there was an organization started in Ireland and that you were involved with starting the organization?

AH: I got a letter, and it was from this Siobhan Armstrong, and she identified herself as being a… “I play historical harp. I’m from Dublin, and it finally dawned on me that I should be playing the harp of my country. I remember hearing you play when I was a wee girl.” And it was at the first Granard or somewhere in there. She heard me playing at a bar, at a session at the harp

festival, I think she said. So she wrote me, and she came to Winthrop, Minnesota, on two occasions and studied.

DS: Which is where you live.

AH: Yea. She was already playing gut harp with fingernail technique, playing arpa doppia, chromatic, continental harp, with two rows of strings that overlap – sometimes there’s a portion of three, depending on the fingering system. She’ll tell the story, that I was after her to start a harp organization in Ireland to promote the harp. But, being from her approach, she called it the Historical Harp Society of Ireland, but she has always been great to keep the focus on the cláirseach and on the early Irish harp. She likes to say early Irish harp, and she would like people to say that they play the modern Irish harp, that she wouldn’t be the only one to do a qualifier with it. But again it’s the terminology thing.

DS: You’re in a terminology minefield constantly apparently.

AH: Well, it’s a big one, and people who play the modern harp really don’t want to say, “Here’s a piece of Carolan, but he didn’t play this kind of harp at all.” They don’t want to say that.

DS: What did you say was the title she had for the society?

AH: Historical Harp Society of Ireland.

DS: What is Cumann na gCruit then?

AH: Cairde na Cruite. That’s the Irish Harp Society. It was started by Gráinne Yeats’s generation.

DS: That’s an older outfit, yea?

AH: Most of those people are gone, recently gone. They just don’t care about promoting the early Irish harp or the cláirseach. They had me do a seminar. They would like to join forces, but the trouble is that they don’t want to put the real McCoy on the mantle. They aren’t interested. It would be like as if uilleann pipes hadn’t made a go, and instead everyone was playing clarinet or something, another reed instrument. It’s a different repertoire. You said earlier about organ being different form the piano, And really what it is is, yea, they’re both keyboards, but you sound the

string differently, you strike the metal string with fingernails, you pluck the gut string with the pad, and it’s a whole different technique and a whole different repertoire and a different sound.

DS: But again you starting off as a lone person working out your own thing, you were aware of, this is going to be a different technique and so on, so did you also have to work out all those things to do with technique yourself, you’d nowhere to go? Is that right?

AH: Mm hm. The harp was a good teacher. I’m sure it’s changed through time, but I taught myself to play, and after I won this harp competition in Ireland, I realized then that while I’d been working on my own, no one else had been carrying the torch and following through. And so I actually took what I was doing seriously, and I sort of took stock of what I could do and realized, well, you’ve got techniques for this. Sometimes I’d play by hook or by crook – they weren’t really elegant techniques or good techniques, but it was to get through it, you know – maybe a little hackneyed or – I don’t like using a term like that. And I purposefully set forth to create some techniques, and I would work with techniques that are given in Bunting, but it was difficult to apply them to the music. You could apply, oh the same finger’s damping here – oh, a different finger’s damping here. It took a long time to understand them, and to this day I’m still gaining new insights with working with it. It’s not a comprehensive list of what’s there. Under this technique it shows using these three fingers, and could you apply the same idea and use these, depending on the fingering? Where so you draw the line?

DS: Is the information in Bunting that detailed? Does he talk about damping and all this stuff? It’s all there?

AH: Yea, taken from the playing of Denis O’Hampsey. But what is hard is that it was very hard to use in the music except for like in a piece “Burns’ March”, which is one of the early teaching tunes. You’ve got a pedagogy there of tunes and some of the techniques used, and you have the tuning on his harp. There’s a lot to go through. He was ninety-two when his music was first collected – he was ninety-seven rather when his music was first collected in 1792 by Edward Bunting.

DS: This is Hampsey? Was he at that point, and is he still the best source, are Bunting’s comments on Hampsey the best source that you can have for the older style then?

AH: Yes. Absolutely. I’m having real fun right now because there’s a lovely musician and singer in Dublin, Mícheál Ó Catháin. He sings nice sean-nós style, and he plays fiddle. His grandfather was one of the founders of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. He’s been playing a student copy of the Downhill, a student harp of the Historical Harp Society of Ireland. Ok, so Siobhan Armstrong studied with me, and I kept after her to start an organization, and she started it, and now I think we’ve had fourteen years of a school every summer, and it’s now called a festival.

DS: That’s wonderful.

AH: Yea, it is, and I’ve been at every single one of them, and it’s just a dream to be there. It’s just really lovely.

DS: Well, it’s great you have the good feeling of the growth in what you love as well as the company and so on, if you think of you starting out and now there’s this wonderful thing happening.

AH: No one cared. I did this music, and I worked to do this, but no one appreciated what I was doing except for Charlie. No one knew the background, and now people do, and I’m challenged and there’s more that I want to do. But it is really, really great to have it going. It’s a small growth because it’s become very specialized, and it’s also cut me off very much from the community here. I got cut off when we started traveling because no longer was I here, and I felt kind of rejected coming back here and playing, and all of a sudden it was a weird switch where I didn’t know people any more. They didn’t know me. I hadn’t been introduced to people, and I was like on the fringes of the scene here – I didn’t know anybody more, and I felt really a stranger where I’d grown up with it. And the people that we used to hang out with were also gone – they’d died, you know, a lot of them – and the scene had changed. And then we had kids and we had to live far out, and we were still traveling even with kids. I’m sort of also willingly dropping out because to get a better mindset of the music I keep going back, and I always thought… I started with traditional music on the harp, but then it was very interesting looking back and always, “What did this sound like? What would it be like?” And the hands start getting trained on it, trained in a way that I can trust my hands and let them go. I can also trust my ear in working with these old manuscripts, with the earliest versions, and it’s very detailed stuff. I can start seeing things then, oh this was a sruth mór played here and this is a sruth beag played here, 21

and it starts to be this painting of the piece being performed, and Bunting dotted it out the first time through and then the second time through he tries to show more timings and what’s going on, and then he rewrites the piece over here. I can’t tell you, I’ve been working on that for thirty years and it’s just a real source of delight. I mean to supply a book to the library here, “Irish Harp Studies One” out of Four Courts Press, and I’ve got an article there on three iconic pieces. I’m still fascinated by it, so I got really into the historical. It took me a long time to get where I am right now, but it’s very important. They did not play the chord of the subdominant, four chord. In our Ionian mode, in our major mode the four chord is the third most popular chord.

DS: So you’re saying – we guitarists start with a one, a four and a five, right?

AH: Yep.

DS: So you’re saying the four was not…

AH: No.

DS: I don’t remember this point, and we’ll have to talk about your scholarly work that you used to talk to me about, but this is a fascinating thing to me, because I can’t remember whether we’ve mentioned this, you’ve mentioned that to me before or would I remember. Because now I’ve spent forty years or whatever it is accompanying Irish tunes and all I’ve got to go on – it’s a wee bit different from you – you’re looking at the music and you’re delving back. You’re almost doing pre-Irish traditional music, in a sense. It’s before the tradition that’s here now.

AH: But I will argue. It was traditional music.

DS: At the time.

AH: It was oral tradition, even though it was art music, see, and this is a difference. It really was at one time an art music, but oral tradition.

DS: This is again terminology of course. Traditional Irish music can mean many different things because it involves the national label Irish, and traditional is just a label to a great extent for this genre, right, but it also means this other thing.

AH: Paddy Quinn, the Irish harper, was very happy with his rendition of “Saint Patrick’s Day”, the set dance, and he played fiddle too. He quit playing fiddle he was so happy with how he did it on harp.

DS: Great, Well, the only thing I was going to say about the one, the four and the five is, my teaching or workshops or mentoring is purely based not on the past but on trying to develop a way of accompanying Irish tunes in the present.

AH: It’s gorgeous.

DS: And there was nothing to go on, basically nothing to go on. Therefore my mentoring or if I say anything, it’s based on observation, almost invariably the only thing I can talk about, I realize now – this is what I’ve been doing for the last forty years, and you might want to try it. So one of the things is, funnily enough, the four chord, because people stick in the four chord where it might not be happening at all. Not only that, but I say this thing – this may be a waste of time, I can cut this out of the recording –

AH: No, no, no, if you cut it out, give it to me.

DS: What I say, if it’s an ordinary major in the modern sense tune, a jig or a reel, I would say if you only had three chords that you’re going to learn to play these tunes, it’s not actually the one, four and five at all. As a guitarist working with a good knowledge of the tunes and some sort of modern ear, wherever it’s come from, I would say it’s the one, the two and the five. So if you’re in D, you’re far more likely to get further playing D, E minor and A major than D, G and A.

AH: And the six as well.

DS: I was going to confine myself to three chords, but you’re quite right. And it’s very, very obvious and literally true, particularly in tunes in G and so on. It’s just fun for me to hear you say that.

AH: What is interesting about the one and five chord, and I actually learned this from the medieval Welsh manuscript, the Robert ap Huw Manuscript, whatever mode it’s in, the chords are in the one and five position. So it might be a minor one and a minor five. It’s always the one and five spacing. And if it’s not that, it’s either between the one and the seven or the one and the two. You see the rules of Irish and Welsh music, they met at Glendalough, the musicians, and set 23

up the rules, and we don’t know really what was set up then, but we know there’s differences in the music and the instruments. Maybe they just set up some sort of hierarchy like, a union kind of a thing.

DS: And when was this, at Glendalough?

AH: Early 1100s.

DS: Yea, there must have been some continued, not continuous, but some contacts, between the Welsh…and the Welsh bardic tradition too and the Irish.

AH: And this real important person with the tradition, Gruffydd ap Cynan, was reared in Ireland. His mother was Irish, and until he became king in Wales, he lived in Ireland, and he went to Wales then with his entourage. Yea, it goes back a bit. It ends up getting fascinating. Positionally, you’ve got the one continued tone between a one a five chord, would be like, the one chord would be C and G, but G is the root of the five chord, you see, so it gives a drone effect between those two. Your guitar playing makes a beautiful use of drone, that’s why I love it.

DS: Well, that’s why that tuning magically worked out for Irish music, DADGAD, it was just D and A. It actually is just D and A, the tuning. I did a workshop, a series of classes – in fact Seán Gavin, who’s now living here, and his partner Kelsey, came into my class to play tunes. It was an accompaniment class, so they were the people who were going to play the tunes while I talked about the accompaniment. At some point I was talking about DADGAD. I’m not an apostle of DADGAD, it just happens to have worked for me. So I was talking about this here, and then of course Seán said, “Well, you realize the drones on the pipes are D and A,” and of course the pipes and their drones have been incredibly formative on modern Irish traditional music, by which I mean the body of music that we normally talk about – the jigs and the reels and so on.

AH: Or on a flat set it would be C and G.

DS: Yea, in a different pitch it would be a different thing. It was so obvious. The very first time I played DADGAD to accompany an Irish tune, a jig or a reel, a dance tune, it worked, the first second – the first session I played, I was playing. There was no space between those two events,

whereas playing standard tuning didn’t really work for me. I mean, I can do it, and I could do it still, but it didn’t work.

AH: But I’ve wondered about this. When you’d tried it, you’d heard someone playing in that tuning?

DS: No, no. No, I hadn’t.

AH: You invented it for yourself?

DS: What happened was, as far as the tuning was concerned, and the dance music – I’m really talking about the dance music – the jigs, reels, hornpipes, etc. – I had always been accompanying songs and finding what I thought were beautiful chords in standard tuning. But I wasn’t really an accompanist of the dance music, it wasn’t around me, I was a singer, and I loved harmony, and I loved the songs, I loved the melodies, beautiful melodies. And then Skara Brae, that was singing. But we started a little branch of Comhaltas in college, when I was in college – me and Mícheál Ó Domhnaill and Seán Ó hÉalaí from Derry that I got all my songs from. We didn’t know anything about Comhaltas, but we just wanted to get together in a classroom to play and sing. We sent out the invitation, and, as it happens, the people who came to stand around, sit around this classroom and play a few tunes, in perfect sobriety, it was just a lecture room, were people like Mary Bergin, Fintan Vallely, Mick Allen, Tony McMahon a few times, Máire Bhreatnach. These were the people who came. (laughs) Talk about luck. But I remember vividly, they’d want us to strum along with the tunes, we didn’t do it. I did it, it was there, it didn’t take off, it didn’t mean anything. And then myself and Mícheál started using DADGAD to accompany songs, and the tuning was from Bert Jansch of Pentangle, and it was nice, it was a lovely sound. Anyway, one day I was at the Gaelic League Club, Conradh na Gaeilge in Harcourt Street in Dublin, about ’73 or so. I hadn’t even been playing much traditional song, I was playing electric guitar and so on. But I happened to have my guitar there in DADGAD, and this young woman, girl, I think her name was Ann O’Connor, she was a whistle player, she said, “Oh, Dáithí, take out your guitar and accompany me.” And it was in DADGAD, and I picked it out, and it was the first time I ever accompanied dance music on DADGAD, and it just worked. Then another time, not long after that -- this is too much of me --I was at a party, run by you know Diane Hamilton, Diane Meek, who financed Mulligan Records – Lunny and all these people were there, Mícheál, and Tríona Ní 25

Dhomhnaill, and there was a fiddler playing, and I took out my guitar and I was accompanying him for ages. I didn’t know any of the tunes. And it was working, you know. And Tríona told me, “Oh, you should keep that up, that sounds great.” And that was Frankie Gavin, I discovered afterwards – I didn’t know him. So that was something that just worked. There was something in the nature of the chords.

But anyhow, to return to you, I wanted to ask you…there’s a million hours of material here to talk about. I just wanted to talk personally, your devotion to the harp, what you’ve done with it is a fantastic story in itself independent of this area or the history of this area. You’ve ended up in a very supportive atmosphere in fact, it sounds like, but did you meet with much resistance? Did you have any oppositional experiences with harp players, that are worth mentioning? You know what I mean?

AH: Oh, god, yes, yes. It goes back to terminology and… Yea, I’ve had some very uncomfortable, unhappy experiences – from someone, a harp player in Scotland, a harp player on the east coast of this country, a harp player in England…

DS: What doing, writing to you or confronting you or what?

AH: Yea, yea.

DS: All of the above?

AH: Yea. Bad mouthing and…

DS: Behind your back, as it were?

AH: Behind my back and in front, just out loud, both different things and not understanding. Again, one goes back to terminology. So what do you call this instrument, all the names? Historically it was called Irish harp, writing in German it was called the Irische Harfe. It was also called cruit, and in the 1300s it gained a name cláirseach, but both names were used in the same poem for the same instrument. They were interchangeable terms. And, oh man, I’ve got history ideas, I’ve got articles to write. I’ve got stuff to do on that, because the Irish harp is an amazing instrument, the early Irish harp, but what to call it?

Let’s see, the Irish harper Echlin Kane, playing in Scotland, and he was playing in the early 1700s in Scotland, he was a student of Cornelius Lyons, he called his instrument a Gaelic harp. 26

That’s how he referred to it, speaking English. To me that solved a problem, because the path of harp had also led to Scotland. The terminologies collected from the Irish harpers by Bunting are synonymous with pibroch terminology of the Scottish bagpipe. Indeed, there are pibrochs called “one of the Irish pibrochs” – things like that. There’s connections. So he called it the Gaelic harp, and I felt that made sense because Gaelic harp wasn’t a term used, and it was the instrument used to accompany the performance of bardic poetry, and clan genealogy, etc. And so to me it’s very coupled with the language. That’s where I ran into trouble with someone I Scotland, because it was a Gàidhlig speaker who plays the modern Scottish harp, and she plays the Gàidhlig harp, why is this? If you’re a Scottish singer and you accompany yourself on the piano, you don’t say, “I’m playing Gaelic piano, I’m playing Gaelic guitar.” You know what I mean? It’s the fact that people really want to resist harp, because they got into it because of the romance of it. Now it’s not quite the story they want. They’ve sort of been there and done that and looked at the poor cousin and decided, well, we don’t need that and don’t want it, they don’t want to give it any press. They don’t want to give it the prestige, what it deserves, or pay attention to it.

And so, terminology is a big thing because cláirseach was not used by the major harp organizations, and it was a term – though in Scotland it’s clàrsach, but it’s a different pronunciation and a different spelling…

DS: It’s the same word.

AH: It’s the same word, sure. But Comunn na Clàrsaich, they wouldn’t – and it’s very different from cláirseach as far as pronunciation and spelling goes… So I see no reason why there isn’t an Irish name and an English name for it. So Gaelic harp refers to it. Early Irish harp also refers to it. But arguments exist. Like, in Grove’s Dictionary the person who was going to write about the early Irish harp, the cláirseach, was just going to call it the Irish harp because she’s writing in English and that’s what is was known as in English, and I was begging her not to do this because there’s so much confusion with terminology.

DS: Yea, but the problem is – a problem is looking at it from the outside is that the purpose of terminology is communication and clarity, and if people are using it in different ways, you can’t wave a magic wand and stop. (laughs) All you can do, I would advocate anyway, is have a consistent…what you need yourself is a consistent usage. But you can’t impose usages on other 27

people. How can you? Like, say if you had an organization, you could get an agreement within the organization, look, folks, this is the usage we’re going to use, but you can’t impose usages on other people, I would think anyhow. I know it’s frustrating.

AH: No, you can’t. But it means if someone is using it in a way that isn’t beneficial for the instrument, and they should have the respect for the instrument, there’s a problem.

[END ANN HEYMANN PART 02—filename: A1009b_EML_mmtc]

[BEGIN ANN HEYMANN PART 03—filename: A1009c_EML_mmtc] DS: We were walking about this person who…

AH: I don’t want to waste time on it.

DS: If you mention just one example, I think it’s interesting – you know, what you’ve had to go through, as it were – somebody who used your work, you were saying.

AH: Well, yes, and they had been pushing to be editor for my book – I was doing a teaching book, where I was writing down for the first time what I’d been engrossed in for a long time. She wanted to come and help me there. I was like, I can’t work with someone else now, and I had her proofread it, and then I realized she started making editorial decisions, and when I would say “I”, she would say, “Oh, no, you have to say ‘we’”, and I’m like, “No, it’s ‘I’.” Things like that. She goes, “I learned a long time in writing you can’t use the term ‘I’ in case there’s someone who doesn’t like you.” (laughs) So things were on the internet – “By the way” and then this person’s name “they aren’t so bad after all. I met them at da-da-da.” But basically I’ve been cut down badly by one person, very, very much so and professionally with people. It’s just been too unfortunate because the person has a lot to offer.

DS: You’re talking about a small field too.

AH: It’s a small field. So it doesn’t really matter, someone in the historical harp world, I don’t know where that came from, it’s like, “Oh, we’re going to hear Ann Heymann playing.” “I wouldn’t go across the street to hear her play, and if she was out without a place to stay, I wouldn’t give her, I wouldn’t offer her a room.” 28

DS: Wow.

AH: Just various things like that. But way more you meet wonderful people. So I hate to get this all dark, because in the long run just wonderful, wonderful people and wonderful projects along the way.

DS: Do you enjoy teaching? People come to you, face to face -- do you enjoy face to face teaching?

AH: Yes, I do, and I’ve come to enjoy Skype teaching as well, and that works better because of where I live. It opens up students so I can have students anywhere. I’ve got a wonderful student now in Dublin. I started talking about him earlier, a trad fiddle player and sean-nós singer, quite a nice one. He’s been playing, and he’s been really working hard on techniques. He has a grant to study with me all year now and do a three day workshop. I’m happy because I do a lot of workshops and a little bit of teaching, and I teach a lot of beginners, but I don’t have that many really worthwhile students who are going to stay with it. They take it so far, and it’s a whole different approach to playing, so it’s hard for them to come in and do what I’m doing unless they are really are going to concentrate. This is happening and it’s improving my method of teaching. No one taught me, so I have to sort of – I’ve been teaching myself how to teach. I’m still improving my teaching, I’m happy to say, because it was much more fun teaching riding horses. (laughter) But I’m enjoying teaching too.

DS: Oh, it’s the most wonderful thing in the world if it’s the kind of thing you like – if you like it, it’s really great.

AH: I like working with the physics of it, getting the hand mechanics right, and getting the relaxations right and the feel right.

DS: Yea, yea, and you’ve mentioned – it isn’t deliberately a theme of all these interviews, but the irony is that in the modern world, in the world of the Center for Irish Music here and in the world of all these workshops we go to and these festivals, we’re teaching and people are teaching, and people don’t realize that almost none of the previous generations were taught by anybody. We were talking about the harp, but in fact I wasn’t taught, who was taught? So that’s an interesting difference nowadays. I’ve even been talking to some of the people I’ve

interviewed and they’ve said, they’ve almost been a bit apologetic and said, “Oh, you’ve got to understand, you know I didn’t have any lessons and blah-blah-blah,” and I would say, “Well, hang on, nobody had any lessons.” There are a few exceptions. Say, in Ireland if you were in Dublin and you were involved with Comhaltas, you might go to get some fiddle lessons.

AH: A certain age group.

DS: I know some wonderful musicians who I’ve seen teaching, and I’m just a hundred per cent sure they must have had structured teaching, and then I talk to them, and they say, “No, no, no.”

AH: Well, the Center for Irish Music, started by Kate and Jode, are products of the Chicago classes.

DS: Yea, Kate had that background, and she wanted to have that, And, of course, even though I comment on it always, the fact is that the standard of the young students in the school is unbelievable, and it’s because they’re being taught. (laughs) And they’re being taught by people who can play, who really have got the music, it helps a lot.

AH: And starting young and involved. Yes, the standard is really improving, it’s great. And the idea of tradition is that you learn from a master, but you are learning the tradition. You’re not necessarily being taught your instrument by a player, but you’re learning about the tradition, so it’s another way of learning and being taught by the master. And in that sense, you know, I can argue that it’s a traditional music that was taught thought the oral tradition, and I’ve learnt from an old master – the old master’s my instrument.

DS: Very good – that’s very, very good. I like that. I was thinking too when you were talking about learning the techniques and discovering the techniques, I was thinking – and oh there was some other word you were using – that the technique on the instrument can be two things. In other words, when you’re teaching somebody, say, the flute or the fiddle, your teaching of the technique can be two things which are going to overlap obviously, and one of them is actually based on what other people have done, that this is the way we do it. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with another way to do it but, hang on, this is the style and this is what we do, so that’s technique. This is how we do a roll, this is how we do a variation, so on and so on. But then the other aspect of technique is what you were discovering partly with the harp, but you were also

studying Bunting. But part of what you’ve just described as the instrument teaching you, because the instrument itself, certain things are possible on it and certain things don’t work as well on it, and certain things can only be solved, to produce the series of notes and music you want, you have to do it in a certain way, or otherwise it won’t work. The way you beautifully put it is that’s the instrument teaching you. I think those are two overlapping sides of technique.

AH: I am looking for things being idiomatic and feeling good to the hands. It’s part of training the hands. I don’t want to train my hands… A classical musicians wants to train their hands so they can do anything. I’m wanting to train my hands to play the music that’s meant to be played. I’m not wanting to develop techniques where I can play some modern symphony on it. I’m not interested in that right now, and I keep going back to this, and yet for me I keep on intending in the future some time, and I have composed in the past and composing in this style, but composing new music, and I love improvising. I intend some time to get more modern, but I have to finish my work, going backwards, and it gets pretty big. I have to say when I found my way of playing crunnluaths and taorluaths on the harp, it was like, “Ok, I’ve done what I was meant to do. This is what I was meant to do in life. Everything is icing past then.” I sometimes forget it, and there’s other things that come up, but really I don’t know when they’re going to happen again. I keep on having new little breakthroughs. My recent thing – but teaching is getting in my way because I have serious students and I have to be able to see, to work from manuscripts etc. with them – but I’ve been really enjoying playing with my eyes shut and in the dark. I was going to do that all year. I have a full year until August where I don’t really have responsibilities, but already teaching is getting into the way of it, so I hope it doesn’t go by the wayside.

DS: Would you like to explain why you would want to do that? I can think of reasons, but why would you want to do that?

AH: To explore a lot of the harpers, especially towards the end of the tradition, when it wasn’t such a great thing to be. It was something that the blind sons of gentlemen who were in reduced circumstances, where they would make a living and get along.

DS: So you can see, hear the world from their perspective, as it were?

AH: Yes, and actually it does help tie the ear to the feel. It ties it ever more so when you can’t see. And that’s always been important to me and part of learning from your instrument, is to hear your instrument’s voice. So many people when they play a note, they’re students, play something, it embarrasses them the sound of whatever they created and it was like, how would you be at petting a cat if you go down like that you know. (laughs) Really how it feels to be able to reach your hand down and scratch a dog’s ear. You need that kind of feel on your instrument. You’re not going to poke it in the eye. You have feel. You can do it with your eyes shut. (laughs)

DS: Funnily enough what I thought when you said playing with your eyes shut or playing in the dark, of course, the bardic poets composed in the dark. They would withdraw to their cell – you know, the students anyhow and they probably continued it, I assume, later in their careers. If they were given a poetic exercise, to compose forty verses on such-and-such, they would withdraw to their cell and lie down in the dark and sometimes with a stone on their tummy – have you heard this one? – the Marquess of Clanricarde – and that was how they composed. But then in the other sense that you were talking about, of course, the fact is that – what am I trying to say? – the sound, everything completely changes when you shut your eyes. Everything changes – your whole perception of being in the world changes when you shut your eyes. I imagine my whole brain instantly, like somebody’s thrown a switch, I’m shutting my eyes now, and now the whole brain is completely reorganizing itself. So it’s great to play music always anyhow shutting your eyes and practical things will fall into place, of course, because you will hear pitches, for example, much more clearly and better. There’s a wonderful book that I read years ago, and you would love it, and I gave it to somebody long ago. I’ve looked for it on line and I can’t find it. I’m pretty sure it was called “The Third Eye”, and what it was was each chapter was a different aspect of discussing seeing versus hearing, those two orientations, seeing versus hearing. So there was absolute buckets of interesting information in there. For example, let’s say in terms of meditation or clearing your mind or whatever, a massive amount of our brains are taken up with vision and the interpretation of vision, which is great, it’s necessary. But all this is also an amazing clutter, and say you’re listening to my monotonous tones here now, if you’ve any awareness at all, you’re aware of all these colors and shapes all around us. Then you shut your eyes and all that is just gone, and there’s a tremendous focus. That’s how people are able to hypnotize people – they ask them to shut their eyes. I noticed it in terms of going to concerts and 32

you’re doing sound. If I’m watching a concert, we’re so dominated by the visual impression of the band, when I shut my eyes the balance changes. The sound balance. I might as well have twiddled all the knobs, and the instruments have different levels and all this stuff because the vision of the band was dominating my perceptions of what was happening so much.

AH: That reminds me of playing over a p.a. system. I learned that I’m on the same harp, same tunings, same fingers everywhere there, if you turn down the treble, my hands start feeling like they’re sticky and I need to wash them – there’s too much drag. And if you turn the treble up, all of a sudden my strings, instead of being brass or gold, they’re steel and they’re cutting into my nails, and I’m getting my nails caught on them. It is totally how the auditory affects the actual feel. And that is a weird experiment for me. I recognize that.

DS: I loved it also when you said feel – you shut your eyes and you start talking about feel, because that’s something I’m not as consciously aware of, thinking in terms of that when I close my eyes. But I know that it’s the feel of playing the guitar or playing the fiddle at home that gets me playing every day, more so than the sound. I need to pick up an instrument and feel it, playing. And I use that expression, touch, with my students too. And I have no technical knowledge and probably very little technical ability in the normal musical sense, but I talk to them about touch, what touch is, and music that doesn’t have touch. You can have notes that have no touch in them, and then you’ve a note that has touch in it.

AH: I really don’t believe I can judge the sound of a harp or a stringed instrument. I have to be able to sound the string myself. I have to feel the response and hear it, to know if I like the tone – isn’t that weird?

DS: Anyhow, that’s all fascinating. The fact is, I have lots of things we could talk about. I suppose I just wanted to get on the record – we might come back and do some other conversation some other time – I’d love to. I just want to make it part of this sound file record, as it were, the work that I saw you doing, which was sort of linguistic and manuscript work. You and Charlie have done so much research and I don’t know anybody – I know there must be people out there – but in my normal going through life working with musicians – you’re the only people I know who, in addition to playing and developing, almost campaigning for this thing that you love and exploring it, and teaching about it, but you’re sort of like researchers who are…there are 33

researchers who go out into a field where there is lots of stuff and they’re marshalling and exploring, like the Amazon Jungle, as it were, whereas you are exploring back, it’s almost like when people are going beyond the atmosphere and there’s only a few molecules of oxygen. You’re going back into any old resources you can find, to try and find something that will help you, and you’ve worked with Old Irish and Middle Irish and bardic Irish and so on.

AH: And going to Welsh and also plain chant. There’s crossover areas – the classical compositions of Cormac McDermott, an Irish harper from Roscommon. There are all sorts of threads, but there isn’t that much information. That’s why it’s so important that I play with my left hand high, my right hand low. I think it makes a huge difference in the music performance. Think of the piano. What if the piano were designed so the high notes went to the left and the low notes went to the right. Would that change the style of music that’s played? You know what I mean. A back to front thing. So I have to follow things like that, and learning to play with my eyes shut, I am interested in just how they would have been teaching blind children, but it’s my own research to understand how much would being sighted or not affect the type of music one is playing, if at all.

DS: I suppose the word I would use as well is, a lot of your work has to have been reconstruction, exploring and reconstruction. Again I want to put it on the record how much I’ve always admired your ability to combine your meticulous research with creative imagination, which I think is wonderful. It’s fantastic.

AH: Well, thank you.

DS: Which is another thing you don’t find a lot in Irish studies in my experience.

AH: I don’t think it might all work out this way, but the typical thing is obviously accents. Rhythm isn’t important because you only have two accents here and there, distributed all weird, and syllabic poetry, and all the rules and the rhymes work with syllabic poetry that way. But the thing is that, except for things like hickory dickory dock, singers line up words and do unaccented and still there’s caesura, the beginning and ending, they really do line up. I cannot believe that the bulk of material would be performed without a pulse going, without a tactus going.

DS: Yea, yea.

AH: But especially any that would be performed with a stringed instrument and, although the harp can ring out long and take turns, it is foremost a percussion instrument, being struck with the nails, and by playing it you get more that percussion out of it. But rhythm is a memory device, having a pulse can help along with having the words set up, and there’s a lot of it that really works out well. The Amergin one, one of the last ones we did, it starts out with just a double pulse, then it goes into daa-da-da, daa-da-da, then da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da (NOTE: strong emphasis on first syllable). Into nine, 9/8 from 6/8. The lines get like that. It fits the pulses of what I was creating of the crunluaths and taorluaths, and then you can double up on it. Sean Donnelly, the great pipe researcher and harp researcher, I thought this before, but he actually goes so far and say in an article that crunluath and cran might have been related.

DS: Of course, I’m fascinated by the origins and developments of words. And also I’m fascinated by phrasing. I file everything you’ve just been talking about under phrasing as well, which I am fascinated by, the phrasing of tunes, the phrasing of songs, and how we map it.

AH: How we map it – I love that line.

DS: I would mention two anecdotes and then maybe I’ll wind it up. I can cut out all this stuff of me. It’s relevant, I think, to the conversation. And I would put in that part of what Ann was talking about there was bardic poetry. The theory of bardic poetry was that it was syllabic, in other words it wasn’t rhythmic and that’s what she’s saying – it can be both rhythmic and syllabic both, not either/or. This reminds me of this thing that I often mention where I’ve been accompanying these tunes all this time, and one time in a workshop here at the Center for Irish Music – it wasn’t a workshop – it was a kind of a play-along of all the young musicians, about thirty of them sitting in a circle, and Randal Bays was playing fiddle and somebody else, and we were talking and playing. And I suddenly realized I have a map of all these tunes in my head. It’s not a harmonic map – it’s a stress and phrasing map of all the tunes that I’m used to playing, and that’s how I feel them, and I was astonished myself.

AH: How neat.

DS: I myself was astonished as well. Then there was this funny thing in the Altan recording session that I just did where Mairéad was doing this gorgeous traditional song that she’s always sing unaccompanied, “Níon a’ Bhaoigheallaigh”, and it’s so much like another song I can’t sing it to you. The melody’s too confused with other songs and I don’t sing it myself, but anyway she sang it completely freely unaccompanied, and I love the idea of accompanying an unaccompanied song. This is one of my favorite things. I will accompany the unaccompanied person – I will fit in with the way they’re singing. And I hate the idea of a metronomic skeleton coming down upon it.

AH: Like the 3/4 waltz.

DS: Yea, exactly, or something equally crude. Anyway, so she was totally into it. We did this thing where she sang it unaccompanied, but I was accompanying her, I was actually having a pulse underneath it as well – da-da-da-da-da…on the guitar. But then all the other phrasing on top of that where she would hit a stress or whatever was completely free, and I would try and follow it. What was fun, and it worked out, we think, great, most mysterious, but then we wanted to dub in bouzouki on it. And I didn’t think necessarily the bouzouki would fit, but Mark Kelly, the other guitarist in Altan, he started doing single strums on chords, and I said, “That’s great, but hang on – there’s one particular beat where you can do the strum.” And they couldn’t hear it at all, they didn’t know where it was going to be. But to me it was obvious where the beat was going to be. Myself and Ciarán went into the sound booth and I listened back to the song, and Ciarán sat with his plectrum, and I would hold up one finger for one chord – we just marked certain chords – not in the normal one, two, three, four, thing. Such and such a chord’s one finger, such and such a chord’s two fingers three fingers. And he sat there not hearing anything and I would hold up my finger slowly in front of him and he would strum. It was really, really fun, and it was sort of like the beat I was looking for.

That’s enough about that. I know it makes sense to you, and you know what I’m talking about.

AH: I could argue about it – I don’t like people sharing slow airs. It can be accompanied if somebody is really, really good and aware of their style depending on the instrument, but I don’t want two singers singing sean-nós style, but accompanying it’s possible. But it usually isn’t well done. 36

DS: If it’s two singers singing together in unison – I love unison as well, so I’ve spent my whole life harmonizing and I love unison.

AH: Except if it’s in a fun song…

DS: You can sing a free rhythm song in unison, you can, if the two people know each other inside out. It’s hardly ever done, but Mairéad and her sister Anna do it and the Friel Sisters. They do it with three sisters and it’s absolutely gorgeous.

AH: There are examples of it.

DS: Anyway, I think we’ll call a halt there, Ann.

AH: Ok.

DS: So you’ll have a proper cough. Thanks a million

AH: Thank you, Dáithí.

[END ANN HEYMANN PART 03—filename: A1009c_EML_mmtc]