Background
I started work in rialto in and around 2004. I cant remember which project came first but the first one I remember is the song ‘My grandmothers brother went over to America’, which I made with young people aged eight, nine and ten years old. As the years progressed, I ended up working with several of the young people involved as teenagers, and then young adults.
The lyrics of the song were gathered by what became for ten years after that, my technique
- Ask broad vague questions that are very easy to answer
- Write down everything everyone says
- Hang the room with these words on large sheets
- With the group try and find resonant sentences
- Use one of these to find a rhythm pattern
- Use that rhythm pattern to compose the music
- Using the music as a rhythmic filter, try and make the resonant sentences fit
- Come up with a simple minimalist melody
- Play it to them
- Try and get them to sing in tune.
I really loved this song, I loved the freedom and cultural confidence expressed in it. Pre teen kids have such enormous creativity its actually overwhelming. The job became hanging on to some sort process and structure in the face of their, often hilarious and energetic interventions!
This Girl
This process was extraordinary. The group were all thirteen year old girls. My job, before I could even get started with my process, as listed above, was to, on some level, win their trust without being creepy or pervy. I decided to just try and be as honest as I could with them and make it as interesting and fun as I could.
The music was based on two ideas, a rising melodic pattern against a falling one and a four chord repeated pattern. I put down delayed guitar lines to help create an urban indie sound, and a sense of melancholy.
When we presented the work, I felt that the production had taken over the process and made it meaningless. I spoke afterwards to the artist Ailbhe Murphy and we both agreed that our hopes for the piece hadn’t been realised. In the (lengthy) feedback and analysis sessions that took place after it, we expressed that. It gave us a hardened resolve to make sure that the next piece wasn't similarly thrown under the bus of mass engagement. What every community organisation back then wanted was visible participation, numbers justified anything, artistically.
I felt that one of the promises you make participants, is that they wont loose face – that their expression should, if possible, not simply validate their own experience to themselves, but enhance it. This is what every other artist experienced when they engaged in a process, why not community groups?
I was determined that the musicality of the next piece wouldn't be aesthetically elided. Meanwhile the youth Project got funding for the Dolphin Diamonds to make a video of the song with film maker Enda. This meant I got another run at it, and we recorded it with Miriam Ingram as sound engineer.
This song was made during the Celtic Tiger era. One thing that I learned from this process was that pretty much all the girls parents, made way more money than I did. It started a new way of thinking for me about the work.
Lots of the community based organisations had started out as charity organisations and that attitude, that this was somehow a 'reach down' operation, helping out 'people in need', pervaded the processes I was brought in to facilitate. I changed the way I saw this, it was just a community wanting to express itself, and hiring me to help that. That became the job.
The Goodbye Song (The Balcony song)
I was commissioned to work with two separate womens’ groups in Fatima. One was a voluntary group that met on Tuesday evenings and one was a CE scheme group that met on Thursday mornings. I worked with the first group on writing lyrics. We gathered memories, at first I just asked everyone to write 8 lines about anything they remembered. I used a variety of workshop exercises for this. One was focussed on sounds that summed up Fatima for the group. Another other was focussed on remembering peoples names. These yielded great results, but there were many workshops and some exercises were better than others. Then we read them out and on sheets and sheets of A2 paper, wrote down the key resonant sentences that really jumped out at everyone. We hung the walls with these sheets of A2 and using them as the raw material chose which ones seemed to really sum something up.
The second process was to break down all the sentences into sequences of two syllable and one syllable words – ‘bottles smashing’, ‘doors banging’, ‘toilets flushing’.
I came up with a simple musical two chord sequence for the verse. G major to A major. It sounded urban and evocative, like the opening strings of an American black and white 50s social realist movie.
For the chorus, I took the tune from 'under the bamboo' which they had sung as part of their games when they were young girls.
The “Mrs Gavan” section came from their expression of how much they all admired her.
Years later I was getting a taxi and it turned out that the driver was her son. He had heard the song. It was a nice moment. In the video above, the song is the last section of the video.
