“Well, that’s all I am: music”. At the start of his book Shared Notes, Martin Hayes is recounting his response to his now-wife Lina, when they are discussing possible marriage after she has said, “But, I don’t know who you are’, though acknowledging she loves Martin’s music.
Shared Notes is subtitled ‘A Musical Journey’. However, as Martin explains in the preface, whilst he initially set out to write about his “thoughts on music in greater and more precise detail”, he found that wasn’t possible without also describing the context of his personal story, as they “are inextricably interwoven”. The book is then both a memoir and much more besides offering a wealth of insightful ponderings on traditional music, as well as the absorbing, frank story of Martin’s life.
Traditional music was an integral part of Martin Hayes’s childhood on the family farm in County Clare. His father, P.J was a fiddle player and co-founder of the Tulla Céilí Band (Martin joined the band as a teenager). Martin describes growing up in a house often filled with music, with all the best known traditional musicians dropping in to play. That a young Martin should aspire to play fiddle like his father and Paddy Canny (Tulla Céilí Band’s other fiddle player) is unsurprising. Still, there is a delightfully poignant moment when Martin recalls his father, having watched him play a concert, saying, “I’d have love to have done what you are doing.”
Martin’s core musical ethos was established early on. He describes when an older, local concertina player called John Naughton played a tune called The Ships in Full Sail in the Hayes house:
“There was this transcendent moment.. where he played a series of long notes… as if distilling the phrase to its most innocent beauty. My father and I looked at each other, knowing that something beautiful had just happened. Such moments didn’t come as a result of technical skill…I would end up spending most of my life attempting to understand the architecture of those special moments, how to get inside the tune, how to be present, how to let the music to flow. In the end, it was mostly about letting go.”
The extensive influence of the upbeat recordings made in the U.S. in the 1920s and 30s by the great Sligo fiddle players Michael Coleman and James Morrison is contrasted by Martin with “a big part of traditional music that would go unacknowledged for many decades – the subtle plaintive music of fiddlers like Padraig O’Keefe, John Kelly, Tommy Potts or John Doherty, who were speaking a different language that was mostly overrun by the influx of technically dexterous playing recorded during that era in America.” These more “rugged, raw and elemental expressions of traditional music” began to get attention in the 1960s, and that, Martin says, is where he “went looking”.
The teenage Martin Hayes took his experience of school as alienating and feeling isolated from his peers, and ‘turned it into musical fuel’, winning competitions and touring abroad with the Tulla Céilí Band. He took the ideas he heard older musicians discuss about “the idea of feeling, the idea of heart, the idea of soulfulness” to help him ”skip past the idea of music as simply playing an instrument”.
A move to America in his 20s led eventually to Martin earning a living as a musician, but it proved a difficult period, not least as he mostly wasn’t playing the music he loved. Being asked to organise regular sessions at a pub in Chicago was a turning point. Together with resolving his U.S. immigration status, some key life changes preceded a return to Ireland in 1992 to appear on an RTÉ TV music programme and to teach at the Willie Clancy Summer School in Miltown Malbay. Despite his teenage achievements, Martin “had dropped off the radar as afar as this world of traditional music was concerned – it was as if I had never been there before, I was somebody new.”
An explanation of how Martin developed his approach to performance is fascinating. He describes his determination to find a way to get audiences to listen to the music and not talk during the performance.
“The very first note played must be serious and from the heart; it must be expressed with deliberate intention and confidence, projected out into the room, not necessarily with volume but with focus: I must go to the space that I want others to enter, go as deep as possible and trust that the invitation is powerful enough for others to come along.”
For a festival in Australia in 1994, Martin developed an approach that anyone who has seen him live will recognise: “I put together a medley of tunes that would start out quietly and then crescendo through to some pieces of fiery and dexterous playing”. He describes this as “invitational”, attempting “to build trust with the audience by vulnerably presenting very delicate and sensitive pieces of music”. Martin notes that the approach worked, and we might add, has worked for him ever since.
There is genuine humility in the delight Martin expresses at the success of The Gloaming. Essentially the story is one of bringing together a group of musicians based on an instinctive sense of possibilities, then “just letting ideas emerge” and, in a perfect description of the aural experience, “a sound gradually began to develop – a moody atmospheric sound that was simultaneously old and new”. In concert, the “music is flexible and different every night…and we relish the moments of uncertainty when we are all engaged in a collective improvisation, not knowing how or when it will end. We love that we don’t know.” As the audience, we sense that and implicitly trust the band to delight and move us.
As with his music, there is in his writing an integrity and a calmness. You are left in no doubt that the words on the page are his authentic, intriguing self.
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