Seeing Ireland: 3 music videos

Landscape and the love of it run deep in the heart of the music of Ireland. Whether you are dreaming of, remembering, or imaging a visit to the island of Ireland, here are three music videos that will help you see aspects of the place.

“This is what I believe that we bring to our audiences” says Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh. to her long time friend Moya Brennan, “that they can sense the beauty of this place.” The two are walking in Donegal where they both spent time growing up and where Mairead lives.

They go on share a memory and a song about the lights in the windows you see a at Christmas. Perhaps you are reading this at another time. It is a fine song nonetheless, good to enjoy at any season. As Ni Mhaonaigh and Brennan remark during their conversation, you are going to want to bring a heavy coat with you when you come to Donegal anyway...

You may find the song Soilse na Nollag/The Lights of Christmas, recorded on the Windham Hill collection called The Very Best of Celtic Christmas. You may find more of NI Mhaonaigh’s work on recordings by Altan, and of Brennan’s with Clannad.They each have solo albums out as well.

The Wild Atlantic Way has become the descriptive name for the many landscapes and places you will meet along the west coast of Ireland, all the way from KInsale in Cork to Malin Head in Donegal. There are six regions and, indeed all sorts of things to aexplore and all sorts of great music to hear as well.

Aoife Scott and Enda Reilly wrote the song All Along the Wild Atlantic Way, and with her partner and fellow musician Andy Meaney along for the journey Scott brings quite a bit of the place to life through this video as well as in the lyrics and melody.

You will find the song recorded on Scott’s debut album Carry the Day, and she has a second one out now as well, called Homebird.

There is much of the landscape of Ireland which lends itself to myth and legend, and many stories to go along. The stories may be true or may not, likely some of both in most cases. The song Port na bPúcaí/The Fairy Tune is one such. It comes from the Blasket Islands, which lie off the coast of west Kerry. Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh lives in the Dingle peninsula and across from the Blasket Islands.

The song, she says, was given her by her father, who told her the story that a Blasket Islands fisherman heard the music on the wind one night and played it on his fiddle. Some say it was a whale song, others that its origin was from the otherworld. The words are a story of a woman captured by the fairies. There is an otherworldly aspect to the landscape of the west Kerry shore where this video was filmed, and to the sound of the music, as well. Billy Mag Fhloinn constructed (after a concept of Gorkhem Sen) and plays the acoustic instrument called the yaybahar to compliment Nic Amhlaoibh’s singing. You will find the song on Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh’s recording Thar Toinn/Seaborne.

You may also wish to learn more about
Altan’s album The Gap of Dreams
Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh’s Foxglove & Fuschia
Another Irish musician who draws on landscape in her work to learn about
One of the most loved stories at Music Road: Irish music, Irish landscape

From the Music from Shifting Times series at Wandering Educators
Music for Connection and Contemplation, with music from Aoife Scott, Matt and Shannon Heaton, Cathie Ryan, and others

Photographs by Kerry Dexter, Thank you for respecting copyright.

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Harry Potter, imagination, and music

Recently, I’ve been reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In connection with a project I am working on, I’ve spent the last month or so reading through all seven of the Harry Potter books, actually. Quite a lot to take in there in the way of imagination, story, and character, not to mention parallels and suggestions of myth and history. Not long after I finished Deathly Hallows, I came across a television show on the making of the music and sound effects for the Harry Potter movies, and I thought I’d watch. But I didn’t stick with it.


That wasn't because of the the stories about the sound effects. I’ve worked in both music and television production, so I was familiar with how those were done. I thought the interviews with the composers and the actors were quite interesting too. But, when they started showing clips from the movies with the fantastical creatures -- I discovered I had my own ideas of how they looked and since I’d just read the books, I wasn’t at all ready to take in someone else’s versions of them.

That got me thinking about a conversation songwriter Jeff Talmadge and I had had a while back. Jeff, who is a poet and a lawyer in addition to being a musician, was thinking that one sort of unintended consequence of music videos is that now, when someone hears a song, he or she has the same pictures in mind as does the next person, whereas before each person created his or her own patchwork of visual ideas. He has a point.

Of course, you could regard that shared view as a shared connection. Most of the videos to go along with music I write about here are of artists in performance, which is another sort of thing entirely. Interesting to think about how imagination, music, and visual image connect to each other, though, and what we share and what we don't in those areas.


[is that a photograph of Hogwarts up on the left? no, but some say those buildings at the University of Glasgow were JK Rowling's inspiration for it. I find that quadrangle welcoming, myself, and appreciate your respect that the photograph is copyrighted]

you may also wish to see

Music Road: music and the unexpected
Music Road: Seven Stories

now playing: Kathy Mattea: Black Lung: video

Just the woman, her voice, and a song with a powerful idea



video recorded at Joe's Pub, in New York City.

Kathy Mattea has recorded this song as the final track on her album Coal