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| Composer Peter Fahey |
American Composers
Orchestra: What was the inspiration for your composition? Can you tell us
about your creative process for this piece?
Peter Fahey: The starting point for the piece was a recording,
taken from a live television broadcast, of a former resident of an industrial
school in Ireland speaking about his experiences in the industrial school
system and about how he was treated by the Ryan Commission (as it is commonly
referred to in Ireland), a commission set up by the Irish government in 1999 to
investigate the extent and effects of abuses that took place in institutions
for children in Ireland. Almost all of the musical material in the piece is
informed by or derived in some way from this recording: the harmony, rhythm,
orchestration, and so on. I began by simply transcribing the recording, mostly
by ear, and making a short score of the piece, but later I did a spectral
analysis of the recording to find out more about the harmonic structure of the
voice. The results I got, using a couple of different computer programmes, gave
me some good raw material to work with. I was attracted to the idea of the
harmony in the ensemble coming from the recorded voice – corresponding to what
is already there in the voice - rather than trying to impose some sort of
arbitrary harmonic structure around it. I wanted the harmony to “belong” in a
way that it hasn’t in my previous music. I didn’t take a very “scientific”
approach in applying the results of the analyses to the music but the results I
got informed the harmonic decisions I made.
My approach to the orchestration was largely intuitive; the raw
material here was the sound of the voice as I heard it rather than something
generated by a computer. Much of the time the role of the ensemble is simply to
colour or highlight certain sounds or articulations in the voice, but the
orchestration also adds extra layers of meaning – layers of musical meaning –
to the voice. It gives the voice musical meaning. The recording itself is part
of the piece with chunks of speech triggered by a sampler during the
performance. The voice functions almost like a soloist at times; at other times
it is less soloistic and more a part of the larger texture. Much of the
composing of the piece was a sort of “orchestrating out” of the recording of
the voice. The intention was to create a canvas or a space in which the voice
could exist and be presented and to create a situation where the recording of
the voice itself becomes music - a sort of recontextualising of the recording.
The role of the ensemble is to work in tandem with the recording to produce
this situation. The result is a sort of musical expression of the recording and
of what is being said.
The person speaking in the recording is Michael O’Brien, a former resident of St. Joseph’s Industrial
School (“Ferryhouse”)
in Clonmel in the southeast of Ireland. (I grew up in Clonmel.) He is speaking
from the audience during a panel debate on Irish television on the day the Ryan
Report was published in 2009. The Report concludes that there was widespread
and systematic abuse and neglect in institutions for children run by the
Catholic Church and overseen by the Irish State. (These were institutions that
existed to protect the most vulnerable people in society.) Michael spent eight years
in Ferryhouse after his mother died; his seven siblings were also sent to
Ferryhouse and other similar institutions. What
drew me to the recording – and it wasn’t so much the specifics of what he says
- were the various themes Michael touches upon. Themes that resonated with me.
He says so much and sums up so much about Irish society and the institutions
that define it in such a short space of time. There’s a density to it. We hear
how Michael was let down by every institution he came in contact with: Church,
State, the legal system, political party. In a way he sums up his own life too
in expressing the defining effect the industrial school system had on him. It’s
a remarkable speech - raw, emotional, and very frank. I knew Michael as the mayor of Clonmel when I was growing up. I went and spoke to him soon after I began working on the piece
– still a bit unsure at that point whether or not to write the piece - to talk
to him about what I had in mind and to see how he would feel about me using the
recording of him speaking. He was very supportive of the project.
The title of the piece, A
Mirror to Kathleen’s Face, is taken from a study by a Canadian academic,
Donald Akenson, published in 1975 that looks at the Irish education system
since the founding of the Irish state up until 1960. It gives a social
historical perspective of the Irish educational system in the period we’re
talking about, though it is limited in it’s scope because of the secrecy and
lack of cooperation of the Church and State at the time in allowing access to
information about the system. (The study was ignored by the Irish government.)
It’s perhaps a curious title for an academic report, but I was attracted to the
metaphor of the title and the potential to apply it in a musical context.
“Kathleen” (or Kathleen Ni Houlihan) is a literary symbol for Ireland; it was
used by writers such as WB Yeats, Augusta Gregory, James Joyce.
In Akenson’s
study, Kathleen is a beautiful woman seen from a distance, but if we look
closer - much closer - we see her wizened face and we begin to realise that she
is, in fact, an old hag (to put it rather bluntly!). Akenson presents the Irish
school system as a reflection of modern Irish society – as an indicator of its
values and attitudes and problems. This idea of a mirror image informs the
structure of my piece on various levels (for example, the harmony at the
opening of the second movement is a “mirror image” of the harmony at the
beginning of the following section), and the idea of looking into a mirror and
seeing things close-up, as they really are, informs, to some extent, the sort
of “anatomical” approach I have taken to the orchestration where we hear how
the sounds are produced by the instruments – the sounds of the woodwinds and
brass blowing through their instruments, bowing and brushing sounds in the
strings - as well as left-over, peripheral sounds, the veiled resonance or
overtones of a note and not the note itself, and so on.
