Richard Martin from Dundalk speaks about his participation last year in the National Concert Hall ‘Blow The Dust’ project.
I’d been playing piano from the age of about ten or eleven. I did it formally at school for five or six years, doing exams and all the scales and so on. In my final year, when I was doing my Leaving or Matric, my teacher thought it would be a good idea to discontinue the piano exams in favour of playing pieces I enjoyed. I went only as far as grade three. But she brought in the sort of music I wanted to play – jazz and popular music, so it was a wonderful year of piano playing.
While at UCD, I wanted to play the popular tunes of the moment, so I used go to the music shops and write down the guitar chords and then form an accompaniment of my own. It wasn’t a bad way to begin because it gave you a feel for chords and chord sequences and the logic behind them. I played just for myself at that time, though I also played at the band breaks in Dublin dance halls. In school some people might come in and listen from time to time but I wasn’t aiming at that. In time I suppose self awareness did mean I knew that I was able to play. But I was getting great fun out of it. I always did. I went to UCD to do a degree course that was not demanding and it allowed me free time to develop and play the piano in the University Halls where I stayed.
Eventually, I came back to Dundalk got myself a proper job. A few of us did attempt to form bands but with very limited success. We had more enthusiasm than actual skill, so while it was quite funny, it didn’t last very long and as it turned out it was an expensive pastime — very often the band outnumbered the audiences!
I was working for my father who had a business selling corks, lots of paper and twine bags and so on. But I remember once, when he was away on holiday, I went and took his piano to my home, thinking that he had little use for it as he didn’t ever seem to play it. He was not at all happy! Mind you, some time later, he took me to Dublin and bought me a new concert piano! He clearly understood my interest.
The piano remains a popular instrument, of course, but I suppose the keyboard has taken over somehow. It lets people who might not be particularly proficient to make rapid strides.
I think it was in an advertisement in some magazine, perhaps in the NCH catalogue, that I learned of the Bealtaine ‘Blow the dust off your trumpet’ project. I figured out it just might be jazz, and thought that perhaps I could manage to do it. When I arrived up at the Concert Hall though, I found the place full of kettle drums and harps and all sorts of instruments, so I felt I had to tell JoeCsbi, the organiser, straight away to lower his expectations of me. I don’t read any form of music, and I play all my tunes in the key of C! But Joe listened to my playing for long enough to realise that maybe he could fit me in somewhere. I was on the way!
I think that I did have some hesitation initially about going to the NCH. I was acutely aware that I was away behind everybody else in that orchestra; all of them there were music readers but I wasn’t. They were a great, talented bunch of people – and they let me off the hook!
So for anybody hesitating about getting involved because it is a national institution as the NCH is, I would say, Go for it. Two things will happen. One is that they will accommodate you and your limited ability if your ability is limited. Secondly, you will improve by just doing that, your game will lift. There is a powerful impetus in playing for a team – so much more so than when you’re playing for yourself. And there are another returns you get from such a project. I wanted to meet other musicians. I wanted to measure myself against other musicians. I wanted to fit in with other musicians and make music together. Because the piano is a solo instrument, playing solo can lead to a lot of indiscipline – your tempo can become too relaxed for instance; all over the place, to put it more bluntly!
We had about twenty three people for the preparatory sessions before the first concert. It was very slow progress. It turned out that Joe had to make sure that we were all able to play, to stroke a bow on a violin or whatever, or to blow a note, or even to tune instruments. He had to start by bringing us back to basics. I think that was a key to the whole thing. He was never, never, critical, never sarcastic, yet always demanding a higher standard than we were delivering.
Of course, having the resources that the NCH provide was very important. They could provide the venue, the instruments, the Steinway piano to play on. They had the publicity machine. They had the credibility to get airspace and airtime.
And of course there are all kinds of values delivered by the project. To people who take part in it, one, is that you rediscover that you can do more than you thought you could. You rediscover former friendships and forge new ones, all on a very solid basis of shared love of music. I think it is a signal achievement to be able to say that you had actually played in the national concert hall. And before an audience of six or seven hundred — granted, of course, that they were a captive audience! We joked about charging them five euros in and ten euros to get out! People we spoke to afterwards really did enjoy it. And it was very satisfying later when people phoned you up to tell you that it really was good. That is motivating. It was not that we had any pretensions; we’re not the Berlin Philharmonic and never will be. But we had a lot of fun, and that fun was shared with the audience who seemed to respond. And that is always great to experience.
The thrill of playing with the ‘Blow The Dust’ orchestra has lasted. It provided me with the momentum to go and get piano lessons from a jazz musician, something I would have never have done without that Bealtaine experience. I have learned from this teacher a tremendous amount that I would never have learned met this teacher: all about more complex chord constructions and techniques of playing. It’s been brilliant.
I believe I did contribute something to the project too. I have one thing in spades: I am able to play some two to three hundred songs off the top of my head, which allows me to ‘jam’. Also, it does a lot for one’s memory for a start! I think it is a way of staying young to have to memorise the structure of some three hundred songs! So, often during the training and rehearsals, we had jazz sessions in the breaks. These were completely informal, ad hoc – people joined in instead of going to lunch! The fun was good and the excitement great.
The real challenge for people joining in a project like this is, I suppose, being able to swallow ones fear of failure. To enjoy anything there must be a downside risk to make it truly interesting. In my case, it was a huge chance to take for it was most likely in my mind that I would be ejected after the first rehearsal.
And for such a high level and demanding project, few real issues arose. Due really to Joe who made the music arrangements easy to handle and yet interesting to listen to. The credit is his and others involved in making the arrangements for the orchestra and picking the material – selecting melodies we would all already know like the ‘Blue Danube’. When you’re not doing something obscure, you’re already that bit ahead when you open the first page.
Of course, it wasn’t only about performances at the concerts. The days of training and rehearsal were at the core of the process; here all the learning and camaraderie took place. It was always training for the first few days. It is an interesting distinction to draw between rehearsal and training. Training was always about exercises; old fashioned scales which are terribly boring but terribly important, but you just have to do this. There’s no sidestepping it if you want to be a musician. Often the actual rehearsals were quite short, perhaps six days of rehearsals, usually four or five consecutive days as we came up to the concert date. If you worked at home on these exercises – which every one of us made the time to do, and I think every one did – you come back with your head held high, knowing you are not going to make an absolute fool of yourself or of the orchestra.
For me and I suppose for older people interested in creativity and human behaviour generally, I think we encountered many insights and delights. Firstly, I recognise the fantastic opportunity this was. For a lot of us, there was an undoubted therapeutic effect to be found in working with a large group. This was an opportunity not often given to people at this age of our lives, in our sixties or seventies. We learn how to work and converse and do all sorts of things with a wide group of people. For many of those – people who play the piccolo, the oboe, the clarinet, the trumpet, and so on – they are not playing solo instruments so they get only modest joy out of playing on their own at home; and very often the neighbours may be unhappy too! So for these, the sum was greater than the parts, and that must have been terrific. With piano it is a bit less so for it is a solo instrument.
I would say to people who might be thinking of trying this: Come in, enjoy it; sit in on the rehearsal. Do you feel this is something you want to be part of; whatever your ‘this’ is, try it. At our age the whole secret is moving outside of our comfort zones, giving ourselves a few challenges. The ‘Blow the dust’ project is a fair challenge but it is not climbing Everest either!
The theme chosen for this year is absolutely so important – ‘to have dreams and to speak them without fear.’. This is what Irish people are so scared of: failure. The face of fear is the fear of failure, of being told you’re an eejit. The ‘Who do you think you are?’ attitude. I was so timid about letting anybody know that I was part of this NCH project. I had come to it having just resigned from a choir of consummate and outstanding musicians. Now I was looking for a musical outlet to replace it. But I wouldn’t dare tell any of them I had become part of this Bealtaine orchestra – I could imagine the comments: “The National Concert Hall – you!” The best thing was to leave it till the actual concert was happening and tell them that it might be worth their while coming up for the performance!
It was like walking towards the dream for me, the NCH and Bealtaine opened a door; and it was up to each person to walk through that door. I did.
The people who initiated this, and who participated and assisted, have enriched the lives of forty people and maybe more by now. There was a lady there, I recall, who hadn’t played the piano for thirty years. She came in and got to play magnificently — that was until she broke her arm! Nothing to do with the project I hasten to add. Aonghus McNally described it as the only orchestra in the world that had a six fingered pianist, unique. A lot of guys joined up who had done the hard graft of playing in dance bands and jazz bands in their day, and were consequently very good musicians – Pat Troy, Pat Glynn and others. All good musicians. Some music teachers too. The youngest of us was in his fifties, a good guitar player. It was really lovely to know that these people too don’t feel that this is just an orchestra for the bewildered!
We’ve had two concerts and a third coming up now during this Bealtaine 2010. Originally intended as a one-off, the momentum among us players after Bealtaine last year has kept it going, and the NCH were willing to give us the facilities at a very good rate. So, we have a lot of people to thank for the whole process. I often think this is a great country to be old in! Free travel; free medicine; and all these opportunities that Bealtaine throws our way. Not a bad place at all.
