My second, and even third, Fleadh

Coffee now29 Jul, 01:00Open original ↗

Back last year, I attended my first Fleadh, Irish music festivals with a focus on competitions, as very much an intermediate tin whistle player. So intermediate in fact, that we had an accidental misunderstanding about what was meant by a slow air, which is a required element as part of the four styles of tune in the adult tin whistle category.

This year I needed to do better…

a stage with a group of people playing traditional Irish instruments at the back and three young dancers doing high leg kicks at the front — An unusual opportunity to play music for Irish dancers.

I will say that since last year, I’ve continued with my lessons at Cambridge Comhaltas and have been able to attend occasional sessions and other activities, such as the Cambridge TradFest.

In general, my interest is mostly about enjoying learning the music and also appreciating the communal and spontaneous aspect of sessions, and maybe some fairly relaxed/low profile performances with Comhaltas, like when a few of us recently played a session and provided music for Irish dancers at a local festival.

However, the process for the Fleadh is a bit different and for me needs a more-preplanned approach, as below!

Choice of tunes

As for last year, I’d need to have four tunes of different types, but this time definitely including a slow air.

I decided to get a head start on practice, and somewhere about Christmas selected four tunes to polish up.

I’d definitely be playing Aisling Gheal, as it was the only slow air I knew, and I felt it would be an obvious choice to include a jig and a reel, as those make up most of my repertoire, but for the fourth tune, I had to think a bit to decide between a hornpipe, a polka or something else.

After much thought (has to be a tune that I like, not too long, or too short, maybe not too hard, or too easy…), I decided on The Dingle Regatta, a slide. The Dingle Regatta was apparently first made famous by Ó Riada and the Chieftains, but I’d come across it in the context of The Pogues and so I also see it as slightly punk.

Roll on to about late March, and our tutor was encouraging us to start playing some of our Fleadh tunes in our lessons. “Oh!”, she said, “you can’t do a jig and a slide; they’re sort of the same.” In fact, it’s only recently that the rules don’t explicitly disallow it, but I was encouraged “you wouldn’t want to…”.

So, I decided to drop the jig Ships in Full Sail (which I’d had a mildly mortifying experience of people not recognizing from my playing at a session) and replace it with The Kerry Cow, a polka I was pretty familiar with.

For the reel, I’d settled on The Cup of Tea, another relatively well known tune but one with three parts so a little longer than some without feeling excessive.

Overall, I’d been trying not to be too ambitious with complex/obscure tunes or overly fancy ornamentation, and my main goal was just to do as best I could at (mostly) playing all the right notes in all the right order with the best right rhythm I could muster.

On the subject of rhythm, so far I’ve also chickened out of too much foot tapping to set the beat – it seems that it’s pretty acceptable to do that or not, and although I think it can sound quite good, in my case I also suspect it could emphasise the deficiencies in my timing.

The Midlands Fleadh

The Midlands Fleadh was again being held at Birmingham Newman University, and this time my category was playing in a rather large lecture theatre.

This had the potential to be more intimidating than the classroom of last year, and I was a bit relieved when the crowd for the preceding junior category (I guess mostly parents) dissipated, leaving us with only the competitors, adjudicator and clerk, and a few spectators.

To be honest, I find it a bit difficult to remember too much of my playing. I guess I was quite focussed on the moment. I think this kind of performance is always going to be a bit of a tense experience, but at least I don’t recall any major disasters.

I was a bit less nervous this year than last. Partly, I was a bit more confident in my playing, but also I’d met the other two competitors before. One had been there last year and the other was a fellow whistle learner from Cambridge who had been kind enough to offer me a lift.

After we’d all played, the judges gave some generally encouraging comments before announcing the placings. I was third of the three, but unlike last year, we’d all qualified for the next round, AKA the All-Britain Fleadh!

I’d at least gone some way to answer the question of “how bad can you be at music and still qualify for the All-Britain?”!

We managed to see some of the other competitions, including the over-18 uilleann pipes slow air competition.

Like other slow air competitions, this has a challenging format in that you need to prepare a list of (I think) eight slow airs from which the judge picks two for you to perform.

As it happened, one of the airs chosen was Port Na bPúcaí, which apart from Aisling Gheal is probably the only one I recognize. Unlike most slow airs, which are derived from songs (often, but not always, with words in Gaelic), legend has it that this one originates from mysterious sounds heard by the Blasket Islanders attributed to whales or maybe the Púca.

I’ve been listening to this with a view to learning it, so it was encouraging to see that the judge felt it was one they’d like to hear.

The All-Britain Fleadh

Having qualified for it, I thought I should aim to attend the All-Britain Fleadh – who knows when/if I might get another chance! But I also had some misgivings that I was a bit out of my depth.

It probably tipped the balance a bit that this year it was held in Brentwood, close to where I grew up in Essex (in fact, apparently my parents had even taken me to an open day at the school where it was held, although I eventually went elsewhere) and a relatively short trip from our home in Hertfordshire.

Mindful that the few weeks until the All-Britain might fly past, I decided not to be over ambitious in picking new tunes or even learning new ones, and to mostly stick with the same tunes I’d played in Birmingham.

The exception to this was the polka, which I decided was on the simple side (maybe my lack of imagination; I’m sure there would be ways to vary it more) and hence I chose to swap that out for a more-challenging tune.

As I already had a reel and a slide (or single-jig as the judge had referred to it), the obvious choice would be a hornpipe. Of the few hornpipes, I know I decided to go for Charlie Mulvihill’s. Although this is quite popular at the Cambridge Comhaltas branch (maybe others from there have taken it to Fleadhanna before), in general it’s a little less well known than the other hornpipes I knew, which I think could all appear in a list of ‘Top 10 popular Irish hornpipes’.

I set about practicing that one a lot more regularly and also trying to make the other tunes a bit more polished. In light of the comments on the adjudication sheet from the first round, I felt I’d at least better try to add some vibrato to the slow air and I’d also resolved to try to speed it up slightly.

The week before the Fleadh, we were actually on holiday, or at least had a few days off work.

I’d been thinking this would be a good time to put some final touches to the tunes, but as it turned out there was a heatwave that week (hottest June week ever), which wasn’t very conducive to practice. I also had a less-than-confidence-inspiring time when I made a right mess of my hornpipe at a pre-Fleadh practice. Even considering I’d just cycled across Cambridge in the 30°C-plus heat, I was a bit alarmed at how far it was from having all the right notes in the right order!

I was very happy that by the Sunday of the Fleadh, the weather had eased a little, although it was still very warm in the classroom for the whistle competition. I was once again relieved to see there was not a large crowd.

This time there were six competitors in total, plus a few others that had come to watch.

Again, I managed to play my tunes without any desperate problems. Not perfect, but well within my regular range of imperfection and a lot better than my midweek rehearsal!

Me sitting in a classroom, playing a whistle intently. In the background two of the other competitors appear uninterested in my playing. — Me at the All-Britain Fleadh.

I think I’d been put strangely at ease by the time it was my turn, as having heard a few of the other players who were clearly a bit more capable, I had no worries about placings.

I managed not to be too distracted by the extreme authenticity with which my surname¹ was pronounced as I was called up (different to how my family say it anyway; I once had to spell it out when booking accommodation in Ireland).

The judges sum up with a few comments, as well as announcing the top three. In this case, I seem to recall some advice to pick short slow airs so as not to break the momentum of the dance tunes. I’m not sure that was directed particularly at me, but probably it was for the best that I’d sped up my air a little so it didn’t drag any more than needed be!

Before we left, we had lunch and got to see the 15–18 whistle competition, which seemed a very high standard again (a bit humbling!), and also cheered on my tutor who won her category.

We didn’t stay to see much of Brentwood, but as we drove though it, I was left with the impression of it being a bit smaller than I remembered. I guess I was a bit smaller when we lived there!

I’ve now received the adjudication sheet from the All-Britain.

Again it was generally encouraging (with a reassuring number of uses of the word ‘lovely’!).

If you were a bit more advanced at playing, there could be a lot to speculate on in terms of what tune choices and details of style the judges might prefer. At my level there’s clear room for improvement in the basics of rhythm, playing the right notes, playing in tune, applying a few more ornamentations, and not many short cuts to improving those things.

I’ve definitely not got any illusions that I’m really one of the top three whistle players in the Midlands – in reality, now overthinking this, I doubt I’d be in the top 30 in Cambridge. In some ways, I’m a little bit unsure about the concept of arts as a competition, but I definitely had fun and it pushed me to put a bit more focus on improving my playing rather than just learning more tunes (although there is a long list I want to learn…).

My surname is from Irish ancestry, but this is fairly unconnected to my learning of the music! I wasn’t exposed to much traditional music growing up, and only really learnt anything about the tradition after belatedly starting learning to play the whistle in my 40s, thinking it would be simpler than other instruments! ↩︎

Recordings

For this post, a recording is worth a thousand words, so here we are…

The recordings of the first three tunes were made in the week preceding the Midlands Fleadh (and I seem to recall they were more or less a single run through rather than best of a million takes!), so probably give a fair impression of how I was sounding on the day.

The recording of Charlie Mulvihill’s was made a few weeks after the All Britain as I wrote up this blog post, but I think it’s still more or less how I played it (having played it very little in the meantime).