Celtic Connections and music from the ocean’s depths

That’s the name of the “city under the sea”, the drowned town, with its watery cathedral and its bells, still ringing from the depths of the ocean off the western coast of Brittany. It sounds through Claude Debussy’s impressionist masterpiece for solo piano “La cathédrale engloutie” (The Sunken Cathedral), published in 1910. Hugh MacDiarmid refers to it in his 1933 poem “Homage to Dunbar”:

Wha wull may gang to Scott’s or Burns’s grave

But nane to yours, in your lost Scotland, lost

Neth this oor Scotland as neth the ocean wave

Atlantis lies, and haud’n a greater host

Than Brankstone’s deidly barrow ten times owre

To reckon nane but men o’ wit and worth.

The floo’ers o’ the Forest wede in Flodden’s earth

Were nocht but weeds to you, Scotland’s best floo’er.

Still, like the bells o’ Ys frae unplumbed deeps,

Whiles through Life’s drumlie wash your music leaps

To’n antrin ear, as a’e bird’s wheep defines

In some lane place the solitude’s ootlines

(As a sculptor the form frae the marble

A greater silence’s you wi’ your warble

– A’ th’ auld Scotland abandoned, unexplored,

Brocht oot vastly, waesomely, in your a’e word!)

And wee wings shak’ the immobility

And ootshine the vera sunshine suddenly

– Oh, in your unkent grave there’s mair life yet

Than Scotland’s had else or’s like to get!

In other words, from the great obscurity of myth and lost history, sometimes, to a listening ear strangely attuned to such wayward music, the doors can open to an undreamt-of world: the old Scotland, where life was lived to the full, with all the “connections” between the Celtic nations vibrant and humming in harmony.

READ MORE: Celtic Connections staged a fitting tribute to the great John Maclean

If this sounds a little romantic, vague, a bit wishy-washy in the worst sense, let’s be hard and precise for a moment. Mark Williams, in A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (2016), puts it very plainly: “The earliest written evidence for native gods comes from early Christian Ireland, not from the pagan period.”

Oral cultures do not write things down. Which is to say, we can never prove that Ossian existed. But neither can we prove he didn’t. We cannot ground our every conclusion in demonstrable proof, which means, we must not be credulous; but neither should we foreclose the capacities of our own imaginations.

Those are what open horizons. They may be risky but they make all navigation possible. And I think this is exactly what the portals open to, when you listen to the Celtic harp and Stivell’s playing and singing.

Of Breton origin, Stivell was born in 1944 in the Auvergne because his parents had moved there due to the war and German occupation. He lived there for a year and a half but his Breton origins prevailed. After the war, his father, Georges (Jord in Breton) was a civil servant in the French ministry of finance, who achieved his ambition of recreating a Celtic or Breton harp. His mother, Fanny Dobroushkess, was of French descent by her mother.

In 1953, Stivelln had a classical harp teacher, Denise Mégevand and began playing of the instrument, at the age of nine, at the same time learning about Celtic mythology, art, and history. He learned the Breton language and became familiar with traditional Breton dance and the traditional Breton bombard (an instrument cousin to the ancestors of the oboe).

He performed first in November 1953 (prompting the Revival of the instrument in Brittany). He was around 10 when he gave his first concerts in 1954. He began to practise the Scottish bagpipe at the end of the 50s, after the bombard and the whistle, but his first instrument was in fact the piano (which he began playing at the age of five).

With a new bardic harp with bronze strings, Stivell began experimenting with modernised styles of music that became known as Celtic rock. In 1966, he began to perform and record as a singer, coming to the forefront of the Breton roots revival. After the release of “Renaissance of the Celtic Harp”, the critic Bruce Elder wrote: “People who hear this record are never the same again … one of the most beautiful and haunting records ever made by anybody.”

It “introduced the Celtic harp to many thousands of listeners around the world. To call this music gorgeous and ravishing would be the height of understatement – indeed, there aren’t words in the English language to describe this record adequately. The opening work, ‘Ys’, is inspired by the legend of the fifth-century capital of the kingdom of Cornwall (most versions of the legend place the city in the Douarnenez Bay on the coast of Brittany), [said to have been] engulfed by a flood as punishment for its sins …”

Kernow is the Cornish name for Cornwall as in the British archipelago but Kerne or Bro-gKerne is the Breton name for the Breton “Cornwall”. These names and locations are sometimes slippery and elusive to get right. Effectively, they connect the Celtic countries but they also indicate distinctions between them.

The vitality of the folk music revival subsided a little in the 1980s but in the 90s, Stivell recorded with Kate Bush, Shane MacGowan and Senegalese Doudou N’Diaye Rose on an album entitled Again, initiating a Celtic new wave.

In 2002, Au-dela des mots (Beyond Words) was released, followed by Explore (2006), Emerald (2009), “1 Douar – One Earth” (2010)with Jim Kerr (Simple Minds), John Cale (ex-Velvet Underground), Paddy Moloney, Youssou N’Dour and Khaled, AMzer: Seasons (2015) and in 2018, his 25th studio album “Human-Kelt” included Andrea Corr, Bob Geldof, Yann Tiersen and Fatoumata Diawara.

John Purser, author of the magisterial book and radio series Scotland’s Music: A History of the Traditional and Classical Music of Scotland from Early Times to the Present Day (second edition, 2007) had this to say: “Alan Stivell is well-nigh a Breton musical guru and was certainly a great pioneer, a prime mover and a great musician, internationally respected.”

Traditional harpist and teacher Bill Taylor commented: “As traditional harp players, we really need to admit that we are all Alan Stivell’s children. He was the one who was in the right place at the right time to generate the Renaissance of the Celtic Harp. He inspired many who heard him since the early 1970s to take up the harp, and they became the teachers of the next generation.

‘OF course, he was hardly the only player around. In the 1920s Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s daughter Patuffa was the first person to record Scottish music with harp (on wax cylinders) and the Clarsach Society itself was founded in Dingwall in 1931 to support the growing number of harp players, teachers and makers. But it was Alan who fused ancient Celtic with modern pop and created a new voice for the harp.

“This fusion is what has been celebrated at Celtic Connections for over 30 years now. The ‘connections’ are distributed across a range of genres: folk, traditional, world, indie, Americana, and jazz & soul. But what are the connections joining?

“Do we better understand ancient Scottish harp music after hearing the undoubtedly joyous music from Africa, Appalachia and Galicia? It is a shame we lost all the record stores, but at least we moved away from labelling the CDs ‘File under Celtic’. Maybe ‘genre’ is becoming outdated in music, as it has become in the art world. Do we need to keep pretending that all this is somehow ‘Celtic’ music?”

On the idea of Celtic Connections, the renowned composer, piper, singer and teacher Allan Macdonald says: “There are ‘Celtic’ connections between Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Scotland by way of linguistics and to some extent through the music by extrapolation.

“The harp music survived without a break in Wales only and ended in Scotland around 1820. We find now that the clarsach players in Eire and Scotland are looking to the pipers to find out the dynamics of the motifs and figures in pibroch court music so they can re-interpret a version or versions of them to ascertain what they may have been like in the 17th and 18th centuries.

“The song traditions have some parallels, for example the working songs and waulking songs in Brittany, where they use their feet rather than hands (the feet-waulking died out in Scotland some time ago). And the modes are so different.”

It’s worth noting that Stivell played three extracts of piobaireachd (including the crunluath variation) on his 1985 album “Harps of the New Age”, one of which he performed in Glasgow in January. He has spent a great deal of time analysing the music of the Celtic nations. Few, perhaps, have studied it as closely and as extensively as Stivell, and recognised that the music is best understood alongside a comparative anthropology.

Stivell has been engaged in such study for 70 years and because he chose live music to express the findings of his research rather than writing books or essays, relatively few recognise the depth of research that lies behind his work and informs it.

His own sense of “compléments culturels” can be found in his autobiography, as yet untranslated from French into English. Here, the deep links between the Celtic nations are explored in different fields, including music.

So the connections are there but sometimes tenuous and so deep as to be easily overlooked. It is not simply a matter of sustaining or maintaining a tradition, or traditions, since they have to be recovered, retrieved and renewed, and profound study which bears its fruit in performance rather than scholarship is too easily undervalued or missed.

From his youth, Stivell studied traditional music and other kinds of music but he doesn’t claim to be a purely “traditional” singer or musician. The condition of Brittany has perhaps obliged him to give more time than he might have wished to his new and experimental arrangements from traditional music, bringing it into the world of “contemporary” music.

Stivell has always self-consciously given significant space to his musical roots. Others may be more or less conscious of various strong cultural influences but he has worked attentively on the cross-over, producing a music and writing which embraces a global provenance, while never excluding his own native environment.

If the renewal inevitably involves some degree of invention, an active use of the imagination in its development, the balance between this and anything entitled to be called “authentic” may seem sometimes blurred.

But on January 31, in the Mackintosh Church in Maryhill, there was nothing blurred about Stivell as he came on to the stage and declared his delight at being back in Scotland, in the wintry month of his own birthday, turning what he described as “Eight point zero.”

Well, for an 80-year-old, his playing was as sharply-focused, sprightly and energised, or as languorous and magical, as any youth’s might be, and the mellifluous, then sometimes pacy, percussive, then somehow floating, mesmerising melodies and tunes that emerged from his fingers on the strings formed a lasting memory for a packed and enthusiastic audience.

One of those in the company was the composer Hilary de Vries, herself one of Scotland’s finest harpists. Her CD The Knockbain Road (BPCD002) appeared in 2023 and gathers 21 compositions of great charm and haunting loveliness. I asked Hilary to comment on her own work, prompted by Stivell’s concert.

Alan Riach: Hilary, your love of the harp, what the music of the harp can do, comes through so clearly in your recordings. How did the harp first appear and appeal to you? Did you have formal training in playing?

Hilary de Vries: I’d been to various harp concerts over the years as part of folk music events but it was when I heard Alison Kinnaird playing a wire-strung clarsach that I first had the urge to play one myself.

The way the ringing sound of the strings built up, almost creating a drone effect, amazed me. I’ve no formal training in playing the harp, although I did for other instruments I’ve played. The harp taught me how to play it, and the best way to learn was to listen.

Alan: How did you become aware of the history of the harp, and the clarsach, in Celtic culture?

Hilary: The historical side of the harp is something I’ve become more aware of and learnt more about through people such as Bill Taylor and Keith Sanger. It wasn’t something I knew anything about when I came to the harp and any sense of the clarsach in Celtic culture was instinctive rather than knowledge based.

Alan: When did you learn of Alan Stivell? When did you first hear him? What sort of impact did that have?

Hilary: I first saw him in the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh years back. I went there knowing nothing about his music, listened to it, and loved it. I didn’t realise the impact his music had had on me till I saw him again in Glasgow and realised just how much he has been a founding influence in the music I listen to and how I compose. He was part of my musical growing-up.

Alan: What do you feel about the connections between the Celtic nations? What might be the best way to build on these connections?

Hilary: It feels like the connections are there but weak or fractured, or what is happening doesn’t get enough coverage. We are not enough aware of what the different nations are doing as so much is drowned out by the prevailing mainstream culture.

More opportunities to hear each other’s music, to experience it and the culture it comes from and to create dialogue between us would increase the strength of connection, but it may need to be done by circumventing the mainstream and creating a Celtic network.

Alan: Could you tell us a little about your own compositions, how they have come about? And why and how the music of the natural world – birdsong, for example – comes into play there?

Hilary: I came to composing by chance after years of playing different instruments. As I wrote more and more music it became apparent how much of it draws its inspiration from the natural world and from poetry, to the point where I think I would struggle to write music otherwise. It’s never been a conscious decision to work this way.

I’m just expressing the music of the world around me, whether that be the wind in the trees, the sound of water in all its forms or the sight and sound of birds. I never set out to compose on a certain theme- it needs to be as instinctive and unplanned as possible. I write the music, and there are the birds, there is the land, there is the poetry.

I don’t know if it’s something akin to some kind of synaesthesia, but I feel notes. I can be watching a setting sun, for example, and I can feel a note there, the note the sun is singing. It’s only when I go to an instrument that I discover what the note I’ve felt is. It’s another way I experience the music of the world around me.

Alan: Perhaps it’s that sense of how reality is most closely interpreted in its interconnections, and perhaps that kind of sensitive synaesthesia, along with the deep research that Alan Stivell’s music and sensibility arise from, is what the phrase Celtic Connections is really all about.