Carolan’s Concerto with El McMeen “Carolan’s Concerto” is one of the greatest compositions of legendary Irish harper and melodicist, Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738). It was composed in honour of Mrs. Power, mother of the young lady to whom another beautiful Carolan tune, “Fanny Power,” was dedicated. It reflects Carolan’s reported immersion in the music of certain Italian composers, and the consequent development and expansion of the scope of his arrangements. My involvement with this tune has spanned over 25 years, and illustrates an arranging “odyssey” in at least three contexts. The first involves the manner (sometimes serendipitous) in which one selects a piece to be arranged. The second involves the arrangement itself (or, in this case, for me, the arrangements themselves). The third relates to the evolution of an arrangement as the thought process of the arranger, and his familiarity with a piece, mature. In the mid-1980’s, I began to delve into traditional “Celtic” music—an inaccurate, but useful, term covering Irish, Scottish and English music. The inspiration included guitar arrangements that were publicized through Stefan Grossman’s excellent Guitar Workshop series, as well as the recordings of instrumentalists, including Derek Bell, the late harper for the Chieftains, and Joemy Wilson, on hammered dulcimer. The stirring and lyrical quality of much of the repertoire with which I was becoming familiar led me to create my own guitar arrangements. At this time I became friendly with Caleb Crowell, from Montclair, NJ, an expert in the area of Irish and Scottish music. As I was working on a tune, Caleb would provide me with a recording of multiple versions of the same tune—sometimes eight or ten! This generosity on his part had at least three impacts on me. First, the multitude of versions indelibly imprinted the tune on my brain, so that I would be carrying it around with me for days.
GUITARBENCH MAGAZINE ISSUE 5 PAGE 1
As a result, when I set about doing an arrangement, I usually didn’t have a problem in “finding” the melody. Secondly, the diversity of approaches taken by the various instrumentalists rendering the tune reinforced the notion that there was a significant degree of freedom of interpretation permitted in trying to capture an ancient melody. Obviously, straying from the melody too much would impair the integrity of the arrangement, but the phrasing, the pace, and to some extent the particular chords chosen—those matters could reflect the style of the particular arranger and player. Tempering this idea of freedom, however, was the third idea—that, with so many arrangements of certain tunes out there, one should undertake an arrangement only if the result would be a worthwhile addition to the repertoire. Otherwise, what was the point?