EDITED BY JANE HARDY
HEAR MY SONG Neil Martin and Ruth McGinley discuss musical roots, difficult harmonic shifts and playing for Bill Clinton with Jane Hardy.
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ombine one clever composer, Neil Martin (60), with one inspired pianist, Ruth McGinley (45), in the Clayton Hotel over coffee, and the result is a fascinating insight into music making. And collaboration. Not only have the two pooled resources on Aura, their new CD featuring beautiful arrangements of Irish airs, they also have a serious back catalogue. In an ‘Ah yes, I remember it well’ exchange, they try to remember whether a Newry gig or the Bill Clinton event came first. Neil: “I think our first collaboration was with the BBC, wasn’t it?” Ruth confirms his memory: “Yes, we got together for music in the Ulster Hall for Bill Clinton.” The opportunity came about when Clinton and Senator George Mitchell, who helped to bring about the Good Friday Agreement, were given the freedom of the city of Belfast in 2018. Neil Martin adds: “It wasn’t written specifically for the event, but Clinton quoted Seamus Heaney and I’d set his poem The Cure at Troy for soprano, alto, choir, orchestra and piano so we got Ruth McGinley from Derry.” They used part of Martin’s setting. As the poet put it, ‘Believe in miracles’. You can’t help wondering whether performing in front of the President of the United States is a little nerve-wracking. No, says McGinley. “It doesn’t make any difference who I am performing to, it’s all about the connection with people, all of whom are the same whether it’s a granny or a president. I try not to let the pressure of the event get through.” Mr Martin reveals that setting Heaney is a joy because the man was so musical. “He was a great singer, I heard him several times, and there was that great music in his writing.” You could, of course, say people on the island of Ireland have a strong musical identity. McGinley agrees (“We are an expressive nation.”) and she and Martin bat this about when Neil Martin
comes up with a seriously left-field reference. “I think it was a twelfth or thirteenth century Welsh diarist, Gisaldo Cambrensis, who said the Irish were much better harpers, light years ahead of the other nations.” That was in the troubadour time, Martin notes, before Queen Elizabeth I, when poets and harpers sat at the top table. “Music and poetry were central to, well, everything. My word, things have changed since.” But we still inherit music via our parents, and grandparents, today. Ruth McGinley quotes her friend Duke Special who said in a workshop at Queen’s University that a performer steps onstage with their parents’ and grandparents’ tastes in them. “It helped me embrace that part of my childhood, having grandparents from Donegal and sitting round the fireside. I sometimes wished my parents, who are wonderful people, had had cooler tastes. They liked traditional Irish, country and western.” Martin says that his parents’ record collection shaped his musical leanings. “We had Beatles, we had Ry Cooder, Thelonius Monk, Beethoven, Bach, the Chieftains, as well as the Clockwork Orange music. It taught me to keep all the options open.” He goes on to say that he appreciates “the space in between” classical and traditional music. “I never saw them as different or disparate bedfellows.” He says that he learnt about studio work while doing arrangements in the ‘80s for country and western stars. “I would have done things for Philomena Begley.” Both Ruth McGinley and Neil Martin started very young. Ruth was a child prodigy. Brought up in the well-known McGinley School of Music and Drama in Derry, which was run by her parents, she’d sit at the bottom of the piano while her mother was teaching. “I taught myself the scales and was about two and a half. My granny visited, heard me playing and they thought it was my older sister. But they came in and saw me
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