HEAR MY SONG

Combine 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 at the piano and I played them the scale of C. Then asked if they wanted G, D, F# and C# minor. My mother was quite chuffed as she hadn’t known I could do it!” McGinley went on to win the BBC Young Musician of the Year award at the tender age of sixteen, got an agent, and studied at both The Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music.

Similarly, Neil recalls listening to music and getting the composing bug at a young age. “I was about eleven, at primary school and I saw this documentary on television called The Family. It showed ordinary people living their lives and was fly on the wall. One sad scene I remember had cello and flute music behind and I was absolutely drawn in. I wondered why these notes were happening with the pictures and thought, “I like that, I’m going to try that.” He started finding the right notes himself, went on to compose as a teenager, then more when he studied at Queen’s because composing wasn’t on the A level syllabus. “But something that was on the syllabus, Bach four part harmony, enabled me to do what I do now. I don’t know how people manage without it.”

This knowledge has underpinned Martin’s career; one of whose highlights was a commission to write a piece for the opening of the Belfast Arts Festival in 2004. He composed something for the traditional instrument he plays. “I did a concerto for uillean pipes with orchestra, called No Tongue Can Tell. This poignant piece is personal, as Martin notes. “It tells the love story of my maternal grandparents. My mother never met her father, who was a sea captain and died in his thirties while her mother was pregnant with her, her fifth child.”

Aura is also resonant and its version of Danny Boy was described as revelatory, “as if you’re hearing it for the first time”, by Glenn Patterson at the album launch; with its beautiful versions of traditional Irish songs or airs it shows the way collaboration works. Neil Martin says that he took on board Ruth’s “perfect” suggestions. Thinking of an example, McGinley comes up with something from Farewell to the Meg about a river in co Tyrone. “I suggested the left hand be brought up so we could have a kind of treble dreaminess.” Neil Martin then admits to a compositional falling short. “I had a bad key change, well it could have been better. And when Ruth played it, we both went ‘Er..!’” They laugh. The amendment was made and as Martin says, at the end he felt his music couldn’t have been played better. It’s soothing and Martin notes how effective the powerful, slow time signatures are. “We got the tempo right and when I played the CD in my car, it was one of the most relaxing pieces of music. There’s space between the notes and quiet is as important as noise.” He adds: “It’s a great thing arranging music when you know the people you’re arranging for.”

What about when inspiration lags? Is there a composer’s block, like writer’s block? No, says Martin, because he doesn’t allow it. “Of course, there’s the inspiration, but there is also the craft, how you navigate round the difficulties. When I’ve got a piece of music and it’s tough - you’ll have to reword this - I say ‘I’m going to f***ing win this battle’.” And he does.

In lockdown, Neil Martin was characteristically busy. He wrote a violin concerto, a work for the West Ocean String Quartet in which he plays cello, quite a bit of Aura too. “I kept writing, what else are you going to do?” Ruth reveals that she enjoyed the time out, and has found her residency at The MAC fulfilling. “It’s given me space to explore and try new things.”

The musicians are looking forward to the New Year. Their plans involve family, and unsurprisingly some music. Ruth McGinley, who relaxes to jazz and composers like Max Richter (“less notes, more space after the Rachmaninov I’m used to…”), will see in 2023 with her parents and son in Derry. She says she relishes new beginnings. “I like a Monday, I like a January, the opportunity for a fresh start.”

There will be music performed around the Martin household in Lansdowne Road, North Belfast. As Neil Martin, who mainlines Bach for pleasure, especially the cello suites, says he lives in a key landscape, between the mountain and the sea, Cave Hill and the Lough. “That’s important, grounding. I have four children who live in different places, including Scotland, and unusually they’ll all be home. They all perform so we’ll be playing something, maybe in a jocular, not too serious manner.”

Aura is available via Ruth McGinley’s website: www.ruthmcginley.co.uk