London-born composer Tarik O’Regan’s new opera, Heart of Darkness (based on Joseph Conrad’s novella) premiered at the Linbury Studio of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in November 2011 and in the same month the premiere recording of his Acallam na Senórach (The Colloquy of the Ancients) with Paul Hillier leading the National Chamber Coir of Ireland was released.
Based on a late 12th century Middle Irish poem, Acallam na Senórach tells the tale of Saint Patrick’s encounter with the fían, a band of ancient warriors led by the hero Caílte. Sung in the exotic Middle Irish language by a cappella choir (there are also interludes for the bodhráin, an Irish frame drum, and guitar), it’s a fascinating story of the meeting of pagan and Christian Ireland. O’Regan’s music conjures the ancient past while still sounding quite current and absolutely accessible.
O'Regan spoke with Ariama editor Craig Zeichner about Acallam na Senórach.
Ariama: The dialogue between the sacred and secular worlds is very interesting.
Tarik O’Regan: It was in the early part of the story where Patrick baptizes the warriors that I felt I would be able to work on the piece in a long form. I was drawn to that text immediately.
This early encounter is interesting to me because instead of the warriors being grateful immediately and having their lives change, they immediately come back to Patrick and say, “Well how much does that cost? What’s that worth? You gave us something, what can we give you?” And in fact, they give him gold. This is the beginning of an exchange that never ends. Patrick takes the gold and he says, “Well I’m going to use the gold that you’ve given me to illuminate my manuscripts.” That’s a sort of cultural game of tennis in some ways. Neither side is quite willing to be the recipient. They both want to shake hands; they both want to work together and to explain to each other something of their lives.
So for me, that exchange really sums up the whole piece, which is about dialogue and discourse in its many different forms – whether it’s Patrick to his own people, Patrick to the warriors, the warriors to Patrick, or the warriors about themselves (when they tell their own stories). There’s also this realm of the síd (the underworld) that’s neither Patrick nor the warriors, represented largely in the piece by the guitar.
These permutations and combinations of discourse, secular and sacred, different voices, different thoughts and different times (many of the tales being told to Patrick are hundreds of years old) are one of the reasons I decided to set the work for many voices. None of the voices sing a particular role, but are spread evenly throughout the voices of the choir.
Ariama: The Middle Irish language is very musical.
TO’R: The reason I set it in Middle Irish was for a musical and textural feeling of dialogue. In the original text (which is made up of maybe 200 different stories) each time a story is told, it is then told again in poetic form. The poetry, when I heard it read, has as you say, its own musicality, its own rhythm and its own sounds. But what I wanted, musically at least, was to hear this dialogue between two different languages: between English, which represents the prose sections, and Middle Irish, which represents the poetry.
It is a very interesting language. I had to have it recorded by a colleague of mine. What’s interesting is the choir, who are Irish, also needed it recorded because the way they could read it and understand it deviates from modern spoken Irish quite significantly.
Ariama: How was working with the National Chamber Choir of Ireland and Paul Hillier?
TO’R: They’re great singers. This project initially came about because I worked with Paul and the Orlando Consort and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir on another medieval piece called Scattered Rhymes. That set a text of Petrarch and the Guillaume de Machaut Mass. What links all these texts together—the Petrarch, the Machaut and this work, the Acallam na Senórach, is that the authors of these texts moved away from the language of the educated, which was Latin, to the vernacular. So the move away from the educated to the folk idiom was quite interesting.
That relationship with Paul, both musically and in use of the folk idiom in storytelling, is what inspired me to begin writing this piece. Paul and I were in a post-concert talk the other day and (if I paraphrase him correctly) he was wondering what happens when you get a small group of singers together, what is it they are actually doing. He felt it is very much about telling a story. And so that link, and the link with the return to the vernacular interested me very much.
I know Paul’s particular interest in choral music; at least through his work that I’ve heard recently, shows a very keen interest in the role of rhythm and motion in choral music. This is something that very much entwines with my own view of what choirs can do. I feel they are a great instrument that we don’t really use properly, or we don’t use in as varied a way as we might.
So those were the musical ideas that got together. And then I worked with Paul as the piece grew and grew and grew. There was the 10-minute version and then there was a sort of draft version that was performed. Then I went back and spoke with Paul and we went over some ideas, one of which was to increase the role of the guitar. The guitar came in the second incarnation of the work. Then came the third incarnation of the work which is pretty much the one that you’ve heard. So working with Paul is great because it allowed the piece to grow over time.
Ariama: You’ve recently had your opera premiered at Covent Garden.
TO’R: Yes, my opera based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Which is interesting, actually, because firstly it’s about storytelling. And secondly, it’s another framed narrative; much in the way that Acallam na Senórach is a framed narrative. It’s the story of a man telling a story, much in the same way that the Acallam na Senórach is the story of warriors telling stories.
by Craig Zeichner, Ariama Editor
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