A Year Joyful and Tragic: An Explanation of why I play Irish Music

I’m coming up on a year anniversary of going to a local Irish session, and of really working on acquiring a repertoire and vocabulary in this style. During that time I’ve learned - certainly not mastered - somewhere around 120 tunes. I use the ‘tunebook’ feature of the website The Session to help keep track of these things, but some of the tunes added are placeholders, so those don’t count. 

I can’t say completely what compelled me to do it. My only session experience was at this same session near me, in 2014, when I had absolutely no Irish repertoire, but a curiosity, and a desire to push myself further into folk traditions after spending some time at a Swedish fiddle workshop (also playing accordion) and getting my butt kicked by the details. I did what I now understand to be the mostly verboten thing of sort of ‘busking along’ with tunes I don’t know - and played a Swedish polska for them, by request. But I did also record, and from that recording, painstakingly transcribed a single tune. Not knowing any of the vocabulary, having very little idea of the ornamentation or variation that is often employed, this was not an easy process, and my attempts to actually learn the tune suffered for that reason. (I later learned, in this attempt, that the tune was called the Wicklow Hornpipe, or Sonny Murray’s, and actually learned the tune properly). 

In the intervening years I spent a lot of time avoiding Irish music, feeling like the skills I had gained from working on Klezmer and Scandinavian and other styles was not really transferable given the tunes were of such different character - and more importantly, I really took to heart the belief that the piano accordion was, without exception, the wrong instrument for the job, given how complex some of the tunes can be especially in terms of intervallic leaps at rapid speed. All of these things are true, but they are not insurmountable, which leads me to believe I may have possibly been making excuses for some gaps in my technical ability. It would not be the first time I’ve done such a thing. 

But it was the winter of 2022, and it was what could be understood as a bleak one. Earlier that year my father had received a cancer diagnosis, something that I think my brain rejected the scientific name for - but basically, a tumor on his optic nerve. It was the type of thing rare enough that made him eligible for a proton beam therapy treatment, but that treatment had been delayed by a case of Covid around Thanksgiving. The course of treatment reached its end as the year drew to a close, and my dad was wiped out by the intensity of it - low energy, barely able to make it up subway stairs at times. We talked often on the phone, and at one point I was very self conscious that I had only bad news to relay to him, since there was a lot of uncertainty at that time. 

And then some combination of things fell into place here: an accordion student had mentioned he liked some folk-accordion sounds he’d heard on a film soundtrack; I was listening to a lot of Steeleye Span which included the odd bit of Irish repertoire; and I found, almost completely by accident, a “Traditional Irish Piano Accordion” group on Facebook. About a week later, I would recognize this as something like a synchronicity, a random alignment of events or occurrences that seems to suggest a path forward. Suddenly I had found Jimmy Keane, and YouTube tutorials, and what I could find at random on Bandcamp. I first learned Morrison’s Jig from a tutorial video, but what really made it click was feeling some uncertainty at the order of notes in a particular phrase - and then going to find a different recording - and another - to compare it against. 

Irish music still seemed like a puzzle, but it seemed suddenly like a “solvable” one. More solvable than cancer, more so than those weirdly warm December and January days when I first started working on a small group of 3-4 tunes. I went to a session about a week later, at which I played Morrison’s, then realized as we were reaching the fourth go-around that “hey, they usually switch to another tune at this point don’t they?” and knowing for certain that I didn’t have one in the queue. A very gracious fiddler was kind enough to recognize my “Oh shit” face and led the group into another jig or two. I stayed the whole session and biked home feeling a mild buzz and some genuine excitement for the following week. 

And so it went - between a combination of some Online Academy of Irish Music courses, a few online playlists that I was shuffling around, and some exploration of tunes I’d heard on those Steeleye Span recordings, I found something really beginning to blossom. This was one of those times when my obsessive tendencies had a positive outlet. I could dig deep into an easily accessible catalog of recordings, and due to regular sessions and encouragement from some long-time session hosts and anchors (Thanks Katie, Jeff, and Loretta especially!), I actually felt that, beyond just learning tunes, I was getting somewhere. And it didn’t hurt that I had something that felt like good news to relay when I talked to my dad. 

It turned out that some of the tools I had acquired while going to years of Klezmer retreats actually had some value here. It wasn’t so much about the playing, where Irish music seems to have much less metric elasticity in the melodic delivery, but in the listening. Learning not only notes by ear, but phrasing, ornaments, subtle shifts in tempo, and connecting passages. The idea of really trying to map a tune out in your head before ever bringing it to your instrument. Crucial here was the ability to listen to crackly-sounding recordings of unaccompanied solo musicians without getting antsy - questionable as a moral virtue, but indispensable as a learning tool. 

It wasn’t always a linear progression. I plateaued for the first time about a month into going to sessions, feeling like there was a wall I was slowly being pushed up against. The qualities that made Irish music sound ‘good’ to my ear (and I'm not even going to touch ‘authentic’) just seemed at times too different from everything I’d done until then. But I got through that one, and all the plateaus that followed. Maybe it’s all just one continuous plateau when learning a traditional style. Part of it is learning not to be blind to the gaps between the sound I want to hear, and the sound I am creating. I have to be aware of them, but I have to be forgiving of myself that they exist. 

Only a few times in online spaces - and never at the local session I attended - was I made to feel as though I didn’t have any business playing Irish Music. Mostly, people were excited to see a reasonably competent musician starting to put the time in. I never really did the ancestry deep dive, although extended family on both sides have done some digging. My mother’s side of the family, made up of primarily Black American ancestry with traces of Cherokee, Scottish, and Scandinavian roots. My dad, to his intense chagrin (“why couldn’t our family be from somewhere interesting?”) reported that his ancestors came to the US from England, Ireland and Scotland in the 18th century, and ended up in Missouri where he was born. Not exactly a tenable connection. He did at one point tell me a vivid memory of his grandparents and their siblings getting together in his youth, singing and playing fiddles. After both of us doing some digging, it turned out this was the Ozark variety of American fiddle music - but from his description of his grandfather closing his eyes and singing, everyone around him silent, transported, and transfixed, I might have entertained for a week or so the idea that he was witnessing a performance of Séan-Nos song. 

But the music wasn’t about identity for me. It didn’t even take all that long to get away from the idea that ‘style’ in Irish music was a puzzle that can be solved more quickly if you know the right terminology or listen to the right players. Trying to rush this sort of thing is like drying clothes in the fireplace - you may get them dry faster, but you may also scorch, stretch, or weaken the fabric. I had a few brief pauses during this year, in part due to a mild back injury, that actually turned out to be a good opportunity to get some perspective on this. 

The common refrain is “Irish Music is a social music”. For sessions, this means it’s the friendships, and the conversations between tunes, and the people watching, as much as it is the tunes themselves. My dad had patience for small doses of traditional music, but what really gave me fuel at that time was just getting to talk to him about people I was meeting. He had an endless curiosity about people, and some of that was passed onto me. 

But things were not going well on the treatment front, and it seemed at times all I could do in response was play tunes and chat with him on the phone, trying to scrape by with work responsibilities. I wrote a few tunes of my own between February and May of 2023, all of which were some form of processing all this while it was happening, and dedicated a reel to him, entitled “The Staircase Brawler”. I got the chance to play it for him on his birthday, in a moment in which I have absolutely never been more self-conscious of what the audience was thinking while I played. I have almost no memory of playing the tune at that point, but I kept thinking how different my accordion sounded in his kitchen compared to in the pub, how much more shrill. 

Two weeks later, he was in hospice care at home, and barely a month following, he was gone. I spent a lot of that time staying with him and his husband Ted, and brought my accordion during that time, quietly playing tunes on the porch in concert with a magnificent population of birds and frogs in eastern New York. But his birthday was the last time I had played for him directly. 

There are parts of the second half of 2023 that are a blank for me. I understand now that this is one of those effects of grief, of a brain restructuring itself to deal with the reality of a person’s absence. But I do know that a week after his passing I was playing at a session, and people had been wondering where I’d been the last few weeks. I might have been numb at the time, and taken that concern for granted. Now I see it as a lifeline. 

Judging from what I posted on Social Media, it would seem like I had undergone a radical conversion. But I was still playing other styles, still doing free improvisation, still occasionally composing and recording synth music. I’m an interdisciplinary learner, which means that keeping up with those other musical contexts continues to help me understand Irish music, and vice versa. I didn’t start out thinking “I’ll learn a few sets and start gigging as quickly as possible” - and in hindsight, I feel like I dodged a bullet not going into this process with that attitude. 

At some point during the year, I connected with the fiddler Adam Work, and we have made it a habit of having tunes on a semi-regular basis - fiddle and accordion, with me sometimes accompanying on piano depending on where we meet. After a few months of that, it started to feel like we had something worth presenting, and we ended the year doing a gig at a holiday craft market, playing tunes for about two hours, which confirmed for both of us that polkas are in fact a powerful compulsion to dance disguised as a tune. I also had the chance to sub in with the Western Mass band New Leaf, learning a bunch of phenomenal tunes to join them at a New Year’s eve gig, just a few days ago now as I write this. I was phenomenally nervous, but pretty well prepared, and it was a blast. I hope this trend will continue into 2024. 

But even if it doesn’t, some of my happiest moments this year were at sessions - mouth agape, quietly humming or playing along, all senses engaged as I try and learn on the fly. Some tunes just seem to leap to your fingers, where others are a bit fussier. I’ve managed to avoid being too jaded about session-standard tunes, the chestnuts in the tradition that experienced players have heard played with low energy one time too many. Those can sometimes be easier to learn in the moment or from recordings, simply because so many people know them and the melody can be clearly heard over the backers and the chatters. But I also think there is some kind of sympathetic energy that happens at a good session. I don’t have many to compare to, but I feel lucky that the one nearest me feels like it often has that energy - a lot of strong players who attend regularly, guest hosts in from Ireland, Boston, and New York, and an incredible anchor in guitarist and singer Joe Heeran, who recently passed the hosting baton at the conclusion of the year. I’ve even seen a few of my piano students come into the pub with their families to watch the music, which has led to me starting to teach a few simple tunes myself. It’s about the music, but also how and where we are when we hear or play it, and who we are with. 

Despite all this, my brain is wired such that it is sometimes easy for me to focus on musical details to the exclusion of anything else. So it is now my father’s voice, which I will fundamentally remember as delivering patterns of speech with an almost musical animation to them, that I hear when I hear the phrase “Irish music is a Social music.” He likely never uttered that phrase in his life. But that bubbling quality came out when he was talking to people he cared for, about people that fascinated him. I don’t know if I understand people as well as he seemed to. But then there are those moments where I’m getting so analytical about a phrase or an ornament, lose sight of the tune, or get really self-critical. And sometimes in those moments I feel that nudge, and remember to introduce myself to a new player, ask how they’re doing or where they’re coming from, and really listen to what they say in response. And then, almost suddenly, it’s like what we are playing together makes a little more sense.