Larry Schwartz
For a time, she couldn’t dwell on “something so emotionally disturbing …” But lately Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh has been thinking about the death of her husband and musical partner, Frankie Kennedy.
She remembers him bravely insisting that their band, Altan, continue to perform after he was diagnosed with bone cancer in 1992.
“It was very strange because he was at home receiving chemotherapy,” she says. “The only time I would feel anywhere at ease was when we would be playing tunes onstage. Then the reality would hit you straight in the face again. Somebody was ill at home.”
They’d married in the early ’80s and co-founded their band in 1987, taking its name from a lake near her birthplace, Gweedore, in County Donegal. By the time the Belfast-born flautist died in September 1994, Altan had long been hailed as Ireland’s foremost traditional folk group.
“Time has passed,” Mairead sings on their latest album, Runaway Sunday, “You have gone/ Your tune is played/ I must carry on.”
Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh is one of two fiddlers in the band. She had found it difficult to tour knowing Kennedy was ill. “But when he did pass away, I found that the music got deeper and better. You can treat grief in different ways. One is to grieve and be dark and the other try and heal yourself
and see a positive side in something so bad.
“I think that’s what has happened … It seems that a loss, if you are open to learning from it, will make you a better person and a better musician. You prioritise things in a different way. You realise how important life is and how to rejoice in it and not to worry about it too much.
“Who knows when anybody will be called away? We all go. It’s only a matter of time. And what is time?”
She grew up with the music. Her father, Proinsias O Mhaonaigh, a musician and composer, has played a key role in preserving a style of fiddling in which some note the influence of Scottish migrant workers.
“The Donegal style is very honest,” she says. “It’s very straight music. But then under that there are complications so subtle that only the initiated would understand.”
The former primary school teacher says that when this style of music is played particularly well, “it’s more like a mathematical sum to me”.
It was always the music, not the need to preserve a tradition, that motivated her. “The only thing that I noticed was I loved it. It was not a question of keeping values or heritage or anything alive. I just saw something in it that spoke to me.”
When she and Frankie Kennedy first played together in the early 1980s, they saw no career, just the sheer joy of music.
“It was never supposed to have been a commercial venture at all,” Mairead says. But with a taste for Celtic music awakened, largely, she says, through the efforts of the Dublin-based Chieftains’ collaborations with famous artists, they gained a strong following as far afield as Spain,
Scandinavia, the US, Japan. “Inevitably, it just grew and grew,” she says. They thought they might see a bit of the world. “That’s why we started to play as a professional band.”
She remembers a wonderful night with local musicians in Canberra during a frantic tour of Australia a few years back. She’s found in working with others, including American singer Alison Krauss and dobro-player Jerry Douglas, that music knows no regional bounds.
Others in the band play guitar, fiddle, accordion and bazouki. Mairead doesn’t think too much about her singing. “I listen to the old singers and most of them, it’s one step up from talking. So that’s what I like to do. Not to put too much effort in.”
Altan’s players are known for playing with exceptional speed. “I think it’s just raw energy,” she says. “We play from the heart and we just let loose and try and get that energy across to the people.
“A lot of people dance all the time when we play. Or they hoot or whatever they want to do.”
Though most of the songs on the last album were original, they were still in the traditional idiom. She hopes the group conveys to its audiences something of the spirit of the musicians from whom they learned.
“I always want people to smell the turf or the peat,” she says. “To really feel they’ve been transported to Donegal for a few hours.”
The Sunday Age, 21st of February 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 