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from Tommy Peoples: Portrait of an Artist
‘The March to Kinsale’ is a three-part suite, comprising a march, a song and a reel, commissioned in 2007 to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the Flight of the Earls. It combines a new march as the eponymous first movement, a reworking of ‘Farewell to Erin’ as a song entitled ‘Love’s Legacy’, and bright reel, ‘The Celebration’ to conclude the work. In this suite, Peoples grapples with the downfall of Gaelic Ireland and the vanquishing of Ireland’s last Gaelic Lords in the early seventeenth century. His command of the historical detail is evident, including the key moments of Battle of Kinsale itself, and the various political machinations that followed. Tommy writes that ‘Kinsale became the ultimate battle in the conquest of Gaelic Ireland by the English, who figured that, with the defeat of O’Neill and O’Donnell, the Gaelic system would be destroyed forever (2015: 145).’
The premiere of the piece was given in Portnamurray, Rathmullen, as part of a concert entitled Ceol agus Cultúr na nGael (Ní Chuibhne, 2007: 40). The concert featured a range of musicians who represented different parts of the story of the Flight of the Earls. The March to Kinsale featured Tommy, his daughters Siobhán and X, Francie McIlduff and Seosamh Ó Neachtain. This video features Tommy performing the full suite. It was recorded by David Casey at a concert in the White Horse, Ballincollig, Co. Cork. With thanks to David Casey for permission to reproduce the clip.
Then first movement, a 4/4 march entitled ‘March to Kinsale’, reflects specifically on the story of Red Hugh O’Donnell and his downfall after Kinsale and is a complex composition in the key centre of A. This is an extremely challenging piece of music for the performer and asks difficult questions of a fiddler’s technical ability.
Although the first and third phrases of each part are regular, there is a deliberate avoidance of cadence in places where it may be ordinarily expected, particularly at the end of the first A part and the first C part. Here we find a series of quaver patterns that cascade down the finger board linking the repeat to its first statement.
In the second part, these cascading phrases are found again, but also counterbalanced by complex ascending triplets in bars 24-25.
Owing to the melodic variation found in bar nine, the phrasing of the tune is quite difficult to define. Rather than thinking of two bar phrases, as is usually the case in Irish music, we might instead think of two phrases of two bars each (bars 19-20 and bars 21-22). This is then followed by a longer phrase of 6 bars (bars 23-28):
In Tommy’s own words:
the third part of the march carries echoes of ‘The Foggy Dew’ the song about The Easter Rising of 1916, as a way of representing the fact that ‘conquest’ by might of empire never succeeded in 800 years, and that repulsion of conquest has not yet fully succeeded either. (2015: 145)
The song ‘Love’s Legacy’ is one of a small number composed by Tommy. Towards the end of his life, he would often sing in performances when he found himself unable to play the fiddle, due to his declining health. The air to the song is developed from the first part of the common reel ‘Farewell to Erin’. The air was obviously chosen not just for the quality of its melody, but for the meaning in the title. Tommy had in fact envisaged this setting as far back as 1974, when he recorded the air as a prelude to the reel on his CCÉ recording An Exciting Session with one of Ireland’s Leading Traditional Fiddlers (CL13, 1976).Tommy’s song here is a commentary on the Flight of the Earls (1607), a catastrophic event in Irish social history which saw the last remaining Gaelic lords depart the country from Rathmullan in county Donegal. The song is macaronic, with the middle verse in Gaelic, and its style is reminiscent of early twentieth century ballads in its use of language to praise Ireland and its inhabitants, as well as to espouse grievances against those who disrupted the Gaelic order. Tommy refers to many of the virtues of Ireland, including music, the landscape and the people, as well as citing the remaining vestiges of Gaelic culture.
