In the 1950s an American ethnomusicologist, Sidney Robertson Cowell, traveled to Ireland to record some of the traditional Gaelic music of the West of Ireland. (Sidney Cowell was married to pioneering American composer Henry Cowell.) She recorded various types of traditional songs preserved in the isolation of the isles of Aran – lullabies, weaving songs and folk songs. She also recorded several examples of the Caoine or Caoineadh (keen) – the traditional mourning song practiced in Gaelic speaking Ireland and Scotland.
The Caoineadh
is distinct from the more poetic and personalized form of mourning song, the
Lament. A Caoineadh is a ritualized
wailing, the melodic contour generally starting high and descending in pitch,
the words usually a repeated phrase such as ‘Och, Ochone’ (Woe, Woe) or
similar, often more spoken than sung. In
the notes that accompany Cowell’s recordings she describes the Caoineadh as “a
ritual (and tearless) crying-out against grief and death in the world, and it goes
back into time as far as anything we know.” (Cowell, 1957) The people of this part of Ireland were no
strangers to grief, the great famine of the 1840s having decimated their
population. According to Cowell, half
the population of the western isles starved to death and half of the surviving
islanders migrated.
One
of the singers recorded by Cowell in the 1950s was a woman called Bridget
Mullin who was born in 1868 and was described as “the leading professional
keening woman of the islands.” (Cowell, 1957). The
Caoineadh was traditionally sung by family members at the time of the loved
one’s death but later, as the body left the house for the last time,
professional wailing women took up the Caoineadh. There is another recorded example of a Caoineadh,
sung by a woman who didn’t want her name to be known in case her relatives
heard that she had agreed to perform this very powerful song at random. Cowell describes how the woman, on agreeing
to sing for her, “went around the house to peer up and down the road, and then
she barred the door against unexpected callers, before sitting down at the
hearth.” (ibid) When Sidney Cowell
played these recordings to a gathering in New York, several people were
overcome by the intense and intimate quality of the recordings and Cowell
herself questioned whether in fact these songs were too private to be released
as a commercial recording. She was
eventually convinced of the need for these songs to be heard, as a document and
a relic of a fading cultural practice. This
was over 50 years ago and I wonder is these songs are still sung at all.
The
power of these women’s voices is compelling.
You can hear the remembered emotion summoned by the singing of these
songs: the remembered mourning of dead parents, husbands and children. These
recordings are remarkable in that they capture a vocal tradition that, even at
the time of recording, was dying out. And more remarkable, I can hear these
women’s voices today, long after their voices have stopped, thousands of miles
away. It also makes me wonder if at some
time in my family’s past, my own great great grandmothers may have sung these
songs at the time of someone’s passing.
I
wish this tradition was alive still, that today we had such clear rituals to
follow that allowed us to really voice our grief. In many cultures wailing is still part of
grieving but in our polite modern Australian society there is little room for
this kind of behavior. What a relief to
wail out all the sadness, albeit in a controlled ritualized way, but one filled
with emotion and outward expression of inner grief. How empowering it would be to put that into
song, to follow the traditional form as a guide but to infuse it with your own
personal grief and emotion. I think I
may be past the point where wailing will help express my grief but I am very
drawn to this ancient musical form.
Liner notes by Sidney Robertson Cowell and the recordings are available through the
Smithsonian Folkways website.
Ethnic
Folkways Library Album No. FE 4002
Copyright
1957 Folkways Records & Service Corp.
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