Music and its Cultural Uses by Roger Newton

By Rev. Roger Newton  

During the “Penal Law” times, the Irish created songs which on the surface were love ballads but which contained coded messages about religious and political freedom.  The songs included "Roisin Dubh" ("Dark Rose"), recorded by Michael McGlynn, and "An Raibh Tu Ag An gCarraig?" ("Were You at the Rock?"), sung movingly by fiddler Máiréad Nesbitt and interpreted meditatively by Aine Minogue on Celtic Meditation Music.  By singing these songs from Ireland’s spiritual history, musicians will accomplish as much as, if not more than, the politicians and church leaders toward bringing about reconciliation and peace among Irish Christians.    

     The “disguised” Irish freedom songs remind me of the spirituals sung by Americans of African descent which Sir Michael Tippett included in his anti-Nazi, anti-war oratorio A Child of Our Time.  In the 1960s I sang in the chorus with the Baltimore Symphony as Sir Michael himself conducted his oratorio.  He told us the spirituals were the closest nineteenth and twentieth-century equivalents he could find to the powerful chorales in Bach’s Passions, oratorios and cantatas.                                    

     The spirituals had earlier inspired Antonin Dvořák,     The early Bohemians, Dvorák's forebears, were Celts. They were assimilated by Germans and Slavs, but their spirit endured and inspired both Czechs and Austrians. Austria, home to Schubert and other composers, was also home to Celts in pre-Roman times. Dvořák learned the spirituals from the young composer Harry T. Burleigh during Dvořák's stay in the United States.  In his New World Symphony and in his American Quartet, but most noticeably in his Cello Concerto, Dvořák wove magnificent musical tapestries combining his own Bohemian, Slavic, Celtic and Austro-German spiritual and musical heritage with what he had learned from Burleigh and from Native American Indian music as well. 

     Burleigh learned from Dvořák, too.  Dvořák encouraged him to turn those spirituals into high art, which he did, and the result is a beautiful recording of Burleigh's settings by American soprano Karen Parks on her CD Nobody Knows.  I hear Dvořák's influence in Michael Samis’ haunting cello obbligato to the title song, "Nobody Knows De Trouble I've Seen," just as I perceive it in Eugene Friesen’s cello solos and accompaniments to Áine Minogue’s voice and harp on her CDs Celtic Lamentations and Celtic Meditation Music.  And Chloë Agnew chose to sing the most well-known melody from The New World Symphony, “Going Home.”  I believe Dvořák and Burleigh perceived the profound spiritual kinship between Celtic, African-American and Austro-German songs, if only implicitly.