Observer, stranger, listener, guest & participant: Meabh McKenna reflects on her Navigator Residency at An Grianán

This gave casual conversations and encounters deep meaning, but also drew my attention to the profound strangeness of the casual ritual. Entering An Grianán I brought with me my solid comrades: an early Irish harp, my pedal harp and board of electronics, my favourite stories from mythology, and stories of gathering, forgetting and finding from the history of the harp in Ireland and my own making practice.

On day one in Letterkenny, I arranged to do a workshop on the harp in An Grianán in the beautiful new studio space I had been gifted for my time there. Imagining different groups finding interest in different aspects, I had prepared many different strands to follow, and within the space of the workshop I found my presentation became a weaving of all of these; a collage of the history of the harp, some musical examples, and an introduction to my own compositional/improvisatory practice, followed by a Q and A. Crucially, however, it led to a participatory open section where all participants were welcome to play harp themselves, shifting the space between the listener and the performer. After experiencing the trust of an audience, the luxury of offering the embodied experience of playing and soundmaking and to egalitarianise the imbalances of focus in a discovery space is a rare treat.

On my second day, I joined a beautiful group of people who gathered for the Wellness Cafe. With their permission, I scooted the harp downstairs to join as well. My goal here was not to perform, but participate. This involved sitting at the edge of the circle and improvising while chatting, and encouraging others to play as well if they were curious. This was one of those times when the harp shows its strength- appearing intimidating, it manages to blend softly into the hum of conversation, while its bigness and its strangeness light people up, and a special kind of curiosity can be sparked with a well timed invitation; when played for the first time, there is a moment for the player when everyone else falls away.

Joining the Wellness Cafe group was a privilege. It was to understand in a small way what is being held as a community in that weekly bubble, where all are welcome and come because of the value and beauty of that offering: held both lightly and firmly by wonderful women and by every participant who lends it strength.

I got to experience something of this same feeling when I was visited by Donegal native and extraordinary songwriter Cara Coyle who came to visit me in the studio and invited me to join her in improvising into some of her music. Deep and profound songs that land softly on the ear but dive straight to the heart, masking their depth momentarily in grace to wash over and through you. I greatly look forward to playing with her again.

Later in the week I was given a walking tour from local guide Donnan Harvey, who told me the history of the market town, dominated by St Eunan’s towering Cathedral. I was told of local efforts to overcome a damning ‘Lonely Planet’ review that disparaged Letterkenny as “a town without a soul” resulting in rejuvenation of streets with flower boxes, commissioned murals, the re-homing of unoccupied houses, and the introduction of this new historical ‘jaunt’ walking tour of the Cathedral Quarter. I spent a lot of time during the week walking around the town alone, and this perspective was invaluable. Even so, it took me far too long to really realise the significance of the Cathedral bells. At first, I noticed them because of how unusually long they rang for with an air of annoyance. Dominating my attention, demanding my open ear for up to 2 minutes at a time, which I started timing them out of sheer frustration. At this point, I had not dared to imagine they were live, as I had been heartbroken in the past to discover the practice of pre-recorded bell ringing and the normalcy of that in churches across the country. The romantic notion of devotional bellringing, intentional sounding of faith, erased, had led me to cut out registering the sound at all. As a child I had excitedly ran to my village belltower to discover it empty, hollow as a fraud.

Then, the melodies registered with me, which changed irregularly. One, I realised, was my grandmother’s favourite hymn. I started to record them, trying to place how many notes they contained, or what sequence or pattern they may follow. It was my last full day in the residency before the dam of my curiosity broke, and I asked the staff of An Grianán if they had any idea what the history and context was. Two hours and a phone call or two later, I was generously given a tour of the bell tower by Father Kevin Gillespie. Up, up, up many rickety wooden steps there were twelve bells, all named after local saints who all had wonderful stories of their own varying from minor prophetic happenstance to dramas of profound kindness and the pure bizarre. Swept in winds from the open tower arches, I placed my head inside the resonators I had heard sing out all week. Programmed now with mechanical tongues, the last bellringer still lives nearby and I longed to interview him. I also found and played an old gut string harp waiting to be found in the rectory. So many loose threads on my final day!

As a bizarre echoing itself, as we were leaving the cathedral I was given the trust and opportunity to play the organ. For a year of my time in school I trained as an organist, and to fill the cavernous lungs of that space with unregulated, improvised sound was a profound reclamation. There was something of the strange for me in this whole chapter, with so many forces I have resisted and resented that I recognise now as encounters with expressions of power. I remembered the story of my Grandmother being shushed by a priest in a church for chatting with her friend, and her telling him off in return - it was her home as much, or more, than his.

I list these experiences as they are a huge part of the work I was doing in Letterkenny. As were my conversations with local pharmacist and activist Karima who fundraises for Palestine, and who shared videos with me of her hosting families on medical visas from Palestine for a barbeque to celebrate Eid in her home. She hired them a bouncy castle and magician, who by the end had all the children singing in Irish by the fire. Or a brief conversation sparked with a man on the bus who showed me pictures of his beautiful 3 month old baby, and coincidentally settled in Letterykenny twenty two years ago from the West Bank and is married to a local woman. These encounters set me off researching; I explored traditional Palestinian music and forms of instrumental Arabic improvisation, maqam, on the early Irish harp for a glorious afternoon.

Simultaneously, the well timed purchase of a newly published Pól Ó Seachnasaigh collection of Donegal sean- nós songs had me singing all week as gaeilge. I managed to make a trip by bus up to the Falcarragh Bród na Gaeltachta festival, which featured activist panel talks and musical performances from artists such as Branwen Kavanagh that blew me away, and I even managed to sing my new Anna John Chiot song in, and for, the North West sea.

In my time in An Grianán I took all of the power of being observer, stranger, listener, guest, and participant, to the harp. This exploration of resonance and response is, I feel, an embodied and organic practice of tropism. Within, I can be a bridge between histories, between shy experimentation and realisation, between ancient melody and new, between audience and performer, self doubt and trust. I hope through repeatedly enacting these processes to build intuitive and mycelial networks of making that live in my body outside of linear narrative form, shifting in perspective like the light through stained glass while holding fast to my own revelations of faith, ringing, like the bells.

I’m grateful to the Improvised Music Company, and Patricia McBride and the gorgeous team of An Grianán for their trust and kindness in supporting my time in Letterkenny and extending such a profound invitation for the nebulous development of work. There are many threads now woven into the tapestry I am both untangling and weaving, untangling, and reweaving, and I hope to return again.

If you’re curious about learning more about the harp, I would recommend checking out the resources available through The Historical Harp Society and the many incredible outreach events and concerts hosted by Harp Ireland, or attending the amazing annual Cairde na Cruite Harp Festival in Co. Louth. Find your local harp teachers, find your local harp makers and get them busy! And when in Letterkenny, make sure to drop into An Grianán and keep up with all their wonderful concerts, performances, outreach and events.

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