My Mayo County Council-funded Landmark residency took me all over Mayo in 2011, working with schools in Balla, Claremorris and Loughanemon and interviewing people from a wide area including Ballintubber and Partry, Castlebar, Knock and Straide including artists, churchmen, doctors, parade organisers and union representatives. The purpose of the residency was to document how various communities in Mayo had been dealing with the current economic climate – looking particularly at how people were being positive and pro-active – and to create a large-scale work of music which clearly reflected this notion. Other subjects that came up in the interview process included the healing capacity of art and art practice, the ability of small communities to stand up to big companies, how annual events can unite disparate people and the role of the church in providing hope for communities.
Mini-projects took place in three schools which involved music and poetry. In Balla NS 6th class students wrote their own poems on how they felt about their new school building. In the Gaelscoil Uileog de Búrca, the 4th class created a song with the help of myself and saxophonist Cathal Roche, inspired by the way the children themselves first spoke the lines – identifying and emphasising the changes in pitch and rhythm that the children naturally use when speaking. A very organic process led to a jointly-created song about a spider, sung by the children who accompanied themselves with percussion instruments. Finally, the choir of Mount St Michael’s Secondary School, Claremorris prepared a song I wrote specially for them, a setting of a beautiful Japanese nature-haiku.
The music from the schools and the interviews I made with Mayo people went to form a recorded soundtrack, imaginatively put together by Stephen McCourt, which provides the backdrop to a 45-minute work for the ConTempo String Quartet, which is based in Galway. The work is titled 'Still life in green and red' - a wordplay on the fact that there is indeed still life in Mayo (the Mayo colours are, of course, green and red), despite the hardships caused by recession.
