A blast from the past

Simon O’Dwyer will take us on a musical time travelling trip when he arrives at Cavan County Museum this week.

Simon runs Ancient Music Ireland alongside his wife and fellow musician Maria Cullen O’Dwyer in Galway, and he will bring a selection of replica wind instruments that our ancestors played millennia ago.

Simon traces his passion for historic instruments to his love of traditional music. He and Maria play in trad band Reconciliation. Driven to find an alternative to pipes to create a drone sound, in 1987 he contacted Dr Eamonn Kelly, then the Keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum in Dublin.

Dr Kelly brought out the Derrynane Horn from Kerry which dates from around 700 BC and asked if Simon could play it.

“It was a big open mouthed piece, and a curved conical instrument. I thought I could get a fundamental note out of it, so I said ‘Sure I could play that, but I’d need it for six months to be able to practice on it’.

“And he said ‘No way’,’” recalls Simon, with a laugh suggesting Dr Kelly was just right.

Simon was hooked by the splendid horns and trumpets and by hidden sounds they might possess. But considering their antiquity, Simon realised the only way to explore their potential was to recruit experts to create precise reproductions.

“It all took off from there,” he recalls. Now Simon dedicates his life to sharing his vast knowledge on instruments rescued from the mists of time. His passion is obvious as he enthuses about the Irish National Museum’s collection, some of which were made by skilled crafts people over 4,000 years ago. With a degree of pride, Simon regards Ireland as uniquely rich when it comes to instruments from the Bronze Age and Iron Age.

“We are very very lucky to have them. It’s one of the best prehistoric and ancient musical instrument collections in the world,” he surmises before doubling down, “if not the best.”

Simon adds: “The Bronze Age instruments represent 40% of the entire world collection of metal Bronze Age metal wind instruments. It’s amazing.”

The two main types of surviving instruments in the national collection are horns and trumpets.

“A horn is conical along its whole length, whereas a trumpet has a cylindrical aspect to it added on - that’s the difference,” says Simon, explaining that in the Bronze Age a horn and trumpet together would have been played as a pair.

“You had multiple pairs found all over Ireland.

“On the trumpet you can play a few more notes than on the horn. So you play a drone with instrumental overtones.”

He likens this to “an instrumental version” of throat singing from Tuva. It’s a technique that requires a fair degree of skill.

“With the horns and trumpets you are playing the sounds with your lips, but you are still altering the shape of your mouth behind it, and that works. The only way I can explain that is the actual metal of the instrument is only part of it - the other part is the other side of your lips, in other words your throat, and your lungs and your diaphragm, and that makes the whole instrument.”

Simon is confident they were not used in the context of battle. He surmises they were played on ceremonial occasions such as the crowning of a new king or queen. He opines they might have been regarded by the people of the day as the “voices of deities”.

“We have put together all the known facts including the instruments themselves, where they were found, how they are in pairs, why some of them are male and some of them female, and we reckon that’s the most likely scenario. Of course there’s no 100% in these things,” he says, but is confident it’s a correct thesis.

While the instruments he will bring to Ballyjamesduff are replicas, Simon was honoured to be permitted to play and record the sound of some of the more robust original ancient horns and trumpets.

“The originals sound a little sweeter. It’s like comparing a Stradivarius to a normal violin. The making of them was amazing, just incredible. The technological achievement of 3,000 years ago, the casting - we still haven’t matched it. We’ve got close but nothing really like he excellence they achieved and the fineness and lightness of the instrument is scary.”

For Simon, the virtues of instruments are not to be confined to the past - it’s a part of our living heritage. He still uses them to provide a “superb” accompaniment to modern traditional Irish music.

“It really anchors the whole thing,” he says.

He believes Ireland’s richness of musical instruments remain under-appreciated.

“I’m trying to persuade the government to set up a Museum of Music under the auspices of the National Museum - it would have all the instruments going from the Wicklow Pipes which are 4,200 years ago right forward to Rory Gallagher’s guitar - now that would be some exhibition wouldn’t it?”

Simon and Maria O’Dwyer will visit Cavan County Museum on Thursday, March 13 at 7.30pm. Book: 049 8544 070 or info@cavanmuseum.ie