The concert title is intriguing: The Orange and the Green: A Night of Traditional Music and Song from the North of Ireland.
Is there really a difference in Irish music if it’s sung by Catholics or Protestants in Northern Ireland, I asked Gary Hastings, one of the two performers (the other is singer Brian Mullen), who’ll be demonstrating those traditions on Friday, June 1 at the Irish Center in Philadelphia.
“It’s perceived by people both there and outside that there are two separate traditions, while really there are lots of very messy traditions,” says Hastings, who has played the flute on celebrated recordings by the Chieftains and Seamus Quinn, and shared the stage with DeDanaan. “People use music for their identity. It’s about who you are and where you come from. All traditional music has a political genre in it and Irish music is usually seen as a national thing. An Orange band is presumed to be different from a Green band. It’s not especially, but you can have the two bands playing the same tunes and thinking different words to them. And there are some tunes you don’t want to sing in the wrong place. For example, you don’t want to play ‘The Sash,’ anywhere but a Loyalist area.”
That’s the tune that starts, “Sure I’m an Ulster Orangeman,” a lyric that won’t have the bar patrons buying you a pint in Cork or Galway, but might keep your glass full at any pub in the Waterside section of Derry. “Play the wrong tune, sing the wrong lyric, in the wrong place, and you’re dead,” says Hastings.
I guess I must have been fooled by the images of Loyalist leader Ian Paisley and the Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness practically in each other’s arms–or, at least, sharing a laugh–as they took over the new power-sharing government of Northern Ireland a month ago. “It’s still like that?” I asked Hastings. “Aye,” he responded. “It hasn’t gone away.”
But don’t expect Friday’s concert to be freighted with politics. It’s music, says Hastings, and they’ll keep it fun and light, but informative. Hastings and Mullen, a Derry native and acclaimed singer who was Northern Ireland first full-time Irish language radio producer, are in the US to perform at the Library of Congress, which has been hosting a series of lectures by scholars and performances by well-known Northern Irish musicians and singer to build up to this summer’s Smithsonian Institution’s Folklife Festival. The festival is held every year for two weeks overlapping the Fourth of July on the National Mall in Washington, DC. This year’s theme is Northern Ireland.
I caught up with Hastings not long ago in his rectory–in his other life, he’s archdeacon at Holy Trinity Church, Church of Ireland, Westport, County Mayo –as he was preparing for a wedding.
Which came first, the flute or the ministry?
The flute. I’m an ordained flute player, not the other way around. I’m only 14 years ordained; I’ve been playing for a long time before.
How did you wind up playing the flute? Was your family musical?
Not especially. I grew up in East Belfast and music was big thing in Belfast anyway. I started on tin whistle so the flute was sort of a natural progression. I learned the Scots pipes when I was 11 or 12. When I went to university–that would have been around 1974-5–it was the start of the folk revival here in Ireland, so it was fashionable at that stage to play. Over the years, I played with different groups like De Naanan at one stage, did a CD with The Chieftains, but never intentionally. I was asked to do it for the craic. It rarely involved any worthwhile amount of money.
How do you “unintentionally” wind up playing with some of the biggest names in Irish traditional music?
I attended Coleraine University County Derry where I met Brian Mullen, Ciaran Curran from Altan, Cathal McConnel of the Boys of the Lough, and Father Seamus Quinn, who was in the same class as me at university. A wave of good musicians passed through all within a few years of each other. People used to come from all over to play tunes with us.
That must have been an incredible experience.
It was, though it was very bad for your liver.
You were teaching Irish studies when you seem to have gotten “The Call.’ How did you wind up a minister?
It wasn’t money either. Another dream shattered. It was just one of those things, a notion that I heard in my head that I knew I would have to do something about someday. Then one day it made more sense.
How’s it working out?
So far so good.
You can hear the Reverend Gary Hastings and his friend, Brian Mullen, performing at The Irish Center, Emlen and Carpenter Streets, Philadelphia, on Friday, June 1, at 8 PM. Tickets are $12, $10 for Philadelphia Ceili Group members.