Tony MacMahon image

Review of Mac Mahon from Clare

by Toner Quinn

The Journal of Music in Ireland

Jan/Feb 2001

‘‘I have chosen to play you a lament first, because, in our own time, the loss of love is one of the things that afflicts all suffering mankind.’’

This is how Tony MacMahon introduces ‘An Buachaillín Bán,’ the first track of his new CD, and over the last few months since its release I have been mulling this sentence over. The dual meaning is one reason it sticks with me; possibly he is referring to individual scenarios, as all people at one stage or another suffer the loss of love, but I take great interest in the alternative. Is Tony MacMahon, in the preamble to his performance, which was recorded at the Boston College Gaelic Roots Festival in 1999, actually contemplating the idea of a widespread misery that affects the entire race as it moves through another millenium? This notion halts me, for it is so rare to hear a musician utter such reasons for playing music. Imagine being so moved by the ‘loss of love’ and ‘suffering mankind’ that you would play music!

Tony MacMahon

Perhaps I am sounding ironic. Isn't it such noble, human emotions that moves all musicians to play? Well, in theory, yes, but rarely do those motives come so passionately to the fore, seldom does a musician manage to excavate so deeply down into emotion that they create such a direct line for the listener - out of the receiver's world, into the music, and back out again into a renewed world. That, I suppose, is genius, and that is also why it is difficult to listen to this album without being made aware by MacMahon of the burdens the world carries. MacMahon from Clare is the largest call to humanity that has come out of Irish Traditional music for years.

And why wouldn’t it be so, for this music comes from a figure who is, in a sense, both tragic and a cause for celebration. As Mac Mahon has said himself, he had ‘gone away’ from music for some time. This was not always a physical absence, although the first time I met him, aware of the reputation as a player that preceeds him, he was quick to say that he ‘hadn't played in three months.’ His real absence, I think, and I can only deduce this from snippets of conversation and observation over a few years, was a mental and spiritual one. I overheard MacMahon despair about Irish music, telling a North-African multi-instrumentalist how their music ‘puts us in a big hole in the ground.’ What MacMahon, I think, was despairing at was the globalization tendency towards predictability in music, towards putting music in a box (metaphorically speaking, of course). MacMahon’s way of understanding, thinking, and communicating through music has been at times so far removed from our cultural climate that he has had no alternative but to distance himself from it.

But he could not abandon it, and his work as a producer in television, through The Pure Drop and The Blackbird & the Bell, among many others, appear as MacMahon’s attempt to inject the necessary discernment back into Ireland’s cultural life, if only for it to become intelligible again, and reconnect Irish people with a musical integrity and creativity that was once natural to them.

I once glimpsed a 1970s music programme that MacMahon presented. How different his presentation of the music was to much practise today; using words like ‘discernment,’ ‘fragility,’ and ‘tenderness,’ Ireland and its music were made to appear noble, so strong - far away from the Ireland now embedded with the ‘For Sale ’sign.

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