About Breathe Blue:

Breathe Blue: A Careful Experiment

There are thousands of tunes in the Irish tradition–short melodies that have been carefully handcrafted by composers–famous and anonymous, solo and collective–over the years. Tunes for dancing, tunes for listening, and tunes for playing.

As congenital instrumentalists, we come to spend an inordinate amount of time playing with these little tunes over and over again. Imagine, for instance, rubbing a piece of cloth between your thumb and forefinger to get a sense for the texture–the smoothness, roughness, the thread count. This is what instrumentalists do as they learn and practice tunes. Each tune has its own unique textural profile complete with all manner of details to perceive and interact with.

Getting these tunes under our fingers can be a bit like getting them under a magnifying glass. Interacting with these tunes at close range helps us to see (and feel) musical connections and possibilities when we are making decisions about how to play them on our instruments. We’re thinking about musical connections and possibilities because when we encounter them, they can have a significant emotional impact on us.

And the resulting music from two instrumentalists is not unlike a discussion resulting from these observations. This kind of discussion is neither aimless nor careening toward foregone conclusions. Rather, we are working together in a process of discovery toward a consensus. Our hope is that the musical things we each find important and interesting can be noted and fitted nicely together as a coherent whole. Suffice it to say that there’s plenty to see, plenty to say, and plenty to respond to, musically speaking.

This so-called musical dialogue is the result of each of us trying to make good sense of each tune in light of the workings of our particular instruments played as a duo.

In this way, each tune becomes a musical microcosm about which much could be said, and also ripe for instrumental discussion with inherent potential for variation that complements the character of the tune.

Such discussions can be laden with intense emotions. Imagine a time when someone surprised you with something really wonderful, something that exceeded your greatest expectations–not a mere run-of-the-mill milestone or anticipated holiday–but something extraordinary. Recall the delight that you felt when that other person offered a gift or extended a sentiment that was so much better than you ever could have expected. It was novel. It was creative. It was fitting. It was moving. It resonated because it conveyed a surprisingly deep level of understanding and care that caught you off guard, and perhaps even brought a tear to your eye.

Music, too, can surprise people in this way. For us, this is the nature of the guitar-whistle instrumental dialogue that we are having–what it is like for us to play this music together. We have been playing this music long enough to know, generally, what tends to be done with melody and accompaniment. Yet, in spite of those expectations, I think we managed to surprise each other with our musical choices in a way that spun out a musical dialogue that delighted us and, we hope, will surprise and delight you as well.

Our careful experiment in this recording was to find out what it would be like to handle a small collection of tunes each like a tiny universe, expanding with potential. We asked ourselves: what would it sound like to be careful with each tune and explore the distinctive range, contour, key, and phrasing of each?

To compensate for their littleness, these tunes can invite complexly orchestrated arrangements to enhance listening interest as a tune is repeated. By contrast, our careful experiment takes a slightly different approach.

Traditional music means a lot to us. We find a lot within it. These tunes are short, sometimes just 16 measures that take a mere 30 seconds to play. In our view, small is beautiful. These little tunes can be absolutely sublime.

We’re great respecters of traditional process, honoring the art of variation that has been practiced for generations. As performers, we aren’t only in conversation with each other, but also in conversation with the tradition and other traditional musicians. Three musicians in particular who we see ourselves dialoguing with in Breathe Blue are fiddler Martin Hayes, guitarist Dennis Cahill, and tin whistle player Mary Bergin. Their mastery and artfulness have played a role in inspiring the response you can hear in Breathe Blue.

Rather than diversifying orchestration–adding and subtracting instruments to colorful effect–we instead focused on the nooks and crannies of each tune and tried to fashion an arrangement that would be musically satisfying for us as players of whistle and guitar. In terms of instrumentation and medley, we experimented minimalistically–adding only the nuances that we thought would highlight the latent possibilities of each musical microcosm as we saw them.

An aspect of this traditional process that has been essential to our music is the practice of dialogue between instruments. Each instrument works differently: the whistle blown, the guitar plucked, the whistle playing melody and the guitar playing chords and counterpoint. Both instrumental voices make an important contribution because both voices speak and respond distinctively, creating a truly interactive dialogue.

With these little tunes, our intent in this musical dialogue was not so much to cover a wide range of topics as it were, but, rather, to thoroughly and thoughtfully investigate a select few.