Interview with Áine Mallon

Your work ranges across a variety of genres and instrumentation. Tell us a little bit about your own musical background and influences.

So my musical background is quite varied. I grew up playing Irish traditional music - my siblings and I all attended the Armagh Piper's Club, which is run by Eithne and Brian Vallely. And Eithne and Brian would put these concerts on every month called Trad at the Triad, where they would invite two players, two exceptional players from across Ireland, who were top of their game in Irish traditional music. So I would really get these world-class experiences listening [to trad music]. And then there were master classes the next day. It was just a really exciting opportunity to be given as such a young child.

Alongside that I trained as a classical pianist and violinist and singer and then attended university to study for a degree in music.

I take influence from a really broad range of places. I listen to a lot of indie pop, indie rock, indie folk. I have been listening a lot this year to a fantastic American singer songwriter called Gabriel Kahane. And I of course listen to a lot of contemporary classical music as well - the likes of Laura Bowler and Caroline Shaw.

And you know, I just try to take in as much as much music as I can really. You never know where the ideas and the inspirations are going to come from so I think the more you take in, the more room you have in your head to play around with ideas. So, yeah, I try to take in as much music as I can.

The Mórrígan is not the first of your compositions to touch on Celtic mythology. What is it that inspires you about this theme?

I think at our core, all humans are storytellers. And I think that's what mythology is really, it's telling stories. There's a reason that so many cultures have such a strong connection to their own mythologies. There are myths and legends from all over the place and each culture has their own unique folklore. And I think that's really beautiful.

For me, I find it so engaging because it's so narrative focused and you can really use your imagination with it. I think for me particularly, with the The Mórrígan there's this sense of, ‘okay, I know exactly what that is - she's a warrior goddess.’ The music almost writes itself. There's a real clarity to it and there's a real sense of emotion behind it. And that's something that I really love to do within my music – it's to tell stories.

Tell us a little bit about the mythological character, The Mórrígan. What is it about her that draws you?

So the Mórrígan is an incredible character. Her reputation is that of a violent warrior goddess. That's what initially drew me to her. She's this incredibly strong, powerful, and smart warrior goddess who would kill you as soon as look at you.

But in my research, I really discovered this other side of the Mórrígan that lends itself to the idea of duality. She is violent and vicious, but it's for a purpose. She's doing it for the sovereignty of Ireland. It's for the land and its people. And so there's this idea of death and rebirth because not only is she a goddess of war, and fate, but also of sovereignty and fertility. So there's this kind of death and renewal.

There's that complexity in her that I think is just so important to get across, particularly because she's a woman. And being able to try and kind of draw that out, draw out the strands of the stories and the themes that I really resonate with and try and build them into a piece of music in the most exciting way that I could, has been such a joy.

The Mórrígan is often depicted as a shapeshifter, and a figure to both fear and revere. How did you approach translating that complexity into music?

I think the main thing that I tried to get across, the main point that I tried to get across in the music was the sense of duality. And how I got that across was by splitting the orchestra in two.

There's this almost always present idea of atonality. So in the lower part of the score the strings sit in Locrian, which is the seventh mode, and the winds and brass sit in Lydian, which is the fourth mode. So they're sitting in two different keys at the same time, but they're interplaying with each other. So there's that essence of being whole, but also being two very obvious separate and conflicting identities.

And then you've got the uileann pipes obviously sitting over the top - and the uileann pipes sit in a fixed scale. So there's that kind of interplay between all three parts. You've got the basis of duality and then this kind of playfulness of the uileann pipes dancing over the top.

How does the Mórrígan fit into the larger body of your work?

Something that I found absolutely fascinating about the Mórrígan was the fact that she is so complex. And I think that's really something that's taken a life of its own in my work this year. I've written a couple of works now in the last year and a half, I would say, that have these incredible, fierce, complex women at their core.
I wrote a “choose your own adventure” operetta based on Cassiopeia and Andromeda - these mother-daughter star constellations and their story. And that is full of love. It's fierce. They take agency over their lives in a way that they don't in the story.
And then I wrote a song cycle that was based on five women across time, across myths, religion, who suffer, who have suffered at the hands of men. It's a song cycle called “Songs from Revered, Scorned Women”.

And I think going into my Mórrígan research, I thought that she was this kind of fierce warrior. And uncovering just the sheer complexity of her was such a joy that I could really bake into the music. And it's become a real staple of my work in the last year to really tell these women's stories.

What should audiences listen out for in The Mórrígan?

Probably my favourite part is in the parts of the music where the Mórrígan is shape-shifting. And something that I thought would be a really good representation for this shape-shift is a piece of very idiomatic uileann pipe writing, an ornament in trad music called a "cran".
So it's what happens when you lift the chanter of the uileann pipe off your knee when you're playing a bottom D. And it effectively allows you to play a series of incredibly quick notes that you wouldn't otherwise be able to play. And it really provides this kind of bubbling feeling. It's like a bubbling, like a frothing. And I thought, actually, that's a perfect representation of the beginning of this transition into shape-shifting, whether that's the Mórrígan shape-shifting into one of her sisters, Macha or Badb, who she appears as sometimes, or as a crow, an eel, a cow - all of these different animals.
And so this cran idea, I've taken it and sort of extrapolated it across the orchestra. At different points, you hear this kind of bubbling. Although the orchestral instruments cannot play the idiomatic cran that the pipes play, I've adjusted them slightly so that they sound similar - so that you get this kind of cran idea bubbling throughout the entire orchestra. So that's really something to look out for as well – it's near the end of the first movement.