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atrin admits that kora music sounded indecipherable and… well… ’samey’ to her at first. “People come along and ask, ‘Are you going to swap instru- ments?!’ assuming that, you know, it’s just a bunch of strings. But the harp is a completely different instrument to the kora and I come from a completely differ- ent background; classical music, Associat- ed Boards, read your dots… you know. Seckou doesn’t even read music. If I’m being really truthful, it doesn’t quite make sense that Seckou can do what he does but not know where G is on the stave.” At this point she laughs uproari- ously. “But I love it. So when I get involved with this kind of project, I actu- ally have to shut off my training and all that reading of notes. Because it’s all by ear and that’s very new to me.”
World music was a kind of saving grace to the rock musicians of the early 1980s, who were floundering about in the cul de sac of old formulae and exhausted clichés at the time. Strangely enough, talk- ing to Catrin, you get the sense that it’s been the same for some classical musicians too: a blessed relief from ancestor-wor- ship, a chance to strike out into the
unknown without a map or a chorus of mealy-mouthed obsessives shouting “You played that Bach trill all wrong!” For Catrin, it’s all about proving to the world, and especially her classical music peers, that the harp can do so much more than is generally asked of it. “The harp has very little respect in the classical world,” she claims. Her much-lauded transposition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations to the instru- ment was one bold attempt to change that. Her collaborations with Cimarron, Toumani and now Seckou, are another.
“But can the harp express something ugly?” I ask Catrin, “I mean… could it cover a tune by Throbbing Gristle?” “Not really, no,” she answers. “It’s essentially beautiful.” But then she tells me about the harp concerto she’s composing for the Welsh Youth Orchestra, which is all about a famous Welsh poet whose pseudonym was ‘Hedd Wyn’ or ‘White Peace’. He died at the battle of Passchendaele in July 1917 and one of his poems, entitled Rhyfel (War), contains lines, whose English trans- lation goes as follows:
“Man raised his sword, once God had
gone / To slay his brother, and the roar / Of battlefields now casts upon / Our homes the shadow of the war.
The harps to which we sang are hung / On willow boughs, and their refrain / Drowned by the anguish of the young / Whose blood is mingled with the rain.”
Both the harp and the kora are old instruments. They naturally express the quietness of an older time. There can be joy, sadness, meditation and longing in their graceful flow. Their challenge now is to penetrate modernity, the “roar of bat- tlefields” and the “anguish of the young” and prove that in that old quietness, as in the flow of an old river before before it reaches the sea, there’s something timeless that we shouldn’t forget.
Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita’s as yet unti- tled album is a Theatr Mwldan/ Astar Artes co-production that will be released in October on the Astar Artes label. They will do a 16-date tour of England and Wales together between October 20th and November 21st, with more dates to be announced for 2014.
www.astarartes.com www.catrinfinch.com www.seckoukeita.com
facebook.com/CatrinFinchSeckouKeita www.mwldan.co.uk
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