Macdara on WRITING THE CELLO SUITES

Words by Macdara Woods (November, 2003)

I received the CDs of Richard Hartshorne playing the Bach Cello Suites a week or so before the performance in Derry in
June 2002. I was crossing and re-crossing Ireland at the time, writing a speech to open an exhibition of paintings in Dublin
on June 5, traveling back and forth to see the canvases in the process of framing. And all through the week I was listening
to the CDs, so that my traveling, the warm, unusually rainy May, the lush green of the countryside, the Mediterranean
paintings - done by Anne Donnelly, an Irish painter living in Rome - the dark Irish bogs, the overflowing brown rivers and
lakes, and the dark sound of the music all came together.

The performance itself, in the Verbal Arts Centre, under the City Wall, continued the disorientation, dislocation of
histories and place; the 17th century siege of Derry, a reading I had given there the previous year, two extraordinary
weeks I spent there in 1969, the time-travel of the Dublin/Derry journey - much of it through the landscapes of my
childhood, legends and stories, the wonder of the music, the interrelation of Richard Hartshorne with the instruments and
audience, the fact that I was due to leave for Italy a week later.

I was also taken by the story of his magnificent and long term obsession with the whole business of playing the Cello
Suites on the bass, dealing with such a combination of difficulties before engaging with the spirit of the music at all: the
mental and functional struggle with the physics of sound - as a painter must struggle with the physics of paint. And on top
of that the psychological stamina and sheer physical strength required. As well as which, we are of a similar generation.

I left Derry next morning, on the bus for Dublin, in that disturbed state of mind where real work can happen, playing the
CDs once more: stayed briefly in Dublin, and left for Umbria - where I began my poem, coming in after the beginning of
the film as it were.

The poem itself tells the rest. It lived with me, and I with it, through the following year: Italy, Ireland, Russia, London,
Bristol, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, and the Black Goyas in the Prado I had seen that April on my birthday, so many items,
the Great Wheel of the Prater Luna Park, or the Anish Kapoor piece, Marsyas, in the Tate Modern, with its apposite
resonances of the contest of musicianship between the satyr and Apollo - somehow connecting with Brunel's wonderful
ship, The Great Britain, in Bristol, all introduced themselves into my poem: my geography of memories. It flows, I hope,
as the Solo Suites themselves flow, and in the end comes back upon itself for the Sixth Suite in the room in Derry, in the
fading light, and an incident I had seen outside the Verbal Arts Centre when I arrived to read the winter before.

There is a word in Gaelic, dinnseanchas, which may be translated as topography, but means much more than that - a kind
of topography of the spirit. The spirit of place.

There was a dinnseanchas to that occasion in Derry, there is a dinnseanchas in my poem. They are, I hope, recognizable
to one another.