CONTENTS :
# 1. Improvisation one
# 2. Improvisation two
# 3. Improvisation three
# 4. Improvisation four
# 5. Improvisation five
# 6. Improvisation six
# 7. Improvisation seven
# 8. Improvisation eight
# 9. Improvisation nine

RELEASE :
“In early 2006, while completing my Master’s thesis on improvisation, I approached Cyprian Love to form a practical contribution to my investigation. What followed were three additional meetings in the peaceful and angelic setting of Glenstal Abbey. This disc represents the result of our music-making during that time, with each selected piece presented in its original entirety. Instrumentalists from two very distinct musical backgrounds, we are thus united here in a necessarily unique musical journey. Most of the tracks presented are formations that began life without any preconceived idea on the potential shape of music, simply the innocence of notes chosen in a moment and developed in time through a shared musical consciousness. Others began as but the smallest fragment without a blueprint for life. A few more began as the remote shadows of a familiar melody for one or other of the musicians. Using a deliberately simple method of recording that minimised any external impact on the natural acoustics of organ and fiddle, and performing in the absence of any written script or preparatory verbal utterance (or at most very little discussion), this is music performed in union, music that withdraws from the rigidity of respective genres. This is musician as musician, musician with musician. This is Amalgamare.” Eoghan Neff.

“I was delighted at performing collaborative improvisation with Eoghan, as my improvisation had mostly been solo improvisation. Collaborative improvisation is already familiar in the context of the dramatic arts, and it flourishes in the context of jazz. Collaborative improvisation in music presents exceptional challenges if the result is to sound attractive. The present collaboration is an attempt on a musical level to integrate two people's spontaneity. In these improvisations there will be heard elements of exchange, imitation, synthesis and confrontation not unlike a human conversation. Here and there one may hear quotations from pre-existing tunes, but in other respects the musical material is generated as the performers play. None of the improvisations is the result of any prior planning or discussion, or at most very little. We the players simply set out on our mysterious journey together each time.” Cyprian Love.

“In his poem ‘Lightenings (viii)’, Seamus Heaney tells of how The Annals of Clonmacnoise have the fantastic tale of monks at prayer when ‘a ship appeared above them in the air’. The ship’s anchor gets caught in the altar rails and a crewman ‘shinned and grappled down the rope’ to release it. ‘“This man can’t bear our life here and will drown’/The Abbot said”’. The man is helped, the anchor is freed and he climbs back ‘out of the marvellous as he had known it’. In this CD, Eoghan Neff – our fiddler – is the crewman, and Brother Cyprian Love – our organist – is the Abbot of Clonmacnoise. In the famous Stephen Spielberg film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the spaceship that appears in the air towards the end of the movie responds to the Earthlings’ attempts at communication through the musical motif equivalent of H-E-L-L-O (re, mi, doh, doh lower octave, soh). In this CD, the church organ is the spaceship and the fiddle is the call of the earth.

Our first analogy is submarine, our second is supersonic. In both cases we are taken outside our own element in order to experience a miracle: ‘a music you never would have thought to listen for’ (Heaney in ‘The Rain Stick’). The anarchic subversive musical conversation of this recording resonates with the primary acoustic of the sacred space of Glenstal Abbey known for its monastic hospitality towards the mystery of sound. That primary acoustic is the sound of the Word, and it allows us access to ‘the music of what happens’. All dogma is dismissed, and the Canon Laws of music are turned on their head, like upturned tables outside a temple. The result is of necessity fresh. We are dealing here with unprocessed primary source material. No two listeners will hear the same thing.

Brother Cyprian Love is not only an expert improviser in the tradition of the pipe organ (the only instrument in Western Classical tradition that has an unbroken lineage of improvisatory techniques attached to it). Eoghan Neff is an Irish traditional fiddler of enormous power and vision – a member of the Neff family of Cork city well known for its musical strain.”

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Cyprian Love has been a monk of Glenstal Abbey since 1992. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Organists, England and studied piano at the Royal College of Music. He has a lifelong theoretical and practical interest in musical improvisation and he improvises regularly at the organ of Glenstal Abbey, as well as performing organ repertoire. He has released a number of solo and collaborative CDs, and has published in musicology and theology.

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