Mayo musician's legacy to be celebrated at home town screening

THE legacy of Mayo musician and composer Conor Walsh is to be celebrated in his home town this month.

After a very successful screening at the Dublin Film Festival, the documentary Conor Walsh: Selected Piano Works will be screened at Swinford Cultural Centre on April 26 at 9 p.m. Tickets are available on eventbrite and there's a post-screening Q&A with director Keith Walsh.

Conor Walsh wrote his heart in minimalist piano compositions; his music the soundtrack to his life.

Described in the press as ‘meticulously crafted’ and ‘genuinely spellbinding’, his work came from a practice of non-directedness, guiding us only to transcendence from our quotidian existence.

In this musical reverie, director Keith Walsh celebrates the work Conor left behind when he died tragically of a heart attack aged 36, just when his music was beginning to flow out into the world.

The film, like the music, pulses with the influences that went into the creation of his art: the windings of the river Moy, the human traffic of a small Mayo town, the migratory movements of swallows, a creaking 200-year-old hotel and the maternal melodies of his childhood.

Said director Keith Walsh: “I first met Conor Walsh back in November 2011. Myself and my long-term collaborator, and partner, Jill Beardsworth, were finishing a documentary that we had been making in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights called Apples of the Golan. We were hoping to find a musician to score the film, and a friend suggested I get in touch with a minimalist piano composer from Swinford who he knew called Conor Walsh.

“I phoned him and it turned out that he had a gig on that night in the Cellar Bar in Galway city. At the time, I lived an hour away in Crusheen, Co. Clare, so I drove in for the gig. I found the music both simple and profound. The delicate repetitive piano rhythms were at home with the like of Ludovico Einaudi and Olafur Arnalds, but they also seemed to pulse with the influences of traditional Irish music and of dance music in a way that felt unique - here was a musician who had found his own sound.

“I met Conor after the performance and, although subtle, his presence was magnetic, enlightening and uplifting. Going home, I felt that I had gained a good friend. Subsequently I would find out that my experience was not unique; Conor had an extraordinary and habitual gift for making people feel listened to, for adding something special to their experience of life.

“As it turned out, we didn't end up collaborating on that film project, except for using Conor’s existing music for one of the trailers.”

A year later they used Conor’s track 'The Front' as the closing music for short film Analogue People in a Digital Age. The plan was for Conor to write the score for their next film, When All is Ruin Once Again.

“He visited us while we were editing the film and enjoyed the card playing scene from Tubber Hall. The abiding memory I have from that trip is his enthusiasm for living as an artist in rural Ireland. He felt it important that we keep swimming against the tide despite the economic pressures to move to Dublin or further afield in order to practice our craft.

“I sent him a rough cut just months before he passed away from a sudden heart attack on March 11, 2016, aged just 36. I missed a call from him not long before he died and never got to call him back. I never found out if he had seen the film and if he had, what he had thought of it.”

Selected Piano Works, he said, is his attempt to finally collaborate with Conor.

Keith explained: “It is not a biographical film - Eoin Butler’s excellent radio documentary Passing Through did this so well in 2020 - it is rather a visual montage of the various streams of influence that flowed into Conor’s music.

“One of the major challenges I had in editing this was the reality that Conor’s music works so well with pretty much any imagery. It can embrace and elevate visuals in a way that wrings beauty, meaning and poetry out of the simplest of visuals while somehow managing to stay in the background. With this film I wanted to invert that - I wanted the visuals to turn our attention and senses back toward the music - to see the repetition, to see the subtle changes, to see the progression of form and to feel the alchemy that Conor created. I wanted the music to be seen, not just heard.

“The other big challenge I faced was deciding who would tell the story. During our research we met and talked to many of Conor’s incredible group of friends, family and collaborators and heard many great stories about Conor. The original plan was to interview some of these people for the film, but in the process of talking to them the one thing that became clear was there was understandably a lot of grief still around Conor’s passing.

“There is always a lot of uncertainty around making a film but the one thing I was certain on was that I wanted it to be about his life, his influences and his music, rather than about his death or about the grief felt following his passing. Not that grief isn’t interesting or important, it most certainly is. It is just that his death and the grief of his loss had no impact on his music or his lived life and it was this that I wanted to be the main focus of this film.

“In the end, the only voice now in the finished film is Conor’s.

“This wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Conor’s friend Patrick Dyar, whose beautiful short film Conor’s Hotel captures Conor creating music in the old hotel in Swinford where he grew up, David Lenehan who shot visuals for Conor’s performances and interviewed him, and lastly the publications Fractured Air and Totally Dublin, who recorded interviews with Conor for the release of his EP The Front in 2015, not long before he died.

“Conor eloquently describes his process in this passage: 'My music is quite simple and minimalist in style and it's certainly not technically all that difficult to play. But I like the idea of there being something different than technical ability, something magical about minimalist music that nobody can quite put their finger on. How can something so simple be so beautiful?

'I don't know what the music means. I just know that it's in some way like a soundtrack to my life and I think it's nice to have a soundtrack to your life. It's like almost being in a movie but I don't know really know what my music is about, I don't really understand what it's about.'

“To me his music is him… it is full of the empathy he showed in life, full of the love of his friends and family, full of the simplicity of his beloved River Moy, full of the complexity of rural Irish life, full of the repetition and subtle differences of traditional music, full of the communion of dance music, of the yearning of minimalism and of so much more.

“He managed to be one of life’s great talents and one of life’s great people. He is so greatly missed.”

Tickets for the Swinfor screening are available at https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/conor-walsh-selected-piano-works-documentary-film-screening-tickets-882483159887.