Magical musician Carl is happy to shun limelight

City Lives – Denise McNamara meets Carl Hession, composer, musician and retired teacher

Although he has spent his life’s work teaching young people to play music, Carl Hession’s first experience with a music teacher was less than inspiring.

A local woman taught himself and his two sisters piano near their home in Belclare, outside Tuam. “I remember she sent a note home to my mother. The two girls are quite good, but the boy is useless – don’t send him back,” he recalls.

Fortunately it did not deter Carl. It was almost inevitable that he would end up immersed in music, such was the rich musical legacy he came from.

His father was handyman by day and fiddler by night, who played with a céilí band. His aunt was Maggie Hession, who was one of the main singers in a famous collection of Connacht songs in Irish the 1920s called Amhráin Mhuighe Seóla, one of the very few to contain notated melodies as well as words. Most of them were love songs; they were collected across Galway and Mayo by Eileen Costello, who was active in the War of Independence and became a senator in the Irish Free State.

The Hession home was an open house for traditional music, peopled by a seemingly endless succession of well-known musicians, among them uilleann pipers Seamus Ennis and Willie Clancy, fiddler Ted Furey and accordionist Joe Burke.

“At that stage I would be called upon to accompany them on the piano. I’d stay up half the night with them and then go to school the next morning,” he recalls, smiling at the memory.

The family moved to Salthill and Carl was sent to St Pat’s and the Bish, where he was more into sport than music. When he started lessons with Vera Dooley whose family were jazz musicians, he made a huge leap forward in his musical education.

“She was a big influence. She taught classical and I did quite a lot of theory exams. In one exam through the London College of Music (LCM) I got 100%. I was given the gold medal for first place in the British Isles for the ALCM theory exam by the college director William Lloyd Webber – father of Andrew. I remember my mother saying at the time, what a strange name he had.”

While still in school Carl joined several bands of all sorts of genres – traditional, pop and one them, called Plain Lazy, was a jazz rock outfit.

“That band was very ahead of its time. The stuff was so way out there people would ring to see if we were playing and then wouldn’t turn up.”

He travelled throughout the province to compete in fleadhanna ceoil and has a number of titles, among them an All-Ireland medal as a trio with accordion player Joe Burke and fiddler Kathleen Collins.

He completed a degree in history and economics at UCG (now NUIG) and did a HDip. After getting his second diploma in piano (LLCM) he decided to go to University College Cork to study music.

It was from there that Carl branched out into composition under the watchful eye of department head, Professor Aloys Fleischmann.

“Prof Fleischmann was a brilliant teacher and composer. In our second year we worked continually on harmony and counterpoint. It was very academic. In the final year we had to write a fugue in the style of Bach – it was a three-hour original piece.

“It wasn’t easy. This guy was German, he cracked the whip, but he was lovely. And brilliant. In our second and third year we had to write for the Cork Symphony Orchestra. I got very much interested in orchestration and composition.”

At weekends, Carl would return to Galway to play at the Hilltop in Salthill with Gerry Mullholland and Jackie Murphy, recording a single called Galway Bay. He was also playing with the folk band Winter Well, which was into the music of Paul Simon and James Taylor.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.