Before Hot Priest

I am working to craft a relationship with a corpus of recordings and sheet music collected in the spring of 2019 while enrolled in an Irish folk singing class. In each session, our teacher provided the lyrics to four or five songs that we would memorize by listening and singing back to her. The recordings from these classes were first intended to help me remember and practice songs.

Speaking and singing the sounds of Irish—holding them in my throat and voice—for the first time has made me a little sad. But I love the feeling of the words even though I cannot understand them. I like to imagine myself gossiping or asking for a glass of water in Irish. 

Performing this archive feels important to me. Initially, I thought that I might feel more entitled to sing these songs if I embodied them as characters. In November of 2019, I captured a short webcam video of myself as I revisited some of these recordings. I wore a Catholic priest's vestive as I tried to simultaneously relearn the priest’s and congregation’s portions of a mass hymn. This felt embarrassing and frustrating but also funny.

I sing “Óró sé do bheatha `bhaile!” while I chop vegetables and “Fill a rún” when watering my Christmas tree or making coffee. I am having some trouble finding space for “A thiarna déan trócaire,” I think because it is a call-and-response song and I am still getting used to preserving and performing more than one part.