Púca – The Changeling's Son: Samhain and John Moriarty

Diarmuid, with the help of John’s niece Amanda, has selected pieces from Moriarty’s work that take you the journey of the Samhain experience. Some of the pieces are directly related to the time of year itself,  and other pieces are based on dreams or images that Moriarty himself conjured that relate to the  essence of the time of year, a celebration and an acknowledgement of the thinness of the veil at this  time of year.  

‘Up here there is a rock. It so challenges our sane sense of things that I long ago capitulated to the  embarrassment of crediting what my father and his father before him used to say about it, that every seven years, at Samhain, it turns into an old woman driving a cow’.

Sensing my difficulties, my father was blunt: if in the eyes of the world you aren’t embarrassed by  your beliefs about the world then you may conclude that the wonder-eye which is in all of us hasn’t  yet opened in you’.

Diarmuid will read some of these selected pieces, with an introduction and closing of his own, that the musicians will then be invited to respond to in the moment after each reading. What is conjured in the musicians in response to what they heard gives those present a different perspective on what it is Moriarty is talking about through music.  

It is a combination of lightness and depth, beauty and seriousness.  

Diarmuid responds to the piece of music with another story based on what has stirred in him and so  a story of Samhain is woven live.