Monday’s Earworm
My weekends in particular are often filled with beautiful music, in many cases hours and hours of it between rehearsals, performances, services, etc. When one piece from the weekend’s playlist defies the onslaught and vanquishes scores of other works – masterworks and others with debatably as much right to the victory – it remains in command of my mind into Monday. This does not by any means happen every weekend, and when Monday features an earworm, especially a WELCOME one, I try to ask myself why.
This particular Monday, the Irish air “My Lagan Love” which featured in a funeral service at Rosedale Presbyterian Church. The deceased was a north Irish girl of 101 with a long fulfilling life and an adoring family. I had suggested “My Lagan Love” to the family partly because of the northern Irish connection and partly because of the many performances I have accompanied by Toronto soprano Rebecca Genge, who introduced it to me a decade ago, and would be in the funeral choir.
“My Lagan Love” was first collected in County Donegal in 1903/4, with English lyrics credited to one of the collectors, Joseph Campbell, who spent 1904 scouring Co Donegal for folk songs with composer Howard Hughes. The Lagan in the title might be the river that runs through Belfast, or possibly a smaller stream that empties into Lough Swilly in Co Donegal, not far from where Hughes collected the song.
1. Where Lagan stream sings lullaby there blows a lilly fair;
The twilight gleam is in her eye, the night is on her hair.
And like a lovesick lenanshee, she hath my heart in thrall;
Nor life I owe, nor liberty, for love is Lord of all.
2. And often when the beetles’ horn hath lulled the eve to sleep
I steal unto her shieling lorn, and through the doorling peep.
There on the cricket’s singing stone she spares the bogwood fire.
And hums in sad, sweet undertone the song of heart’s desire.
But for me the Monday Earworm question lies not in the history of a beautiful, but otherwise unremarkable supernatural love ballad, but rather in what enabled it to burrow into my head. “Like a lovesick lenanshee, she hath my heart in thrall” – In Irish folklore a Lenanshee [“leannán sídhe”] is a kind of faerie who takes a human lover who as a result lives a brief but inspired life. She is an altogether more pleasant dweller of the “tumuli” (mounds) that dot the Irish countryside than her kinfolk, the death-telling Banshee.
In my life this Monday’s earworm, not at all unlike the mythical beloved in the lyrics, gives me a brief inspired life until it inevitably gives way to some other music (unlike the lovers of actual lenanshees my more conventional life continues when the earworm fades). The liturgical power of this music’s offering within the service lay at least partly in the connection with the biography of the wonderful woman whose life was in celebration, but also in the moment’s ability to freeze the inevitable march of time, memory, loss and beauty that coalesce in most memorial gatherings of this nature.
Nor life I owe, nor liberty,
For love is Lord of all.
-CD
Ideas About Music 
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