Found Sound for February: Muireann Ní Sheoighe Eachthighearn

[Music] Welcome to the Furn podcast as the season turns. I'm Leah Landerts and I'm delighted to introduce this Fount Sound for February, presented by musician and sound artist Alice Boyd. Fount sounds are sonic scrapbooks of interviews and field recordings. Alice is travelling across the UK and Ireland to meet people inspired by heritage crafts, folklore and nature and record the sounds of their practice. In February's episode, Alice visits Luthier, Mourin, Nishowiga, Acton in her workshop in County Tipperary Island. Mourin demonstrates how she crafts a violin from scratch, reflecting on the influence of landscape and the role that craft collaboration and working with her hands has had on her life. You may wish to pause the podcast here for a moment while you find somewhere warm and quiet to close your eyes, sit back and settle down into this month's Fount Sound. [Music] Mourin, can you introduce yourself and describe your work? Hi, yeah, I am Mourin Nishowiga Acton and I am a Luthier, mainly in the violin family. So I make and restore instruments like violins and violas and cellos. And can you tell me where we are right now? So we are in my workshop just at my family home in Tipperary near the Shor Valley. We're surrounded by all these violins, these videos, I see a couple of pipes. Yeah. Can you talk us through your workshop? Yeah, so this is kind of like what my brain feels like, very kind of busy but organized. So we have a lot of art that my friends have made and a lot of instruments that are either being made or finished some strange instruments as well that I'm working on. We've got a lot of notebooks and nice books around and obviously my tools, like the main stuff that you need for making instruments. But yeah, a lot of dried herbs and nice looking things, nice smelling and nice looking things. So I don't think I've ever met a fiddle maker before Luthier. How did you get into wanting to do that and what was the inspiration maybe growing up or what was that moment where it suddenly hit you? Oh, I'd love to do this as a job. Yeah, goodness, it's kind of been a meandering path, I would say. I definitely grew up surrounded by like my dad doing a lot of woodwork and taking us on nature walk. So being very immersed in the countryside, but I had no interest in doing any crafts like that. I played a lot of music, but it wasn't until I went to this camp called Camp Nou-Western in the Pacific Northwest in America where I worked in a woodshop and saw a lot of people working with hand tools, with cedar and making canoes and amazing art just with chisels and gouges. And when I was studying plastic music in Cork, I met a violin maker called Ian Nepper and he just kind of opened my eyes that you could study this amazing craft. I really loved the idea of being involved in music, but not necessarily having to perform on stage, but being able to have the honour of making these vessels for music. I felt very drawn to that. So, Mum, what are you working on at the moment? So at the moment I'm making a violin for a musician using another instrument's poster as a guide making a template, looking at all of the measurements and getting an idea of what shape I like, looking at a few different instruments that I like to look out, made a template and then moving on to making a mold from that template, which is over here. So this is the mold. You bend ribs around this mold. Eventually we remove the whole mold itself. Just to describe it visually, we've got the shape of a violin, which is an internal mold made of wood, which you're bending the outside frame of the violin around. And currently it's all pegged in to hold it in place. Yeah, I kind of think they look like teeth. All these little clothes bags that you were taught in the skill to turn them around and add inner tubing of a bicycle tire to give them extra strength, so they're really strong. The wood on the outside, which is the ribs, is I'm using maple at the moment. So it's got this gorgeous kind of like tiger stripe flame on it that hopefully will look fantastic when it's furnished. And how do you actually get those bends in the wood so they create the violin shape? So this is actually what drew me to violin making really in the first place because I just couldn't wrap my head around how you can bend wood. It would seem so sturdy, but I've since learned that it is always warping and trying to move. So because it's quite pin you are able to steam bend it. So we have these bending irons. We usually use them at 220- 230 degrees Celsius and yeah with a bit of water and bending strap we bend them into the shape. So I'm just going to check the bending iron to see if it's hot enough by dropping just like little droplets of water and they should bubble up if it's hot enough. It's incredible that these little bubbles they turn into more small bubbles of water. I mean not to say everything's an instrument but I guess it is. That was good. Thank you water for making such a nice head. So yeah I'll bend a bit of the rib. You kind of want to take it off, make sure you're not burning it and then yeah pretty much all of whatever shape you put in. It's kind of important to get it done well early just because you could be in danger zone of getting cracks or stuff and it dries really quickly obviously because it's been heated up quite strongly and then I would just present that to my mold and see if it fits the shape. And how do you make it so precise to be the shape of the violin? Everything comes from your template so you just kind of make smaller adjustments. You might slightly wet it in a certain area and bend it again or you might even bring your mold up to the bending iron and with the rib kind of held up against the mold block you might just do a little adjustment but it's very minuscule. So you work with your hands a lot and I'd love to hear your thoughts about that and how it has impacted your day-to-day life. Yeah I mean it's such a huge part of being in craft and I mean of course everyone uses their hands all of the time and as a crafts person you know you're so conscious of getting injured and all of that but in a more romantic way of thinking about things especially using old hand tools that have been owned by other people being passed down and being used by me now it's so nice to think about the connection that we have through hands and especially this documentary I watched when I was younger called hands it's all on YouTube and it documents rural crafts people during the 70s and 80s dying crafts or thriving crafts and it's such a gorgeous thing to think about working with your hands and especially as someone who has a very busy brain you can't rush things you have to listen to the wood and I mean listen to your body as well so you don't get injured but working with your hands definitely focuses you a lot more makes a lot more satisfying it feels real. So what would the next step be? So after you've your ribs which is usually your maple but you can use other hardwoods you've that bent and glued onto your mould you then use small strips of either spruce or willow and you bend those to kind of give a bit more strength to the structure of the ribs because you're working with such thin measurements and wood wants to move and warp especially when it's music being played through it so next step would be to prepare the wood for the back and front of the violin at the moment I'm using maple for the back to match the ribs and I'm using spruce for the front which is like just a common combination but there are alternatives of course why do you use those different woods for the front and the back? So that's a really good question because we have just this tradition of using these woods that are mainly found in Europe, so high altitude, low humidity, places like the Balkans, Swiss Alps, Northern Italy. And I guess it's because of the tradition that we're in with making these kind of Italian period instruments, but that's what they used and it's seen as the best tone wood for what people are used to hearing. Is there a bit of a movement towards pushing those traditional boundaries and looking for alternative materials? Yeah, I think so. I think when you get stuck in one way of doing things, eventually people want to try new things, even like different types of instruments, like five strings, or working with stormfall woods, working with native woods, and looking into the sustainability of the wood that we use. Yeah, we're looking forward to seeing what comes from all of these different movements. So this is the spruce that I'm using for the top of the violin, even if you tap it, you can kind of get an idea of the resonance. We call these taptones. I'm going to prepare for the center joint, which is two planes of wood that have to fit perfectly together. It was pretty daunting when I started out, but then you learn different techniques. And the most important thing is that your plane is sharp because the tool does all of the work. So I'll be using my jack plane, which is a lovely long plane, and get like really thin shavings, keep checking with both planes of wood that they fit together and there's no wiggle, and there's no light coming through. I've heard that a lot of people have said that shaving their tools is actually one of the most important parts of the job. And it's like the least fun, but once you've done it's like, oh of course this is what I needed. I think maybe that's just like the wisdom of getting older, getting better at doing those things that just take a bit more time, and it also doesn't really take that long. It just feels like a breaking in the flow. You kind of want the joint to disappear, but I can see tiny gap here. You don't want this to come apart ever. A lot of the things that we put together, we can easily unglu if we need to repair things, but you never really want to have to unglu a center joint because so much pressure. I think it's like 25 kg of pressure is coming down on this small area of wood that you've joined together, so you need to make sure it stays together. Yeah. And it's shaving off the top layer of the piece of wood. Yeah, so it's kind of like I guess a really fancy peeler, very accurate peeler. Have you ever tried using it? I showed actually. Yeah. The excellent like those guiotein things that you see on, telly shopping. But yeah, it's more expensive than a peeler, I will say. All that many female fiddle makers around? In Ireland, it's a very small community of people in general in the violent making world. It's mostly men as for female makers. There's definitely two women I know of in Westcork, French woman and an American woman who are making instruments and working there. Because of social media, I'm getting to see so many more amazing women who've been doing it for decades, which is really inspiring because they have kids and they've had to kind of put up with a lot of the closed doors or very difficult circumstances of being woman or female identifying in woodwork. It's been traditionally celebrated as a male industry and there's been definitely a lot of women that weren't written into history books that maybe worked for all of the famous filing makers. I was never encouraged to do woodwork in school because I went to an all-girl school and it just wasn't an option and I went on my own journey to find my way into that world. But it's really empowering when there's a growing community of people like women in L3, which is an online group of women instrument makers and it's very safe to ask stupid questions. I do not feel like you're being told you're doing everything wrong all the time. At the moment, this stage would be called rough arching. So you're roughly removing kind of big amounts of wood in order to reduce the size but you're always keeping in mind the end goal of why your arching shape would be. So this stage is probably the most athletic, I guess, like a lot of while you're making. You don't need much strength for, you just need to like make sure you're stretching a lot. So once you've carved the body, you've reduced it down, you've added all these small details in its curving, in its curvature. The curving? Yeah, the curves, the flow, the perfling, all of that. How do you then bring it from that point to a finished fiddle? You do your hollowing, which is basically finalising the thickness and at that stage you're kind of testing your flexibility of the wood. If it was the front, I would cut out my sound holes which are these lovely F holes we call them. What's important for the top plate after the F holes? You put in this strip of wood we call the bass bar. It's all involved in the projection and the spreading of all the vibrations of the music that's going to be played on it eventually. We have these sort of disappearing trades, craft and working with your hands isn't necessarily encouraged by schools, but they're also feels like there's this hunger from a lot of young people where they want to work with their hands and they want to feel more connected to the present moment or the natural world or materials. Is that a sense you felt and how has it been going into a craft when it's maybe not the norm for people these days? Being drawn to something that gives our brains a chance to be quiet and kind of be frustrated because you have to have a lot of patience. It can get boring. It's a pretty romantic thing to be doing, but after a while you get used to it and you forget to be present and then something happens. You go a bit too close to your measurement and you have to take a step back and reassess and not get frustrated, but it's something that makes me feel connected to many things all at once. It's so satisfying to hear the wood and to obviously hear the music at the end of it, smelling the workshop and the varnish and using light and shadow your touch for how things feel. With Ireland we had makers in the past who would have been in Dublin or at the pale that were more established businesses so they could make in a more traditional Italian way because of the connection to the British Empire. But then you also have these gorgeous rural makers who were making fiddles for music and they might have been trained, but it doesn't make their instruments any less. Seeing what a diversity you could have with craft and within violent making is just really inspiring and quite cool to be a part of that and try and find what my voice is in that everyone can take up a craft, they're peasants things for a reason. You know, we we've baskets and we tan leather and we make clothes because it was like a necessary thing and being able to reconnect with the land and ourselves through that and other people. It's such a community effort. And then the final touches. Yes, the final touches. So obviously we've kind of barreled through a lot of that and once you've all of your internal fittings working, a huge part is the neck. So you carve your scroll and you fit your neck into the body of the instrument and you have to think so much about the strings and the projection of the strings and then doing your pegs, your fingerboard, your knot, the saddle which are all generally ebony or at least a dense harder wood than maple. So for violin it's ea, dg and viola and cello are a, dg, c. Your musician yourself. Can you talk a bit about that and how that informs your violin making process but also the process of working collaboratively with a musician to make the instrument for them? It's so cool to be able to work with musicians and to know so many musicians Ireland is riddled with amazing musicians. and I came from a classical background, did my degree in piano and cello, and had no connection to making until near the end of that degree. And it wasn't until I started playing folk music with playing, again I don't play the fiddle, although I can play it like it's a cello, badly, playing the tin whistle and the banjo are my main two folk instruments. With the banjo, I bought it from an amazing maker called Jerry James and it was my first experience of having a handmade instrument that I could play. I immediately felt this connection to the banjo that he had made and I kind of just understood what it meant to have a handmade instrument and yeah it's so special to be a part of other people's instruments, just such an honor. It's completely not about me, it's a service to the music and especially folk music in Ireland, it's embedded in the landscape and that liminality that comes with listening to tunes, I definitely relate to that a lot with making instruments because you're repeating this process over again and as your mind wanders, as it would like listening to tunes that happens in violin making so it's a lot of parallels and yeah it's all about the music. So this tune is called The Lark in the Morning, it's an Irish tune, yeah it's like gorgeous four-part tune. [Music] Thank you for listening to my Found Sound for February. Episodes of As the Season Turns are released on the first of each month and Found Sound on the middle Friday of the month, please do like and subscribe. This podcast has been created by the Somerset Fragrance House Furn, working with the rhythms of the seasons, they blend, barrel age and bottle four fragrances a year for the names on the Furn production ledger. To join the ledger and find out more visit www.furn.co. Thank you to Murrin Nishogga Acton for our conversation in her workshop in Tipperary Island. To find out more about her work, head to @ Murrin_Luthier on Instagram. I'm Alice Boyd and if you enjoyed this podcast you might also enjoy my music which underscored this episode. You can find my music under Alice Boyd on Bangkok, Apple Music, Spotify and all other major streaming platforms or via my website www.aliceboyd.info. This episode was produced by me with a report from Capturionable TechFurn. The intro song is by Lisa Napp and this outro song is played by Murrin on the banjo.