Fiárock joins Celtic College and Festival in Goderich this weekend
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
They may have only been performing together for a short period of time, but the intercontinental quartet Fiárock has arrived in Goderich with a considerable amount of musical experience in tow. The Citizen caught up with one of the band's members, Nicolle Fig, right before one of the festival’s nightly free concerts at The Square last Monday night.
It’s easy to see why Fiárock was asked to come to this year’s Goderich Celtic Roots Festival - they’re not just an extremely talented band, they’re passionate about musical education, too. Fiárock was just as excited to teach at this year’s Celtic College as they are to perform at the festival this weekend. This year’s college has been a huge success - the members of Fiárock are just four of the 50 talented teachers that have spent this past week passing on their knowledge to over 250 adults and 75 children.
Fiárock is composed of Nicolle Fig, Clíona Halley, Darragh Carey-Kennedy and Evan Powell. Earlier this summer, the band took to the stages of two music festivals in Spain - one in Granada, one in Madrid. They also traveled to London, England, where they performed at the Irish Cultural Centre Hammersmith.
Fig is known for her skill as a traditional singer and her distinctive bodhrán style. She’s been teaching music for many years, and is now an in-demand educator with a very popular YouTube channel. She got her start at a young age, when she was growing up in Mexico City. “I think I was about 11 when I got into music. I was listening to the Jackson 5 album I’d just bought, and I started singing along to one of the tracks. I still remember that feeling of ‘Oh! This is kind of nice!’ Something just kind of clicked.”
Years later, Fig and her family moved from Mexico to Texas. When she was still in high school, she joined a musical theatre guild at the nearby university. “When you get to a certain age, you’re allowed to take lessons at the university level,” she explained. “I was taking voice lessons, and attending all the musical theatre stuff that was happening at the university.”
After that, Fig then went to a boarding school in Dublin, where she studied classical liturgical music. While she was there, she went on a tour of Ireland. “I heard Irish music, really, for the first time - I loved it.” When she applied to university in Ireland, she applied to two programs - Contemporary Music and Dance, and Traditional Irish Music and Dance. “I auditioned for both, and I got into both. I first decided to go with Contemporary Music and Dance, but during orientation, it was seven other girls in Contemporary, and there was like, 45 ‘traddies’, or traditional Irish musicians. I looked around the room and said ‘I’m in the wrong place - I want to be with them... a fun fact about Ireland - at one point, it was ‘The Place’ for learning - if you wanted to learn, you would go to Ireland, because they knew Greek, Latin and Irish. They’d be writing the Book of Kells, and loads of stuff - it was really cool.”
That decision to pursue the music of the land started Fig down the path to meeting her future bandmates. She enjoyed working towards her BA in Limerick so much that she decided to carry on and earn her Master's Degree. The global pandemic may have made Fig’s schooling a little more complicated, but it didn’t slow her down. “I needed to collaborate with musicians to do something online, so I did that with Clíona. I’ve known Clíona for years - our friend, Derek Hickey, the box player, put us in contact.” Clíona Halley hails from Cork, and plays a variety of instruments in a number of styles. Among her weapons of choice are the concertina, the fiddle, the piano, and the violin, and she teaches concertina workshops in Ireland.
Halley had already received her Masters in Irish Traditional Music Performance when banjo player Darragh Carey-Kennedy began attending the school in pursuit of his BA. Carey-Kennedy, originally from Tipperary, has been teaching traditional Irish music since he was very young, and recently received his teaching qualification from Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, earning the high achiever's award in the course. He began collaborating with Fig and Halley on some video performances.
At that time, Fig was living in Austin, Texas, when she met American pianist Evan Powell. Powell’s interest in Irish music began while he was pursuing a Bachelor’s in Jazz Performance at Florida State University. His passion for music has led him to lecture on subjects like improvisation both in North America and abroad. The four musicians came together, despite being rather far apart at the time, bringing together all their individual musical experiences and influences with their shared love of musical education, and Fiárock was born.
Each act that can be found at the festival teaches a subject of their choosing during the weeklong Celtic College, and Fiárock decided to teach an ensemble class as an entire band, which makes sense, as they are a band that is well known for their high energy, improvisational performances. “If you have no paper in front of you, you have no notes in front of you - all the music is within you, and within everybody else. And then you just come together, and you perform it together, and it all works out - somehow it just keeps going!”
Over the past few days while teaching in Goderich, Fiárock has become part of Huron County’s Celtic community. “The people have been very lovely, very helpful,” Fig said. “Everyone in the festival has been absolutely lovely. The host that we’re staying at, as well - everyone is so nice! We haven’t made it to the beach yet, but they say it’s really pretty, and that lots of people come here for that. We really want to go!”