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DIFFERENT DRUMS by Alf McCreary (In 'Ireland of the Welcomes' Summer 2001)
"If we do not learn to create an authentic sense of community at local level, how are we going to stop wars between nations?" asks Roy Arbuckle, the Director and founder of the unique Irish music group Different Drums. "This philosophy underlines everything we do as a musical group. We are not trying to change people, but we are attempting to help them to express themselves as individuals within a larger community, and how to develop their own culture without harming others."
Roy was speaking during a short break in a one-day workshop for 345 children at the Academy Primary School in Saintfield, Co. Down - a small picturesque village south-east of Belfast, and not far from the famous Mountains of Mourne, immortalised by Percy French. During the workshop, Roy and his colleagues introduced some of the children to the practice of rhythm and taught them part of a piece which they played to the entire school and teachers later on. It was an electrifying performance musically, with the added cultural dimension of seeing a Lambeg
drum and a bodhran, symbolic of the Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland, being played in harmony, side by side.
To reinforce the point, the group played three versions of the one tune- as an Irish 'slow air' titled "Young Boy", then in a variation which became an Orange "marching tune ", and then as a hauntingly beautiful Irish reel, called "Swallow's Tail." At the end Roy summed up succinctly "This is basically the same music, but it shows how-in the end- we all march to the
same tune."
The children, and their teachers, loved it. All across the large Assembly Hall the tiny children expressed themselves spontaneously with the kind of rhythms which adults also experience, but are often too inhibited to follow with the same openness. The School's Principal Stephen Moore commented "This is very much a cross-community school, and it is good for our pupils
to hear the different forms of music expressed in this way."
The performance at the Academy Primary School encapsulated the essence of what Different Drums have been during their meteoric rise since 1992, when they were conceived and founded by Roy Arbuckle. He is a Derry man, with a Presbyterian background, and like many of his fellow citizens; his early musical experience was with local Showbands. He also developed an interest in traditional Irish music, and played with the well-known groups Chaff and Fiddler's Elbow. After spending 8 years in Canada, Roy returned to his native city, and since then has been involved in cross-community projects. Part of his inspiration to form the group came from the poem by Henry David Thoreau, and the book " A Different Drum" by Dr. M. Scott Peck, both of which underline the necessity for humanity to march to the same beat. In 1991, with community- relations funding, Roy carried out experimental work with communities on both sides of the border in the North-West of Ireland.
He says "This development gained momentum, and we were invited to an Irish Festival in New Brunswick, which had the theme 'Come Celebrate Orange and Green'. This is exactly what we wanted to do back home! So we took about 100 people, based across a large spectrum from the North-West of Ireland to Carlingford, to the Festival in New Brunswick, and it was a marvelous."
On his return to Northern Ireland, Roy Arbuckle had a watershed experience when he spent two weeks with the Kodo Drummers of Japan. "This is a mixture of music, meditation and martial arts, and it elevated the ideas we had onto the level of world music. Having heard the big Kodo drum, I had the idea of introducing a big drum to our group-and so the concept of the Lambeg alongside the bodhran sprang to mind."
Some time later Roy was acting in the seminal play "Observe The Sons of Ulster Marching to the Somme" by Frank McGuinness, and a Lambeg drum is an integral part of the production. "I arranged it so that two Lambegs were made available, and at the end I was able to buy them for our group."
He bought the drums in a shop in Belfast's Sandy Row, a well-known Protestant area. "They were a matched-pair which had been used by an Orange lodge at Finnis, near Dromara, and were around 100 years old. So it was a great purchase." Around the same time he commissioned a new set of bodhrans from Eamonn Maguire, a craftsman of musical instruments, based in Ardoyne, a Catholic part of Belfast. The symmetry of instruments acquired from both parts of that troubled city, and being played in tune by the same group, was impressive. The symbolism was also inescapable.
As the group gradually made itself known, it was invited to play at various one-day events, including craft fairs. All the while it was developing a performance repertoire. Their concerts eventually produced a fascinating blend of sounds and rhythms, including Irish reels, jigs and marches, an element of reggae, and traditional Lambeg chants- played with a mixture of bodhrans, Lambegs, a Long Drum and African Djembe.
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