The Music of What Happens: Harp, Song and the Three Strains

The Fianna were resting after a hunt, the story goes, when Fionn put a question to his companions: what is the finest music in the world? “The cuckoo calling from the tree that is highest in the hedge,” said Oisín. “The top of music is the ring of a spear on a shield,” said Oscar. Others named the baying of a pack in full cry, the laughter of a gleeful girl, the whisper of a moved woman. “They are good sounds all,” said Fionn. “Tell us, chief,” one of them asked, “what do you think?” And Fionn said: “The music of what happens. That is the finest music in the world.” The story is best known from James Stephens’s retelling of the Fenian tales in 1920, and Seamus Heaney borrowed its last words for a poem. It is also as good a teaching on the shamanic state of attention as you will find anywhere.

Music from the Other Side

In the Celtic tradition music is not only made by people. It is overheard. The sí are great musicians, and countless tunes in the Irish and Scottish repertoires are said to have been learned from them, by a piper lost on a hillside, by a fiddler who slept on a fairy fort, by a child who wandered too near the mound. Turlough O’Carolan, the blind harper of the eighteenth century, was said to have slept on the fairy hill of Sheebeg and received there his first great tune. The music of the Otherworld is often too sweet to bear: it lulls mortals into a sleep from which they wake decades later, or draws them away from home for good.

Shamanic practitioners will recognise this. Songs received in the journey, from helping spirits or from the land itself, are among the most treasured gifts of the work worldwide. The Celtic tradition simply adds that the tunes do not stay in the Otherworld. They come back into the kitchen and get played at weddings.

The Three Strains

The tradition names three kinds of music, and gives them a myth. In The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, the Fomorians carry off the Dagda’s harp. The Dagda, with Lugh and Ogma, follows them to their feasting hall, calls the harp down from the wall, and plays the three strains in turn. He plays the goltraí, the sorrow-strain, and their women weep. He plays the geantraí, the joy-strain, and their women and young men laugh. He plays the suantraí, the sleep-strain, and the whole host falls asleep, and the three of them walk out unharmed.

Another tale explains the names. When Boánn, the river goddess, gave birth to three sons, the Dagda’s harper Uaithne was playing. The first son was born in pain, and the harp cried with her: he was Goltraiges. The second was born in joy: Gentraiges. The third came easily, and she slept: Suantraiges. The three strains are the three conditions of the soul at a threshold: grief, delight and rest. A harper who could play all three could move any company where he wished, and an Irish harper was expected to.

The American teacher Jane Burns teaches the three strains as a healing practice, and the logic is plain once you see it. Sorrow that is not given a voice festers. Joy that is not given a voice fades. Rest that is not invited does not come. Music gives each a form, and the form carries the soul through.

The Great Song

Several modern Celtic teachers speak of the Òran Mór, Scottish Gaelic for “the great song,” as the song of creation itself: the harmony of the world, tended by the sí, which human music joins when it is true. It is a beautiful idea, and it echoes things the tradition does say, about Otherworld music and about the poet who knows the names of all things. But we have not found the phrase used in this sense in the early literature, and we think it is best understood as a modern name for an old intuition. Use it, if it helps, and say where it comes from.

What About the Drum?

Here honesty requires a plain statement. The frame drum, the shaman’s horse in Siberia and the engine of the modern revival, is not attested as a trance instrument anywhere in the Celtic sources. The bodhrán, which looks the part, was a skin tambourine carried by the wren-boys and mummers before Seán Ó Riada brought it into the concert hall in the 1960s. When a Celtic practitioner journeys to a bodhrán, they are doing something new, and it works.

The absence is less strange than it looks. As Corby Ingold points out, not every shaman in the world uses a drum: some shake dry leaves, some ring bells, some use stringed instruments, and many use only the human voice, “traditionally a very powerful opener of Otherworld gateways.” The Celtic peoples never lacked music. The filidh chanted. The harpers played the three strains. The women keened and the waulking women sang the tweed tight with songs that ran on for as long as the work. The tradition’s own technologies of trance were the voice, the harp and the steady rhythm of work.

Listening With the Ears of the Sí

Fionn’s answer is a teaching about attention. The cuckoo, the spear and the hounds are each a fine sound, but each is a sound one waits for, chooses and prefers. The music of what happens is everything, as it is, now: the rain on the roof, the fridge, the gull, the cough in the next room, your own heartbeat. To hear it you must stop selecting. That is very close to the state the drum is meant to induce, in which the ordinary commentary of the mind falls silent and attention opens to whatever is there. Some practitioners reach it more easily through listening than through any rhythm at all.

A Practice: Playing the Three Strains

This can be done alone or in a circle, with a harp or a fiddle or a shruti box, or with nothing but your voice. Allow about forty minutes.

1. Settle. Sit comfortably in low light. State why you are here: a grief to move, a joy to call back, a rest you cannot find, or simply to listen.
2. Goltraí. Sing or hum or play something slow and falling for as long as it takes. Let sorrow have a voice. If tears come, keep the sound going through them.
3. Geantraí. When the sorrow has spent itself, change. Something quick, bright, rhythmic: a jig, a reel, a nonsense of syllables. Clap, tap, stand up if you want to. Let delight have a voice.
4. Suantraí. When the joy is full, slow down again, this time to a lullaby: low, rocking, repetitive, quieter and quieter.
5. The music of what happens. Stop making sound. Lie down. For ten minutes, listen to everything, preferring nothing. If a journey begins, let it.
6. Return. Sit up, name one sound you heard that you had never noticed before, and write down anything that came.

Do it once a week for a season and you may find, as the old harpers did, that you can move between the three strains at will, and so move between the states of the soul at will. That is a shamanic skill in any culture. And you may find that the finest music in the world was playing in your kitchen all along.