seamus dubhghaill

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Death of Frederick May, Composer & Arranger

Frederick May, Irish composer and arranger, dies in Dublin on September 8, 1985. His musical career is seriously hindered by a lifelong hearing problem, and he produces relatively few compositions.

May is born on June 9, 1911, into a Dublin Protestant family who lives in the suburb of Donnybrook. His father, also named Frederick, is employed at the Guinness Brewery. He pursues his musical studies at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he is taught composition by John Larchet. In 1930, McCullough Pigott and Co. publishes his Irish Love Song. That same year he is awarded the Esposito Cup at the Feis Ceoil and as a result of this he is nominated as the first recipient of a new scholarship prize worth £100 to be spent on the further study of piano. In July 1930, he takes his preliminary examination for the Bachelor of Music at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) before departing Dublin to utilise his scholarship in London. In September he enrolls at the Royal College of Music (RCM) where his teachers include Charles Kitson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, R. O. Morris and Gordon Jacob. He takes his final TCD examination in December 1931 submitting a string quartet and on December 10 his degree is conferred. During 1932 his study is funded by the RCM’s Foli Scholarship and in October he is awarded the Octavia Travelling Scholarship.

May’s compositions are few in number and he produces most of his small output in the 1930s and early 1940s. His first significant work is the Scherzo for Orchestra, written while he is still a student in London. The first orchestral run through of Scherzo for Orchestra takes place on March 17, 1933, and it receives its first public performance on December 1 when it is heard as part of the Patron’s Concert. Between the months of May and October he composes his Four Romantic Songs, which receive their premiere in London at a Macnaghten-Lemare concert on January 22, 1934. At some point, probably in the second half of 1933, he follows in the footsteps of other Octavia Scholarship winners and travels to Vienna to study with Egon Wellesz.

On January 1, 1936, May takes up the position of Director of Music at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a position he retains until he is fired in 1948. His duties mainly consist of leading the piano trio which bears the title “The Abbey Orchestra” in music during the intervals of productions. In 1936, he composes what is today his best-known composition, the String Quartet in C Minor, described in the Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians as “one of the most individual statements from an Irish composer in the first half of the 20th century.” He composes the quartet as his hearing is beginning to deteriorate and he later describes it as “an appeal for release.” String Quartet in C Minor is not premiered until 1948 when it is performed by the Martin Quartet in the Wigmore Hall, London. This is followed by Symphonic Ballad (1937), Suite of Irish Airs (1937), Spring Nocturne (1938), Songs from Prison (1941) and Lyric Movement for Strings (1942). He effectively ceases original composition at this point.

Following a long break from composition, May produces what is to be his valedictory work in 1955, the nine-minute orchestral piece Sunlight and Shadows. It is given its first performance on January 22, 1956, by the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre. Although this is his last original work, he does not abandon music completely. He produces arrangements of Irish music for Radio Éireann, which while not perhaps rewarding artistically, does help to alleviate his always precarious financial situation. He also composes a number of songs for voice and piano and a short piece entitled Idyll for violin and piano. The latter is chosen as a set work for the junior violin competition at the Feis Ceoil in 2017.

Throughout his life May suffers from significant mental health issues which result in hospitalisation. He also experiences otosclerosis, as a result of which he gradually becomes increasingly deaf. In addition, he suffers from severe tinnitus with constant ringing noises in his head. In later life he becomes homeless for a time due to alcoholism and sleeps at night in Grangegorman Asylum, Dublin. He is rescued by some friends led by Garech Browne whose record company, Claddagh Records, records the String Quartet in 1974.

Throughout his career May is an advocate of better musical education in Ireland and expresses his views on this and other musical matters through the medium of The Bell, a monthly journal dealing with the arts. He is a co-founder, along with Brian Boydell and Aloys Fleischmann, of the Music Association of Ireland (now “Friends of Classical Music”), set up in 1948 to promote art music as an integral part of the cultural life of Ireland. Later he becomes a member of Aosdána. He lives the last years of his life at Orthopaedic Hospital of Ireland, Clontarf, Dublin. He dies on September 8, 1985, at the age of 74 and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.


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St. Patrick’s Hospital for the Insane Opens in Dublin

Having been funded by a bequest from author Jonathan Swift following his death in 1745, St. Patrick’s Hospital for the Insane, Dublin, opens on September 19, 1757. The hospital is a psychiatric facility located near Kilmainham and the Phoenix Park.

Today, St. Patrick’s University Hospital, known for the innovative care of its patients, provides “Ireland’s largest, independent, not-for-profit mental health services.” When founded in 1745 it is the first psychiatric hospital to be built in Ireland mandated for the care of “Idiots and Lunaticks.”

Although new theories of madness and more therapeutic approaches to treatment are being proposed in the late 1700’s, during most of the eighteenth-century society views the lunatic as one who has literally lost his reason, “the essence of his humanity,” and therefore “his claim to be treated as a human being.” Treatments designed “to weaken the animal spirits that were believed to be producing madness,” still include restraints with chains, bloodletting, emetics, purging, and beating.

Confinement rather than cure is the focus of the earliest institutions in Great Britain. They resemble prisons with cells and keepers to control the inmates. Bethlem Hospital in London is the first to include lunatics in 1377. By the eighteenth century it has become infamous as “Bedlam” and has a reputation for cruelty, neglect, and poor living conditions, with an inadequate diet, rough clothing, and inactivity. Even worse, the mad in Bedlam are displayed as entertainment — a “freak show,” a “spectacle,” a “menagerie” from which “both provincial bumpkins and urban sophisticates could derive almost endless amusement” for a fee.

The earliest biographers of Jonathan Swift report that he had chosen to found St. Patrick’s Hospital because he had become insane himself at the end of his life. One writer even claims that he is the first patient to die there. Neither of these conclusions is accurate. It is his philosophical views and personal experiences that influence Swift’s decision to leave his estate for the establishment of St. Patrick’s.

Throughout the eighteenth century, medicine, politics, and literature all debate the relation between reason and madness, a subject that greatly interests Swift. In his most powerful satires, including Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729), he sometimes explores the Lockean theory that “any person could fall into madness by the erroneous association of ideas.”

But the stronger motivation for Swift’s legacy grows from his involvement with the day-to-day problems of the Irish people, not only as an individual but also as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a position he holds from 1713 until his death. At mid-century there are no provisions specifically for lunatics. If not being cared for by their families or found wandering the countryside, lunatics would sometimes be confined with criminals in prisons, with the poor in a workhouse, or with the sick in a hospital. Swift has firsthand knowledge of these conditions since he served as a governor of the workhouse and as a trustee of several hospitals. In 1710, after a visit to Bedlam, he gets himself elected a governor there in 1714. By 1731 he has decided on his legacy, intending his hospital to be charitable and more humane than Bedlam.

Another strong motivation may have been Swift’s ability to empathize with the sufferers of madness. Not mental illness but recurring attacks of Ménière’s disease (MD) afflict him for over fifty years, beginning at age twenty-three. The debilitating bouts of vertigo, nausea, tinnitus, and deafness worsen by the late 1730’s, and he complains of memory loss and difficulty in reading and writing. When he finalizes his will in 1740, he refers to himself as sound in mind but weak in body. In 1742, following a sudden decline in his health, his friends have him judged incompetent and appoint a guardian. Probable dementia increases his helplessness until his death on October 19, 1745.

Swift leaves an estate of about 12,000 pounds. In his will he lists details as to where St. Patrick’s should be built and how it should be run by his board of governors. Although they first meet in 1746, the asylum does not open until 1757. The governors need to acquire the site, oversee the plan and construction of the building, and ensure available money for operating expenses. Insufficient funds are the main obstacle, even after adding money from rents, donations, subscriptions and Parliament. Finally, St. Patrick’s has to accept paying patients to offset the costs of its charity cases.

Richard Leeper, who is appointed Resident Medical Superintendent in 1899, introduces a series of important initiatives including providing work and leisure activities for the patients. Norman Moore, who is appointed Resident Medical Superintendent in 1946, introduces occupational therapy, including crafts and farm work to the patients.

After the introduction of deinstitutionalisation in the late 1980s the hospital goes into a period of decline. In 2008 the hospital announces the expansion of its outpatient services to a series of regional centres across Ireland. A mental health facility for teenagers, known as the Willow Grove Adolescent Inpatient Unit, opens at the hospital in October 2010.

The hospital is affiliated with Trinity College Dublin and has 241 inpatient beds.