Focus: Irish Traditional Music

Sean Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135204136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Focus: Irish Traditional Music is an introduction to the instrumental and vocal traditions of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, as well as Irish music in the context of the Irish diaspora.Ireland's size relative to Britain or to the mainland of Europe is small, yet its impact on musical traditions beyond its shores has been significant, from the performance of jigs and reels in pub sessions as far-flung as Japan and Cape Town, to the worldwide phenomenon of Riverdance. Focus: Irish Traditional Music interweaves dance, film, language, history, and other interdisciplinary features of Ireland and its diaspora. The accompanying CD presents both traditional and contemporary sounds of Irish music at home and abroad.

Part I

Irish Music in Place and Time

Chapter 1

Looking In from the Outside

Ireland seems so familiar to those who have never visited. A high-functioning tourist machine generates powerful and alluring images of castles, rocky shorelines, rolling green hills, and remarkably good-looking people. A never-flagging set of factories feeds a never-ending desire on the part of foreigners for Irish-themed clothing, tea towels, shot glasses, leprechauns, shamrock pins, and other signifiers of Irish heritage. In a cultural climate where red hair is enough to (erroneously) proclaim one as “Irish,” and where being descended from one Irish grandparent (along with Muhammad Ali, Che Guevara, and Tony Blair) allows one to gain Irish citizenship, it should not be surprising that Ireland’s economic upswing of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century should have brought a corresponding upswing in the international popularity of all things Irish.

Focus: Irish Traditional Music brings the traditional music of Ireland as it is played and sung today together with the essential interdisciplinary features that make Irish music still so important in Ireland and abroad. Divided into three main parts, Focus: Irish Traditional Music covers the historical context, the cultural context, and the important details of Irish instrumental and vocal music. Chapter 1, “Looking In from the Outside,” approaches Ireland from a foreign, particularly diasporic, perspective. It locates Ireland not only as part of Europe but as the homeland of the Irish diaspora, engages the reader in understanding musical processes such as texture, variation, and modes, and discusses what happens at a performance of Irish music in Ireland. It also brings up the position of traditional music in the context of the other musics performed in Ireland by Irish people.

Chapter 2, “Roots and Branches of Gaelic Ireland,” has as its concentration the historical context of Irish traditional music and culture, from the establishment of settlements on the island to the development of the bards as powerful culture-bearers. Chapter 3 begins with Queen Elizabeth I’s 1603 proclamation to “hang all harpers where found,” and brings the reader up to the present, to the establishment of what is now considered “Irish traditional music.” Chapter 4, “Music of the ‘Celtic’ Nations,” explores the related musics of Scotland, Wales, Northumberland, Cornwall, Brittany, Galicia, and Cape Breton in eastern Canada. It focuses on instruments, contexts, languages, and related cultural issues that both join and separate the various traditions. Chapter 5, “The Green Fields of America,” explores not only the reasons for the Irish diaspora around the globe, but also the rich music that resulted from their experiences in emigration and exile. The chapter also discusses authenticity in the context of how foreigners, particularly Americans, have created for themselves a vision of Ireland and celebrated that vision primarily in song. Chapter 6, “Irish Instrumental Music,” is entirely devoted to the instruments, forms, and playing styles of the bagpipes, fiddles, flutes, accordions, and other common instruments heard in traditional contexts.

Chapters 7 (“Vocal Music in Irish-Gaelic”) and 8 (“Vocal Music in English”) are the heart of this book. These chapters introduce the reader to sean-nós (“old style”) singing, often considered (particularly by its practitioners) to be the soul of Irish music and among its most ancient forms. These chapters cover sean-nós together with other songs in Irish, the great English-language ballads, and Irish macaronic (bilingual) songs. These chapters are the book’s primary focus because much has been written on Ireland’s instrumental musics, but few published works reach into the core of the vocal tradition. Chapter 9, “New Contexts for Music and Dance,” looks at the current excitement and attraction toward Irish (and, more broadly, “Celtic”) music, highlighting the nation’s dramatic economic growth and easing of tensions in Northern Ireland. The chapter concludes with a sense of how Irish music is developing into an international language for people from all over the world who know how to play and sing it, and what listeners can expect to hear from Irish music and musicians in the future.

At the end of the book the reader will find a glossary of Irish terms, a set of additional resources (for reading and web surfing), a listening guide to the included CD, references, and an index. All of these resources are intended to directly connect the reader with little previous background in Ireland, Irish culture, or Irish music, to what is most essentially Irish.

Locating Ireland in Place and Time

The island of Ireland actually comprises two countries: the Republic of Ireland in the south, and Northern Ireland (part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) in the northeast. As a two-nation island, Ireland is a small place compared to, for example, Russia, China, Canada, or the United States. It is approximately the same size as Indiana in the United States, and its entire population of 6+ million people (4.4 million in the Republic; 1.7 in Northern Ireland) would easily fit inside the five boroughs of New York City with room to spare. It is in close proximity to the mainland of Europe (Figure 1.1), and voted to be part of the European Union, making it subject to laws and treaties voted on by the EU member states. It is also, however, a homeland for the more than 70 million descendants of its people around the world.

Figure 1.1 Ireland as a part of Europe

Ireland is even a kind of fictive homeland for the people who have no heritage connection to it, but who are profoundly attracted by its music. It might be worth asking why it is that thousands of Germans, Japanese, and other non-Irish visitors descend on the small village of Doolin in Ireland’s County Clare each year. In spite of its small size, Doolin has long been one of several centers of Irish instrumental performance, geared largely toward the tourism industry that brings multiple busloads of foreigners into (and out of) town every day. People can enter a pub, drink a pint of Guinness, listen to a performance of traditional music, and get back on the bus, confident that they have experienced the “true Ireland” constructed in their lively imaginations. The fact that many of the instrumentalists in the Doolin pubs are not local and perhaps not even Irish at all is, to the average visitor, irrelevant. What is important is the array of visual, aural, and other experiential indicators proclaiming that the scene is “just right” in terms of its authenticity and sense of welcome. Indeed, to some extent, the context is an Irish pub, Irish music is being played, and the beer is flowing. What more does anyone need?

American images of the Irish

Of all the roads into Irish culture, surely one of the most well-worn takes listeners through “Danny Boy,” “When Irish Eyes are Smiling,” and other hits of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Or perhaps the reader has encountered green beer on St. Patrick’s Day, or carefully studied cartoon images of leprechauns as a child while consuming a bowl of Lucky Charms™ breakfast cereal. The friendly Irish cops in the classic children’s book Make Way for Ducklings (McCloskey 1941) and Huck Finn’s no-good drunken absent father (Twain 1884) are but two examples of Irish-themed character types that non-Irish-born children encounter early on. Films that highlight particular traits ascribed to the Irish—Mary Poppins, for example, includes a sneaky Gaelic-speaking fox; Singing in the Rain presents two “reformed” huckster stage Irishmen with hearts of gold; numerous cartoons and even a few Star Trek episodes feature periodically drunken but attractive Irishmen that serve to cement images into the hearts and minds of North Americans in particular.

How did Irish imagery give rise to such an array of stereotypes, as far as the non-Irish view the Irish? Think of these images of Irishness, reinforced since the 1850s in American popular culture: the drunken father, weak son, sweet colleen, saintly mother, valiant soldier, noble priest, scatter-brained maid, jovial but slightly corrupt cop, and gangster. We have all likely seen images on public television of Riverdance (or Celtic Woman, or Celtic Thunder) and heard the lush, vague, echoey sounds of Enya’s New Age recordings. Some of us, or our sisters or daughters, may have taken classes in Irish step-dance, complete with heavy, embroidered, expensive dance outfits, wigs with dozens of tiny ringlets, and hordes of anxious hovering stage mothers at competitions.

Those of us who play and sing Irish music in the United States know well the annoyed looks directed at people who stray too far from the Irish-American hit repertoire of songs like “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Lay” as sung by Bing Crosby. It is not out of the question, after playing a set of jigs, to be asked to “play an Irish jig” (meaning “The Irish Washerwoman,” whose title alone reinforces more Irish stereotypes in the American mind). Similarly, singing a song in Irish frequently leads to the request for a “real Irish” song (in other words, an Irish-themed American song). The ubiquitous St. Patrick’s Day accessories, together with the license to drink to excess, did not develop in a vacuum. Irish-American songs, images, stereotypes, marketing gimmicks, and musical sounds all have historical precedent resulting from Irish immigrants’ transitions into American society. Since the reader is beginning this book by looking into Irish musical culture from the outside, it is reasonable to assume at least a little familiarity with the outer trappings of Irishness.

My own early encounters with Irish music occurred when I was a teenager in Berkeley, California. I used white chalk and a mechanical pencil (perfectly, thanks to being an architect’s daughter) to alter the date on my driver’s license so that I could get into Irish bars in the San Francisco Bay Area to listen to music sessions. I was delighted to hear the Irish and Scottish antecedents to my mother’s Kentucky ballads. As a bluegrass musician, I began carefully picking my way through the notated jigs and reels of various Irish music resources on the banjo, the mandolin, and the guitar. I sang songs learned from recordings of the Clancy Brothers, and tried to accompany a few songs on the guitar using “open” chords and DADGAD tuning (see Chapter 6, “Irish Instrumental Music”). I signed myself up for several years of studying Modern Irish, Middle Irish, and Old Irish as a music major at the University of California, took folklore classes, translated songs and folktales from Irish into English, and generally immersed myself even as I pursued a degree in classical guitar performance. What I discovered in college, and much more so after graduate school, was that the further I ventured into Irish music, the further behind I left the Ireland of Irish-American fantasy.

Ireland’s history is tightly bound with that of North America, and the two chapters of history in regard to music included in this book comprise the minimum of what one needs to know to carry on a normal conversation in Ireland (with musicians or without). Ireland’s history is its present, and its history lives in such places as the slabs of prehistoric tombs surrounded by cows and half-buried in the bog; a photograph of John F. Kennedy enshrined next to one of the Pope in pubs and homes; and band names that recall historical figures, events, and concepts: the Wolfe Tones, Black 47, and Lúnasa.

What’s in a Name?

Ireland has two national languages: Irish-Gaelic and English. Irish-Gaelic is radically different from English, and to speak Irish-Gaelic is not to simply speak English with an Irish accent. It belongs in the Gaelic branch of the Celtic language family of Indo-European. English, in contrast, belongs in the Germanic family. In Ireland, the Irish-Gaelic word for the language is Gaeilge, pronounced “guail-i-gya.” The English word for the same language is Irish! Because this book is in English, you will find the word “Irish” used to refer to Irish-Gaelic. Most people in Ireland speak English as their primary language for a variety of reasons, though Irish is taught in all the schools and has recently experienced a resurgence in popularity among native Irish. Many Irish people also learn Irish at home, then learn English at school, particularly in the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) districts. In contrast to the English-speaking, uniformly white, traditional “Ireland of the Welcomes” presented by Bord Fáilte (the Irish Tourist Board), Ireland’s newest immigrants also speak Mandarin, Polish, Hindi, Brazilian Portuguese, Burmese, Latvian, and multiple languages of African origin. Ireland has become a polyglot nation because of its membership in the European Union, and the barista who makes your espresso in Dublin just might speak English with a Polish-inflected Irish accent.

Scotland is the home of the Scots: of Scotsmen and Scotswomen. Scotch, on the other hand, is both a drink (a type of whiskey) and a verb (“to put an end to”), and is a long-outdated and inappropriate word for Scottish people used only by outsiders. Scottish music is what Scottish (and Irish, and British, and North American, and Australian, and oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Part I: Irish Music in Place and Time
• Part II: Music Traditions Abroad and at Home
• Part III: Focusing In: Vocal Music in Irish-Gaelic and English
• Glossary
• Additional Resources
• Listening Guide
• References
• Index
• Index of Musicians