Turning the Tune

Traditional Music, Tourism, and Social Change in an Irish Village

Adam Kaul

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781845459611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

The last century has seen radical social changes in Ireland, which have impacted all aspects of local life but none more so than traditional Irish music, an increasingly important identity marker both in Ireland and abroad. The author focuses on a small village in County Clare, which became a kind of pilgrimage site for those interested in experiencing traditional music. He begins by tracing its historical development from the days prior to the influx of visitors, through a period called "the Revival, " in which traditional Irish music was revitalized and transformed, to the modern period, which is dominated by tourism. A large number of incomers, locally known as "blow-ins, " have moved to the area, and the traditional Irish music is now largely performed and passed on by them. This fine-grained ethnographic study explores the commercialization of music and culture, the touristic consolidation and consumption of "place, " and offers a critique of the trope of "authenticity, " all in a setting of dramatic social change in which the movement of people is constant.

Chapter 1

Introduction

There is an older way of talking about instrumental styles of traditional Irish dance music that has perhaps begun to fade in recent years. A typical traditional Irish tune is divided into two 16–bar parts which are often simply called the A part and the B part. But in that older language these parts are called “the tune” and “the turn.” Playing music is even called “turning a tune.” “In this way,” Micheál Ó Súilleabháin wrote, “‘turning’ has a wider meaning which could be taken as synonymous with the creative process itself” (1990: 119). It is a notion that emphasizes the playing of music (and playing with music) rather than focusing solely on its structure. In one sense, this book is about the creative process of “turning,” writ large. It is about diverse actors in one particular place who adapt to, play with, and play within changing structures—musical structures as well as social.

To be more specific, this book is an ethnographic description of a small village called Doolin on the west coast of Ireland, which is undergoing rapid social change as a result of globalization, tourism, and immigration. It pays particular attention to the complicated, contested, and multivalent spaces, conceived both literally and figuratively, between tourism and public performances of traditional Irish music. Diverse categories of people interact in these spaces pushing along the social change that occurs there including—to give names to just a few—locals, tourists, incomers (who are sometimes called “blow-ins” in Ireland), and musicians.

Doolin's popularity among tourists is due not only to the beautiful natural landscape that surrounds the village, but also because it has an international reputation for traditional Irish music “sessions”. Sessions are not concerts. They are more casual gatherings of musicians who generally share a common repertoire of traditional music from the Irish and Scottish instrumental traditions. Sessions are social events as much as they are musical events. A great deal of chatting, joking, and general interaction occurs. Unlike a concert, the boundaries between the session and the surrounding environment are porous, and the musical performance becomes one aspect of a larger social milieu.

At the very height of the summer tourist season, going to experience one of the nightly sessions in one of Doolin's three pubs can be a bit of a task. Even though the coastal village is home to less than six hundred permanent residents, well over a thousand tourists can pass through each day during the busiest weeks. In the daytime tourists commonly walk the country lanes, hike through the stony landscape called the Burren, take daytrips to the Aran Islands, lounge around at the seaside, or drive up to the Cliffs of Moher which can be seen from the shore at Doolin. At night they flock into the pubs for a meal, for drinks, and to hear a session. In a village this small, with few venues for public social interaction besides the diminutive grocery store, the pubs act as the hub of the local social world, a place to meet with friends and neighbors after the days’ work. So before even getting in close proximity to the table where the musicians have their sessions, one must first contend with the crowds of tourists and locals.

When you pull open the pub door, a blast of noise, cigarette smoke¹, and body heat engulfs you and pulls you in. The collective low rumble of human voices is punctuated by the sharp sound of clinking glasses and small explosions of laughter. Even on a sunny summer day, the light is dim enough indoors to force you to wait for your eyes to adjust before delving any further. The locals cluster in the section of the pub furthest away from the musicians’ table so that they can hear themselves talk. Usually, this gathering point for locals is nearest the main entrance, and it is this crowd that you must first squeeze through. In order to get anywhere, you must sidle closely past people dearly clutching pints of lager and stout beer. People are gathered more thickly along the bar. When you catch the barman's eye you shout your order and a pint is pulled. Once purchased, you lift your drink gingerly over the tops of the heads of people seated at the bar. Off in the next room, tourists mill around, waiting intently for the music to start. Even though it is close to 9:30 in the evening, some people are still finishing up meals. The bar staff rush around trying to keep up. Every table is occupied, and every stool, chair and bench is filled. People also stand in packs along the wood-paneled walls. On particularly busy nights, there is barely any standing room either. The crowd, predominantly consisting of tourists, creates a carefree and expectant atmosphere.

When the musicians arrive, the designated table (with the “reserved for musicians” sign fixed onto the wall behind it) is cleared. The current occupants are asked to find somewhere else to sit. The crowd stirs a little as the musicians sit down, pull their instruments from their cases, and tune up. One of the musicians orders a round of drinks. Cigarettes are passed around and smoked. Eventually, someone behind the bar flips a switch and the small microphones that dangle inconspicuously over the musicians’ table crackle to life. One of the musicians starts to play a tune and the rest chime in after a few seconds. The crowd moves in closer. On particularly busy nights, it is nearly impossible to see the musicians because they play behind a semi-circular wall of humanity. In order to see what is going on, you must find an opening and move in quickly before someone standing next to you does. The pace of the jigs and reels is clipped, with a steady rhythm. Feet tap and heads bob slightly as the musicians tear through the instrumental pieces. The tunes are catchy and exciting, but they are so fast that, to the untrained ear, it is sometimes difficult to pin down a distinct melody, which is complicated by rhythmic flourishes and grace notes. Several tunes are strung together into a “set” without a pause in between, and the set of tunes lasts ten minutes or so.² Cameras flash in the dim smoky light as people take pictures of the musicians. When the first set of tunes ends there is a roar of applause. The musicians pay little heed to the audience though, almost ignoring the fact that all these people are showering them with so much attention. If anything, they seem slightly sheepish about it all. They fine-tune their instruments and then settle back in their seats to talk amongst themselves. Several minutes might pass before they begin a new set of tunes, and it seems that the audience, so keen to hear this music, is a secondary concern. For the rest of the evening, the music and the periods of chatting in between are like partners taking turns, and hand in hand this goes on for hours. More musicians come in to sit around the table, others get up to leave, and they all face inwards towards each other rather than out towards the audience. There is no sign of a score or a piece of sheet music, but everyone seems to know the same tunes.

As the evening progresses, the energy in the pub ebbs and flows. There are moments when the excitement of the music seems to compel audience members to get up and dance, or to “whoop” suddenly. There are other moments, when a local singer might join the musicians for an unaccompanied sean nós (literally, “old style”) ballad, and the room goes quiet. A tangible tension permeates the air as the singer relays some inevitably sad story in a slow, somber style. The applause afterwards is explosive. Locals cheer, “Good man yourself!” or “Lovely!” When it dies down, the musicians launch once again into another set of instrumental tunes.

Even to a novice who has possibly only read a few sentences about what a session is in a tourist guidebook, it is immediately clear that this is a very different experience from a formal concert. The musicians do not sit on a stage. Instead, they sit in a circle with their backs to the audience. There is also a lot of talking in between the sets of tunes, unlike a concert where the noise and the pauses between pieces of music are kept to a minimum. Often, tourists draw a quick analogy to something they are more familiar with—a “jam session”; however, the musicians themselves would immediately repudiate the use of this term because it implies that the music is being improvised when nothing could be further from the truth.

Just as clearly, there is a great deal more to it than a few local musicians casually looking to play a few old traditional tunes with each other down at the pub, as sessions are often portrayed in the tourist literature and popular culture. There are microphones and huge crowds. There is something premeditated about it all. This would be confirmed at the end of the evening if one happened to notice several of the musicians being paid by a bartender, or if one realized after listening to them speak that not all of them were in fact Irish. Some speak with English, American, South African, Australian, French, or German accents. The session experience appears to be a very “traditional” musical practice, but just below the surface is a multilayered and ironic complexity: here is a cosmopolitan group of musicians, playing a local style of traditional Irish music, to an audience that consists mostly of international tourists.

Many tourists do not seem to dwell much on these things, or even notice them, but for those who do, it tends to raise a series of questions. What is going on here? Has tourism undermined traditional Irish music somehow? Are these musicians being exploited? Or is it the reverse: are they exploiting the tourists somehow? And since they do not all seem to be Irish musicians, who are they anyway? If they are getting paid, is it all just “commercialized” now or is it still “traditional”? What does any of it mean, or maybe better put, does it mean anything anymore? Tourists tend not to ask these specific questions though. Instead, they often sum it all up into one concise but highly loaded question: “Now, tell me, is this the real, authentic Irish music?”

These are common immediate reactions of tourists to the complicated encounter with a session in Doolin at the height of the tourist season. They are a touchstone for a wealth of issues, some of which I hope to shed light on in the following pages. To paint a preliminary brushstroke and to paint it broadly, some of these issues include the economic and social change caused by the tourism industry, the tensions between music-making and commercialization, cosmopolitanism and the integration of immigrants in Ireland, changing notions of “Irishness,” the appropriation of culture, and the trope of authenticity. Throughout, all of these issues are approached through the lens of ethnographic descriptions of this one particular place. In other words, this book does not construct a theoretical scaffold upon which the ethnography is hung. Instead, the ethnography itself forms the core of what follows. Theoretical implications and cross-cultural comparisons are drawn out from it.

Conceptual Orientation

Having said that, it might be useful at this early stage to briefly position myself within some of the relevant current debates. I want to avoid the standard propensity of presenting a “literature review” though; rather, my intention here is to simply (and only in sketch form) orient the reader to my approach to the study of traditional Irish music, tourism, and social change in Doolin, and to give the reader a sense of what I hope to contribute to those subjects. Firstly, while my particular perspective is that of an anthropologist, the issues discussed herein have led me to draw upon several adjacent areas of inquiry, such as ethnomusicology, tourism studies, and Irish studies. In that sense, the following book might be considered interdisciplinary, to invoke that increasingly esteemed but seemingly little understood term. Interdisciplinarity recognizes that reality is far more nuanced, complicated, and contradictory than can be thoroughly explained by means of only one discipline's set of models, theories, or methods. When successful, an interdisciplinary study contributes more to each area of knowledge than it takes. Difficult though this may be, the unfortunate compulsion in academia to subdivide areas of knowledge, sometimes to the point of meaninglessness, while simultaneously celebrating it as “expertise” leads me to feel that broadening my scope rather than narrowing it is worth the effort. While it is hoped that the following ethnography uses an interdisciplinary approach to contribute something more than it took from these other disciplinary perspectives, I also recognize that it no doubt has a decidedly anthropological tone.

What's more, the following book is decidedly ethnographic. Recently, in their excellent overview of the social scientific study of Ireland over the past century, Wilson and Donnan (2006) argue that Ireland must continue to be studied “from below” (as Curtin and Wilson put it in the title of their seminal 1989 volume Ireland from Below), “from the terra firma of locality, from the perspective of those who live and work in the marshland of the bog, on the shop floor, in the government office, and at the IT workstation” (2006: 167). I agree. Throughout, I have made every attempt to bear down on the complexity of lived experience and social relations of one locality, grounding the theory in careful ethnography. In another context, Paul Sillitoe has called this method “ethnographic determinism” (2003: 3), the idea that the ethnographic data determines the theoretical model rather than the other way around. This, it seems to me, is simply good thinking and I heartily subscribe to it.

I have also been careful to pay attention to varying points of view, including the fact that my own subjective experience of Doolin is a factor in the way the following analysis unfolds. Anthropologists used to contend that our discipline was, if not an objective science, than at least one that strived to be so. We are no longer under any such illusion. There is no need to dwell on the nuances of the “postmodern turn” in anthropology, but needless to say, one result of the debate has been a more thorough recognition of subjectivity in qualitative analyses. Indeed, we have found a renewed depth and vigor from the inclusion of the self and the ethnographer's own voice in recent decades. This certainly does not mean that anthropologists have given up on seeking out facts and data, or to tell an accurate story. To the contrary, the goal is to present as true a depiction as possible. This approach, my approach, which requires us to be far more attentive to the dialogic nature of complex social milieus and to recognize that the ethnographer's own perception cannot be overlooked while at the same time recognizing that these dialogic narratives are built upon a consistent and shared extant reality, might simply be called constructivism.

Likewise, anthropologists have become more attentive to issues of scale. In other words, we are far more careful to not see the world in a grain of sand (or all of Balinese society in a single cockfight) as often as we used to do. Proper scalar contextualization is important in any ethnographic case study, but in Ireland this has been a particular pitfall. Sloppy contextualization of Ireland has, “quasi ‘created’ many different Irelands” (Kockel and Ruane 1992: 7). Anthropologists are not the only ones who have perhaps “invented Ireland,” to use Declan Kiberd's phrase (1995). I am also not alone in finding it difficult to even circumscribe exactly what is meant by “Ireland.” Is it the Republic of Ireland, the isle of Ireland, or the “Irish people”—however that might be defined (e.g., do we include the recent influx of African and Polish immigrants? What about the Irish Diaspora?). Roy F. Foster, in his book The Irish Story (2001), similarly contends that there has never been a singular Irish history, but rather a multiplicity of histories. “Irish history,” he writes, “has inspired such a broad and compelling range of narratives, reiterated in every generation, that scope must be restricted” (2001: 2). I take these critiques about the complexity of the Irish context quite seriously and do not presume to make sweeping claims about an Irish Story per se. This ethnography is clearly set in one locale in Ireland, but it is also not simply a “community study” in the outmoded structural-functionalist sense, one in which a supposedly static unchanging community is cohesively integrated via its ancient traditions, kinship networks, mythological hegemony, and isolation from other cultures.³ Quite the opposite: this is an ethnography about radical social change, shifting traditions and meanings, and cosmopolitan reorientations caused by constant intercultural interaction. At the same time, I do not want to take this too far. Despite recent critiques about the notion of “community” and other classic anthropological concepts, one of the major points I hope to make in this book is to demonstrate exactly how community relationships aggregate around varying notions like locality, the musical experience, and sociality.

This book is also about traditional Irish music. I make no universal claims about the music, although I think what is described here might be recognizable elsewhere. In this regard, this book attempts to fill a gap that Harry White recognized a decade ago in The Keeper's Recital (1998), which is that music—and more specifically in the case of this book, traditional Irish music—has generally been left out of the discourse about Irish cultural history. Here, an analysis of Irish music forms one of the central threads in the narrative. There are two major areas that I focus on. First, the book tracks how traditional Irish music changed in the latter half of the twentieth century as a result of its revival, and later, the symbiotic relationship that developed between music performances and tourism in Doolin. For example, Irish music is not the only European traditional music to have become “professionalized” (Bohlman 1988: 85–86) in recent decades, and this book adds to the literature on that topic (cf. Lortat-Jacob 1981, Buchanan 1995, Kaul 2007b). Second, especially towards the end of the book, I pay particular attention to how the music is experienced and understood in the present. This is complex, having to do with subtleties in emotive and cultural meaning that very diverse actors give to performances, the change in the performance space through time, and how traditional Irish musicians are able to maintain what Charles Keil would call “participatory discrepancy” or “creative tension” (1994b: 96–99) even in a heavily touristed and commercializing context.

This is also a book about tourism in Ireland. Tourism is a particularly powerful force for economic and social change, rife with ironies, inequalities, and essentializations. It may be the case that in historical studies “Irish tourism is an under-researched story, too often retailed simply as institutional history” (Foster, 2008: 155). However, ther...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Remembered History
• Part II: Moving through and Moving in
• Part III: Change and Continuity
• Bibliography
• Index