Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond

Mark Fitzgerald, John O'Flynn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317092490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Etnomusicologia

Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond represents the first interdisciplinary volume of chapters on an intricate cultural field that can be experienced and interpreted in manifold ways, whether in Ireland (The Republic of Ireland and/or Northern Ireland), among its diaspora(s), or further afield. While each contributor addresses particular themes viewed from discrete perspectives, collectively the book contemplates whether 'music in Ireland' can be regarded as one interrelated plane of cultural and/or national identity, given the various conceptions and contexts of both Ireland (geographical, political, diasporic, mythical) and Music (including a proliferation of practices and genres) that give rise to multiple sites of identification. Arranged in the relatively distinct yet interweaving parts of 'Historical Perspectives', 'Recent and Contemporary Production' and 'Cultural Explorations', its various chapters act to juxtapose the socio-historical distinctions between the major style categories most typically associated with music in Ireland - traditional, classical and popular - and to explore a range of dialectical relationships between these musical styles in matters pertaining to national and cultural identity. The book includes a number of chapters that examine various movements (and 'moments') of traditional music revival from the late eighteenth century to the present day, as well as chapters that tease out various issues of national identity pertaining to individual composers/performers (art music, popular music) and their audiences. Many chapters in the volume consider mediating influences (infrastructural, technological, political) and/or social categories (class, gender, religion, ethnicity, race, age) in the interpretation of music production and consumption. Performers and composers discussed include U2, Raymond Deane, Afro-Celt Sound System, E.J. Moeran, Séamus Ennis, Kevin O'Connell, Stiff Little Fingers, Frederick May, Arnold

PART I
Historical Perspectives

Chapter 1
‘Whatever has a Foreign Tone / We like much better than our own’: Irish Music and Anglo-Irish Identity in the Eighteenth Century

Barra Boydell

Laurence Whyte’s poem ‘A Dissertation on Italian and Irish Musick, with some panegyrick on Carrallan our late Irish Orpheus’, published in Dublin in 1740, satirizes musical tastes in mid eighteenth-century Ireland, more specifically within Anglo-Irish society.¹ Whyte sums up these musical tastes by the lines ‘Whatever has a Foreign Tone / We like much better than our own’. This chapter examines the interest in and attitudes towards the indigenous repertoire of ‘traditional’ Irish music that is apparent within eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish society.² The presence of Irish tunes in the musical repertoire of eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish society reflects an engagement with that repertoire that, whether or not it may have reflected any conscious desire to express a particular identity, nevertheless casts light on the nature and identity of that society. In short, why was Irish folk music popular (to the extent that it can be shown to have been), and what does this tell us about the identity of Anglo-Irish society?

Ireland is internationally identified by its indigenous musical traditions, an association that can be traced back to the eighteenth century and earlier and that by the nineteenth century, primarily influenced by the international success of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, had firmly established Ireland as ‘the land of song’, a description first expressed in James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy, or, Bardic Remains of Ireland (London, 1831). The use of the harp as Ireland’s national symbol offers a direct if symbolic association of music with the construction of Irish national identity. The identification of Ireland with the harp was already established by the sixteenth century when Vincenzo Galilei could write in his Dialogo della Musica Antica e della Moderna, published in Florence in 1581, that the harp ‘was brought to us … from Ireland, where it is excellently made and in great quantities’ and that it was ‘the special emblem of the realm, where it is depicted and sculptured on public buildings and on coins’.³ But an association of Ireland with music had already been established by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century when he commented in his Topographia Hibernia (1188) that: ‘It is only in the case of musical instruments that I find any commendable diligence in the [Irish] people. They seem to me to be incomparably more skilled in these than any other people that I have seen.’⁴

Leith Davis has drawn attention to the impact of Cambrensis’s comments on the eighteenth-century contribution to the construction of Irish identity in her examination of published collections of Irish music from John and William Neal’s Col[l]ection of the Most Celebrated Irish Tunes (1724) through to Edward Bunting (1796, 1809, 1840) and George Petrie (1855), and antiquarian and other writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through which music was invoked in the creation of Irish national identity.⁵ Cambrensis had been translated into English in the late sixteenth century,⁶ but it would appear to have been Dermot O’Connor’s 1723 translation of the seventeenth-century Catholic Irish historian Geoffrey Keating, who had acknowledged Giraldus’s praise of Irish music on the part of ‘a writer who renounc’d all partiality in favour of the Irish’,⁷ that brought Giraldus Cambrensis’s comments to the particular attention of the English-speaking public in eighteenth-century Ireland. As Joep Leerssen has noted, ‘O’Connor’s translation [of Keating] … marked an important development: Keating’s history, directed towards Gaelic-speaking Irishmen, now became available to a larger English and Anglo-Irish audience’.⁸ Cambrensis came to be widely cited in support of the identification of Ireland with music: in 1753 Charles O’Conor cited him, quoting his Latin text in a footnote, as one of ‘the most radicated Enemies of the Nation [Ireland] doing Justice to the Excellency of our Music’;⁹ in 1777 Thomas Campbell could comment in A Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland that ‘[t]he Cogniscenti, I think, allow that Ireland is a school of music’;¹⁰ and Joseph Cooper Walker cited Cambrensis both in translation and in the original Latin.¹¹ Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Ancient Irish Bards (1786) firmly blamed the English for the spread to Ireland of Italian music, which ‘began to reign with despotic sway’ in London, from whence ‘its influence spread so wide, that it reached these shores. Our musical state became refined and our sweet melodies and native musicians fell into disrepute.’¹² Establishing ‘ancient’ Irish music, in particular an antiquarian perception of the Irish harp and ‘ancient Irish bards’, as central to Irish national and cultural identity, Walker presents perhaps the most articulate expression of the identification of Ireland with music among eighteenth-century writers.¹³

Music’s role in the construction of Irish identity was but one of a number of specific elements, symbols or signifiers consciously selected in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as expressive of a distinctive and recognizable national identity. Some of these symbols of Irish identity – the round towers and Irish wolfhounds of nineteenth-century nationalist iconography, for example – have not retained their currency, but the success of the identification of Ireland with (traditional) music is underlined by the commodification of ‘Irish music’ in the international branding of Ireland today. From the historical perspective, Harry White has argued that, while music became enshrined within the very heart of Irish self-identity, it also became part of a polarized discourse within Irish cultural history, which has removed it from a meaningful role within Irish cultural discourse.¹⁴ Alongside this role as a conscious marker of Irish identity, music can also be interpreted as expressing the unconscious identity, the cultural environment that any social group establishes for itself by the choices it makes, in this case as to what music it plays or listens to. Such choices reflect the social and cultural identity of the group, and the identification of these choices – in the context of this chapter, the musical tastes – must contribute to a fuller understanding of the particular social group.

Information on traditional Irish music in the eighteenth century is sparse. As Nicholas Carolan has written within the context of Irish song, ‘It is not surprising that eighteenth-century song in the Irish language is poorly documented. Among those who practiced it or shared its culture it was almost entirely an oral tradition. Few outsiders were interested in it, and fewer still penetrated the barrier of language.’¹⁵ The poems of Matthew Pilkington and Lawrence Whyte, and the writings of Oliver Goldsmith, Campbell, Walker and others are among the rare published contemporary commentaries on music in eighteenth-century Ireland. These sources discuss music in support of political/patriotic, aesthetic or, later in the century, emergent-nationalist viewpoints in which music is called upon to serve an end beyond itself. They serve the ‘conscious’ expression of music within the construction of national identity. In contrast, however, the views of those who engaged with music at the domestic or public-concert levels, and the musical repertoire reflected both in public concerts and in print, provide a different perspective, that of the ‘unconscious’ engagement with music.

Frank Harrison addressed this ‘unconscious’ articulation of identity through music in eighteenth-century Ireland in his 1986 paper ‘Music, Poetry and Polity in the age of Swift’, commenting that:

it is axiomatic that the poetry the people of Ireland read and declaimed, the songs they heard and sang, the church music they accepted, the sonatas and concertos they listened to were all a functioning part of their ‘nation’ … and at certain times also an affirmation of their religious and political convictions … On the one hand [verse and music] reinforce social identifications; on the other, they assert distinctions, whether national, religious, political or generational.¹⁶

Suggesting ways ‘in which [music] affirmed and promoted the self-identification of the several “nations, interests and religions” into which the country was divided’, Harrison discussed a range of musical contexts from the cosmopolitan household music of George Berkeley as bishop of Cloyne, through cathedral music with particular reference to Jonathan Swift, to theatre music in eighteenth-century Dublin including the presence of Irish tunes in ballad operas. Harrison described his paper as ‘one among many ways into increased knowledge of a formative period in the history of modern Ireland’.¹⁷ A quarter century later, the question of musical identities as reflected in the musical repertoires of eighteenth-century Ireland repays investigation.

The question of the popularity of Irish music within eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish society and what this may reveal about the identity of that society raises issues in relation to the extent to which contemporary attitudes and opinions regarding indigenous Irish music – or indeed any other forms of music – can indeed be established. The views expressed in print by Pilkington, Whyte and others may indeed reflect opinions more-or-less widely held within the social milieu from which these authors came, but they may also be coloured by the desire to shape rather than reflect opinion. With the noted exception of Mrs Mary Delaney (née Granville), whose published correspondence provides such a vital insight into the cultural world of mid eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish society,¹⁸ relatively little private commentary on contemporary musical taste is available. Nevertheless, by combining the views expressed in both the printed and the (rare) private sources with the evidence of concert programmes, newspaper reports and the musical repertoire published in eighteenth-century Dublin, some attempt may be made to understand the musical attitudes and tastes of the Anglo-Irish classes, in particular with regard to indigenous Irish music, and thus to understand how music reveals their social and cultural identities.

Irish society in the eighteenth century has traditionally been seen as fundamentally and irreconcilably divided, comprising two separate cultures defined by religion and ethnicity, the ‘two Irelands’ between which there existed a gulf revealing itself as much through music as through other aspects of culture, religion and society. As Harry White comments in the introduction to his chapter on musical thought in eighteenth-century Ireland in The Keeper’s Recital, ‘a distinction between the achievements of the Ascendancy mind and those of the “Hidden Ireland” has long been a commonplace of Irish history’. He notes that this concept of the ‘two Irelands’ is ‘a perspective which originated not in the aftermath of modern commentary but in the period [the eighteenth century] itself. Within the Ascendancy mind, the sense of two cultures was formed.’¹⁹ White’s investigation of the relationships between the two musical cultures in eighteenth-century Ireland, the ‘dialectic between et...