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In
a new volume in Oxford’s Global Music Series,
the subtitle ‘Experiencing Music, Expressing
Culture’ emphasises the musical force gained
by Irish music from its being rooted in the local.
Dorothea Hast and Stanley Scott, practitioners and
scholars both, visit a seisiún at Gleesons
pub in Clare near the Miltown Malbay centre of melodic
pilgrimage, interview traditional singers Len Graham
from Glenarm and his wife, Padraigín Ní
Uallacháin, from Louth, and analyze a performance
held at Trinity Inn near the college in Dublin under
the auspices of the Góilín Singer’s
Club. By concentrating on these three manifestations
of the current Irish scene, emphasising in turn the
instrumental, the seán-nos and song tradition,
and the song as both perpetuating the tradition and
welcoming the innovative, Hast and Scott provide an
overview easily enjoyed in a couple of sittings along
with the accompanying 28-track CD, keyed to their
informative text.
Although
designed for the classroom, this volume (ISBN 0-19-514555-0;
© 2004, Oxford UP) can inform anyone about the
background, current context, and permutations of Irish
music. As a ‘mediocre tin-whistle player,’
in the estimation of my twelve-year-old flautist son,
I was impressed by the ease in which musicologists
Hast and Scott integrate technical terms into their
text designed for the rank novices like me to musical
terminology. The activities allow you to learn from
the CD track at specified moments in your reading,
and particularly impressive I found one example. Piper
Jerry O’Sullivan offers multiple versions of
“Garrett Barry’s Jig.” The first is
a stripped-down version transcribed for the beginning
student. The notes simplify the melody. The second
version adds ornaments. The third time through, with
the use of the regulators of the instrument, adds
even more intricacies. As a careful listener to the
pipes, the combination of the three scores and the
three takes added immeasurably to my comprehension
of what, if I had been presented only with the audio
tracks, would have sounded like lots of flash added
to a straightforward tune.
How
does this musical exploration of Irish indigenous—and
imported—strains play upon the harp new-strung,
as Wolfe Tone’s logo promised? Can we connect
the culture with the political aspirations? As I have
stated, the connection of the pub session and the
repertoire with the local emerges strongly in these
pages. Hast and Scott could have wandered all 32 counties
and given a thumbnail rundown of famous players or
notable tunes in these 150 pages. Instead, they study
the etiquette, the passing on of tunes, the respect
paid the elders, and the democracy of the audience
and players, as all who play and sing thus gain appreciation
in turn. The incident down the road or up the lane,
as so many titles show, the inspiration of a particular
player, and the commemoration of battles and courtships
long faded remain memorialised but never mummified.
The context emerges in the playing and the singing,
ever-shifting but still reified. Each playing and
recital changes the structure but leaves the scaffolding
in place for the next builder. Eschewing the gazateer
approach, the authors’ choice to zero in on three
locales heightens their primacy of the community within
what continues to be passed on within the Irish traditional
repertoire, and what is added.
After
an injury of a famous musician, the authors note that
within a week or so not one but two ballads had been
composed about his mishap while playing at doubles.
E-mail and phone only accelerate the transmission
of the oral tradition, it seems. Similarly, the ability
to tape performances, to sell recordings, and share
by technological advances the wealth of musical variation
only increases the lustre of the treasure to which
musicians and singers contribute. ‘In each postindependence
generation of Irish musicians, individuals have had
to choose between the urban, upbeat high-volume allure
of swing, rock and roll country and western, heavy
metal, or rap and the more rural, frequently slower-paced,
quieter, intimate appeal of Irish music’. (96)
Now, on the other hand, musicians and singers can
mix forms. While in my opinion the hybrids can be
dreadful, they do expose younger listeners to the
older forms. For myself, as a punk in the late 70’s
whose parents had only an l.p. of Bing Crosby,
Shamrocks and Shillelaghs and another ‘Who
Put the Overalls in Mrs Murphy’s Chowder,’
I recall my curiousity stoked after listening to Horslips,
even though I recall Rolling Stone condemning
their entire oeuvre as one-star rated ‘sham-rock.’
The
gamut of players and singers treated shows this heterogeneity.
While any listener or player may lament who or what’s
been left out, you must admit that the range can certainly
educate the beginner or the advanced fan of Irish
music of the diversity we are lucky to hear and share
now. For example: Carolan harp tunes, West Clare and
Sligo fiddle, céilí bands from the 1940s,
vocals from John McCormack, Joe Heaney, Andy Irvine,
and Gleesons pub singers, sean-nós from Ní
Uallacháin and Scots-Irish song from Graham,
and members of Lúnasa live and in session demonstrating
some of the finer points of the text, to which Hast
and Scott also enrich their own musical collaborations.
The text covers the history of Irish music effectively,
although the influential and detrimental Dance Halls
Act of 1935 in the south needed more explanation,
as it weakened the ability of individuals to hold
their own musical gatherings and seems to have been
instigated by the Church and the Dublin government
to weaken rural choices for venues. I wondered if
this was part of the anti-jazz campaign undertaken
by republicans in the middle of that decade, but the
text offers no context. Dance tune traditions and
their instruments in turn receive a few paragraphs;
from this I learned of the bodhran’s very recent
rise in popularity and that of the uilleann pipes,
both having entered the limelight only during the
60s and 70s. The decline of the harp and the ascent
of the fiddle still puzzled me due to their too brief
treatment here. Why the concertina became the “woman’s
instrument” can be traced, intriguingly, to not
only its relative affordability early last century
but its sale at hardware stores.
Throughout
this survey, Ciaran Carson, Belfast poet-musician,
from his estimable Last Night’s Fun (1996), the
ultimate print on Irish sound, continues to be cited.
Near the end of Hast and Scott: Carson--
‘Each
time the song is sung, our notions of it change,
and we are changed by it. The words are old. They
have been worn into shape by many ears and mouths
and have been contemplated often. But every time
is new because the time is new, and there is no
time like now.’ (116; in Hast and Scott,
135).
As
with the language, so the music and the native culture.
All are enriched by the blow-ins and the strangers,
but never is the root as Gaeilge, ceol, nó
duchas torn away. The nutrients from fresh winds plant
themselves in the soil and the stronger creation,
the hybrid, can better withstand old winds and new
blasts. Or so we hope.
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