Book: Tuned Out
Steve Coleman
Fintan Vallely
Tuned Out: Traditional Music and Identity in Northern Ireland
Cork University Press
Tuned Out is the story of Irish traditional music in Northern Ireland and its transformation there into a cultural form associated mainly with Nationalist identity. Protestant performers of the music have become somewhat of an endangered species – the gemeinschaft canaries of cultural politics in the North, feeling increasingly out of place in a state where many Protestants have begun to reject the very term ‘Irish’ as a label for any aspect of their identity. Tuned Out offers us their voices, stories and reminiscences about the music and its history in Northern Ireland. Along with presenting these voices, Fintan Valley very gently deconstructs the identification between culture, place and people, showing us how the music has emerged out of a history of continuity and exchange between performers in Ireland, Scotland, and further afield.
The cultural politics of identity present a challenging topic for investigation, because the very act of investigating ‘identities’ calls them into being. We identify so-and-so as a Protestant, a traditional musician, a native of County Antrim, and so on, and that very act of identification suggests a relationship between these things. But these...
