Acoustic and Electric: Irish Traditional Music in the Twentieth Century
Nicholas Carolan
A survey of developments in traditional music over the last one hundred years.
The true reality of Irish traditional music is in the fleeting moment of performance and in the consequences of that moment. The full story of Irish traditional music in the twentieth century is therefore that of all the songs that were sung in the course of the century, all the tunes that were played, all the dances that were danced, all the people also who performed and learned and taught and listened and watched and studied and wrote and recorded and filmed and spoke and organised, the whole personal and intimate network of connections that laterally links all who are participants in Irish traditional music today, and the network that links us vertically back to previous generations, and even to our former selves. But most of that extensive and complicated activity has left no trace. What one can speak about now are some prominent personalities, trends and movements, and innovations of style and technology.
Irish traditional music in the twentieth century did not exist in isolation from the rest of the world – if world history had been different, the history of the music would have been different. The century saw, among other things, the great European empires of the nineteenth century crumble, two world wars take place, the world ideology of Communism rise and fall, American culture become increasingly dominant in the world at large, and the rate of scientific discovery accelerate enormously. Especially relevant are the extraordinary developments in telecommunications that have made the world a village: the telephone, the record player, the radio, the tape recorder, the television, the satellite dish, the internet.
Nor did traditional music exist in isolation from wider events in Ireland and among the Irish diaspora. In the course of the century most of Ireland became politically independent of Great Britain although not culturally independent — and two new states were set up on the island; in the Republic and in Northern Ireland different political, educational and other institutions evolved; emigration simultaneously drained the country of talent and energy and created or built up Irish emigrant communities throughout the world; society became predominantly urbanised and mobile; women came to play a more public role in Irish life; the Irish language declined further; relative isolation from the rest of the world at the beginning of the century became an absolute openness to it by the century's end; many periods of poverty and a few periods of prosperity were endured, but educational and economic provision improved and much of the population moved into the middle classes; as the struggle for subsistence eased, leisure activities took on a new importance.
Three features of the nineteenth century in Ireland had a particular influence on Irish traditional music in the twentieth: the Great Famine of the 1840s and its many consequences, especially the severe blow it struck at traditional oral culture (which was largely Irish-speaking), and its creation of a large emigrant population in North America and a smaller one in Britain, and of a continuing tradition of emigration there; the invention of sound recording in 1877 in the United States by the Thomas Edison, which led to the development of domestic machines that recorded and replayed sound on cylinders and on discs (the first body of Irish traditional sound recordings in fact dates from the 1890s); the establishment of the Gaelic League in Dublin in 1893, a crystallisation of moments that had been developing since the Famine with the object of preserving traditional culture and especially the Irish language. Although the Gaelic League was essentially an organisation for the promotion of the language, its activities frequently embraced traditional song, music and dance, both at branch level and at national level. The League also attempted a systematisation of traditional music competition, for the first time, at local feiseanna or competitive cultural festivals and at all- Ireland festivals such as the Feis Ceoil and An tOireachtas.
The Turn of the Century
A person looking around at the state of traditional music within Ireland on 1 January 1900 would have seen a situation that was essentially the same as that of all the preceding ninety centuries of human habitation. That is, a situation in which traditional song, music and dance was created in the mind or on an instrument, and then held in the memory, and passed on in mostly domestic performance from person to person, and eventually from generation to generation, a process that naturally resulted in the original creation forming many variants. This essentially oral character of the music, there from the beginning of time, and highly shaped by local circumstances, would change during the coming century.
In 1900, musical horizons were confined to local personal acquaintance, or to the few professional travelling singers and musicians, or to dancing masters on circuit. The status of musicians was low, and music was almost entirely an activity for after work, or for fair days, or for days of particular celebration. In much of the country, oral tradition music was the only kind of music that was available. It was 'music'. That too would change in the new century, and the Irish person interested in music today can choose with ease between a thousand other musics with all their subdivisions, including the ethnic music of other countries.
In 1900, singing bulked much larger than it does nowadays, and instrumental music played a smaller part. Singing was still a basic form of entertainment in the home, and in other social gatherings. It was still performed almost exclusively in quiet domestic' styles: unaccompanied, and it still retained other old functions that have since been lost, such as providing information about Ireland and the world, encouraging political action, protecting children against evil, exercising local social control, lamenting the dead. Old songs were constantly being remembered, and new songs being created, in Irish and English. There were about three quarters of a million native Irish speakers in the country in 1900, although they were confined to about one sixth of the land area of the country, so traditional singing in Irish was still relatively vigorous. The Gaelic League was beginning regular publication of songs in Irish, and indeed spreading them in the Gaeltacht, and was beginning to introduce to urban audiences the concert performance of songs in Irish to piano accompaniment.
Relatively few musical instruments were in use in the early 1900s, given the size of the population that was then participating in traditional music. Fiddles and flutes, which had been first taken up in the 1600s and 1700s, were commonly met with, but the uilleann pipes were in danger of extinction, so much so that a Cork Pipers Club was set up in 1898 to rescue them from oblivion and a Dublin Pipers Club in 1900. The Irish harp had disappeared in the early 1800s, but a revival of it was well underway by 1900, with Gaelic League support. The Irish mouthblown bagpipes had disappeared even earlier, but a revival of it was also underway, especially as a marching-band instrument, and marching fife-and-drum bands of the Land League period were still in existence throughout the country. Out in the countryside, concertinas and melodeons, cheap mass-produced factory instruments, imported from Britain and Germany chiefly, were making great progress, even if they were seen by some as instruments of anglicisation. Mass-produced metal whistles were also common.
Related to the post-Famine progress of the concertina and the melodeon was a vogue in the countryside for set-dances, quadrille-based group dances that had been sweeping the country for twenty to thirty years by the dawn of the twentieth century. Solo exhibition step dances were still a popular form of entertainment, but they were of course only for the better dancers. The Gaelic League, under the inspiration of its London branch, was promoting a form of group dances that it considered more authentically Irish than set-dances. These, partly based on older forms and danced in halls, came to be called 'ceili dances' after the ceili, a new form of social gathering invented by the London Gaelic League in 1897 on a Scottish model.
New Forces
This situation, as sumarised for song, instrumental music and dance in the early 1900s, continued, more or less, for the first few decades of the twentieth century, but new forces were beginning to appear that would in time transform the face of Irish traditional music.
In Irish America, professional traditional performers had found new and public city venues for their music and had adapted it to meet the demands of these venues and their audiences. By the end of the 1890s, such performers were making an initial foray onto commercial sound recordings, and the Galway-born vaudeville piper and comedian Patsy Touhey was selling home-made cylinder recordings from New York from 1901.
Touhey was a friend and music source for the Cork-born musician and music collector Francis O'Neill, chief of police in the city of Chicago from 1901 to 1905. O'Neill collected and published in Chicago in 1903 the largest collection of Irish music ever made, and this and his subsequent collections and studies, which are still in print, in time transformed the repertory of traditional music back in Ireland.
The cylinders and 78rpm disc commercial sound recordings made in the cities of Irish America had a profound influence on traditional style in Ireland as well as on repertory, and their influence is still vibrantly present today. Early recordings mostly featured non-Irish performers, but in the 1920s especially hundreds of Irish country musicians were recorded, and their records filtered back to the homeland, bringing their local styles to areas of the country that had never heard them. In Irish-America instrumental groups had evolved to play in large saloons and ballrooms, borrowing instruments of American popular music, such as the piano, the banjo and the drum kit, and amalgamating them with traditional instruments such as the fiddle, flute and uilleann pipes. Their recordings of the 1920s also influenced an Ireland that was newly developing its own tradition of large instrumental groups.
The large-scale creation of Irish commercial recordings ended with the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the onset of the world-wide economic depression of the 1930s. With the exception of some recordings made in the 1930s, and one major exception in the second half of the century, Irish traditional music in America had little later influence on the home front, although it continued to evolve in its own unique way and within its own world with periodic influxes of emigrant musicians from Ireland. It is currently in a very vigorous state and exhibits features that distinguish it from traditional music in the homeland.
Back in Ireland, although the Gaelic League had gone into decline in the second decade of the century, its Irish-Ireland Irish-language ideology formed the cultural agenda of the new 26-county state formed in 1922. All primary teachers had to be able to teach Irish, for instance, and traditional songs in the Irish language formed part of the school curriculum. Not instrumental music, however. Most Irish schools to this day make no statutory provision for instrumental music teaching, although many teachers do teach Irish traditional music in a voluntary capacity after school hours. The six-county state of Northern Ireland, established in 1920, was not a promoter of traditional culture, but many Catholic schools within the state were, as were Irish-language summer colleges in Ulster.
Radio has to be seen as one of the most important developments in Irish traditional music in the twentieth century. From the early 1920s in Irish America and from 1926 in the Irish Free State, later the Republic of Ireland, traditional music was a staple ingredient of broadcasting. The BBC, established in Northern Ireland in 1922, did not promote traditional culture in English or Irish in its early decades as a matter of state policy. In the Republic, the national station, Radio Éireann, was also state-controlled but it promoted traditional culture, even to a degree unacceptable to some of its listeners. Live performance was commonplace, and record programmes spread the influence of the commercial 78s. The first director of the RÉ, Seamus Clandillon, was himself a singer of traditional songs in Irish, and often sang on air.
Also in the 1920s, traditional dancing and therefore dance music began to move out of its domestic setting of the home and the house-dance, and into the public dance-halls. By the early 1930s, the 'ceili band' had evolved, a large instrumental group, semi-formalised in its instrumentation, which, like its American forerunners and forerunners in Irish Britain, combined instruments of traditional music with instruments of popular music, and used public-address amplification systems. The Dance Hall Act of 1935, which required the licensing of all public dances, struck an almost mortal blow to the house-dances and crossroad dances that had already been long in decline. The ceili bands eventually achieved enormous popularity, reaching the pinnacle of their popularity in the late 1950s.
In the depressed economic and social circumstances of Ireland and the rest of the western world in the 1930s, traditional music, like the Irish language and many other aspects of life, was at a low public ebb, associated with a culture of poverty. In 1932 the Gaelic League took over the regulation of professional schools of Irish dance that had come into existence since the beginning of the century, and its subdivision, Coimisiún na Rincí Gaelacha, continues to do so, and to organise competitive festivals of Irish dancing. A state-supported initiative of the period was the establishment of the Irish Folklore Commission in Dublin in 1935 with the purpose of collecting and preserving all traditional culture, including song, music and dance. Under its director, Seamus Ó Duilearga, it amassed one of the finest folklore archives in the world, and a good deal of the music and song in it was collected by Seamus Ennis from the time of his employment in 1942. Although there had been some commercial recording of traditional musicians by English companies, in London and in Ireland, from the turn of the century, it was the late 1930s before the recording industry came to Ireland. The English recording companies HMV and Decca set up recording and manufacturing branches in Dublin and their record lists show an Irish record-buying audience divided in their tastes between traditional solo performers and ceili bands, which had become well known on radio, and a whole range of British and American popular music.
New Beginnings
After the relatively uneventful and isolated years of the Second World War, all kinds of things began to stir in Irish traditional music in the second half of the 1940s. There seems to have been a renewed appreciation of traditional music in the western world at the time, and especially in the United States and Britain, an appreciation that co-existed with an appreciation of things modern and that coincided with technological developments in the area of portable sound recording: on disc-cutting machines and from 1948 on tape recorders. This new postwar interest in the traditional manifested itself in Ireland also. The Irish Pipe Band Association held its first all-Ireland competitions in 1945, and continues to this day. Radio Éireann set up a Mobile Recording Unit in 1947 that recorded performers in their own localities. The Irish Folklore Commission made sound recordings of individual musicians and singers. The BBC recorded extensively in Ireland at about the same period, especially across Ulster. For the first time hidden pockets of unknown surviving local traditions and unknown performers were brought to the attention of national audiences, and this material fed a growing interest in and a growing knowledge of traditional music. The urban aficionado came into being. Much of the music recorded at that time still survives in archives, documenting the music of the first half of the century, and indeed the music of earlier centuries is now again being made publicly available. In the late 1940s and 1950s also a new Irish music culture began to evolve in Britain, created by the hundreds of traditional performers who were attracted there to work in post-war reconstruction. Grafted onto music traditions of earlier Irish emigrants, it was at first largely pub-based, and it led to the evolution among the performers and their descendants of a distinct strand of Irish traditional music, a strand that parallels the emergence of another distinct strand in Irish America among the many Irish emigrants there of the same period and their descendants.
The Second Half
The first of the significant developments of the 1950s was the establishment of the organisation Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann (CCÉ), which partly grew out of informal music clubs in Dublin where the music traditions of the countryside co-existed with urban traditions. CCÉ has since become the largest organisation in Irish traditional music, although of course the unorganised community of the music is enormously larger. Strongly influenced by the Gaelic League and its feiseanna, and modelled on the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), which is organised on a parish/county/province/ all-Ireland basis, it had as its object the promotion of Irish traditional music, song and dance. Although its name means 'Association of Irish Musicians', membership of CCÉ is open to all, performers and non-performers. The more-or-less autonomous local branch, which arranges sessions of music, teaches music, prepares for competition, and arranges social functions, is at the heart of the organisation, and drives its performing, teaching, competitive and social functions. There is also a national administrative superstructure, with branch representation, that has a headquarters in County Dublin. This organises festivals, tours and courses, publishes records and books and a magazine Treoir, collects music and keeps an archive, and manages the organisation nationally and internationally — like the GAA, Comhaltas is also organised abroad, chiefly in Britain, the United States, and Australia. The major achievement of CCÉ over the last half-century has been the bringing of large numbers of people to the music — mainly by teaching and by exposing them to live traditional music, and by the creation of various outlets for live traditional music where musicians of different local traditions could meet and play. The chief public activity of the organisation is the fleadh cheoil. Fleadhs are competitive music festivals, with a large non-competitive dimension. They generated huge public attention and huge attendances particularly in the late 1950s and the 1960s, when people could actually meet and listen live to those musicians whose recordings they had been listening to on the radio. Often touchy and aggressive, and in denial about other traditional music activity, the public face of CCÉ sometimes belies the warmth and selflessness of its members and its branches, and their concern and involvement with traditional music and its culture.
Instrumental playing was also boosted by rising levels of prosperity in the 1960s that enabled people to buy instruments in greater numbers than previously. Offshoots of Comhaltas branch and fleadh cheoil activity have been the growth of 'session' playing of instrumental music and of formal teaching of the music. A session is an ad-hoc informally organised group of musicians playing on a whole variety of instruments, for their own enjoyment, for hours on end. While sessions did exist to a small extent in the distant past, and especially among more recent emigrant communities, they only became a standard feature of Irish traditional music in recent decades. A great deal of music is now played in sessions, and the acquiring of the ability to join in a session is a motivation for many learners. Of necessity the large numbers attracted to learn an instrument had to be taught in large organised classes, where teachers usually used some form of notation, alphabetic, numeric or staff, and the older master-pupil learning relationship changed.
Allied with these sessions, the decades of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s saw a decisive move of Irish traditional music from the home to the pub, a move that adversely affected traditional singing. In the same decades the home was increasingly invaded by the radio, especially the transistor radio, which even affected people who used sing in the fields and at work, by the television and later by the video machine. From the 1960s new venues also commonly opened up for the music: clubs, cabarets, concert halls and stadiums.
Another sea-change in the nature of traditional singing came about in the years around 1960, chiefly by the example of a group formed by three Clancy brothers from Waterford and Tommy Makem from Armagh, who were actors and singers living in New York. They took up the guitar- and banjo-accompanied styles of American traditional singing there and adapted them to Irish songs. When their records came to Ireland, they became enormously popular and throughout the 1960s they spawned a host of imitators — ballad groups as they were called. It became possible for some people in Ireland to make a full-time living, even if a precarious one, from the performance of the music.
At the same time as the Clancy Brothers and groups like the Dubliners were coming to prominence, a charismatic and innovative individual was bringing a different kind of traditional music to the public. Sean Ó Riada, from Limerick and Cork, was a classically trained musician and composer with a penchant for jazz. Turning also to traditional music in his twenties, he popularised the music through his work on radio, records, stage and film, inventing a new kind of traditional music group with singer, Ceoltóirí Chualann. In the nine-man group, modelled on the strings-woodwind-percussion structure of the classical orchestra, he arranged the music in contrasting sections, played the harpsichord and bodhrán drum, and brought into circulation again from print and manuscript a wealth of long-forgotten music. Ó Riada also arranged much Irish music for orchestra, and was responsible for the now ubiquitous use of the bodhrán as an accompaniment to music. The Chieftains, the successors of Ceoltóirí Chualann, have brought huge international audiences to the music since the 1960s.
Irish television is a creation of this general period, established in Belfast in 1955 by the BBC and in Dublin in 1961 by RTÉ. BBC Northern Ireland and the northern commercial station Ulster Television have broadcast little traditional music. RTÉ produced many series and individual programmes of traditional music over the decades, mostly studio programmes rather than programmes made on location. The person most associated with traditional music on television, as performer, presenter and innovative producer, has been the Clare accordion player Tony Mac Mahon. Teilifís na Gaeilge (now TG4), a national Irish-language station established in 1996, has broadcast much traditional music since its foundation.
By the 1970s the trend of accompanied singing had merged with the rise of interest and involvement in instrumental playing to produce an amalgam of the two, and the formation of a large variety of commercial vocal and instrumental groups: Planxty, Horslips, Dé Danann, the Bothy Band, Moving Hearts, and many others, who have introduced new styles of playing and new repertory at a rate unprecedented in Irish music history. Under the influence of these groups, but also by popular choice, accompaniment became an established dimension of Irish traditional music as the music moved to the concert hall and the stadium.
The competitive elements of the fleadh cheoil, which were not universally liked, and uneven and subjective adjudication standards at competitions, gave partial impetus to the emergence of new kinds of traditional music gatherings in the 1970s. One was CCÉ's own Fleadh Nua, a non-competitive fleadh that began life in Dublin but which has been held in Ennis for almost thirty years. More significant was the development of the summer school and weekend festival — normally a non-competitive mixture of formal and informal activities such as sessions, concerts, lectures, classes and workshops, and other social activities. The Willie Clancy Summer School was the first of these, in 1973, and it invented a highly successful template that is now applied all over the country — to such a degree that there's hardly now a weekend in the year when several organised public events are not being held.
Recent decades have seen so many other innovations that only some of them can be listed: the founding of instrument-focused organisations, such as Cairde na Cruite (friends of the Irish harp) in 1960, which continued the century-long revival of the instrument, and Na Píobairí Uilleann (the association for uilleann pipers) in 1968, which has ushered in a world-wide revival of the uilleann pipes; the founding of Gaeltacht-based national Irish-language radio in 1972; the establishment of urban music clubs, and especially traditional singing clubs, in pubs, such as Dublin's Tradition Club and the Góilín Club, in the 1970s; the set-dancing revival that swept the country in the 1980s and 1990s; the efflorescence of Irish-language song composition in the Conamara Gaeltacht; the appointment of a traditional music officer to the Arts Council in 1980 and an increase in state funding for traditional music; the widespread use of traditional music for purposes of tourism; the financial income that can properly be gained for the first time from the composition and arrangement of traditional music; the extraordinary levels of instrumental virtuosity that are commonly achieved; the growth of a false perception among the unionist community of the North over the last three decades of the Troubles that traditional music is a feature only of nationalist culture; increased commercialisation and commodification, and the introduction of agents, publicists and high-powered marketing; the international discovery of Donegal music; the growing popularity of the music among people of non-Irish background, and the coming into existence of an international meta-community for the music.
Also in recent decades there have been a number of musical developments that have proved to be both off-shoots of the main stem of traditional music and cul-de-sacs from it: the introduction of electric instruments — chiefly the guitar and keyboards of various kinds; the introduction of rock-music styles of performance and record production; and the introduction of other ethnic styles of performance. The only accepted innovation of this type has been the 1970s adaptation of the Greek bouzouki. The stage show Riverdance and its many successors belong to this category. Although enormously popular, they are essentially derivative of recent developments in Irish traditional music and dance rather than belonging to it, and borrow some elements of traditional music for what are otherwise theatrical purposes. Their impact has been greater on those who hadn't earlier met with the excitement of Irish traditional music and dance. What repercussions they will have on traditional dancing have yet to unfold.
Study
The second half of the century has also seen a great growth in the study of Irish traditional music — although of course the numbers involved in this are small when compared to the numbers of performers of the music and enthusiasts for it. Following long after the demise in the 1920s of the Irish Folk Song Society, which was formed in 1904 among the Irish in London for the collection, publication and study of Irish traditional music, the Folk Music Society of Ireland was founded in Dublin in 1971. It has published sound recordings and printed studies in the years since and held an annual series of public lectures. Public lectures are also a common feature of traditional music schools and festivals. In 1971 Breandán Breathnach published the first book-length study of Irish traditional music in this century: Folk Music and Dances of Ireland, and many more have appeared since, Hugh Shields' Narrative Singing in Ireland being particularly notable. Guidance to all this material and to the detail of Irish traditional music in the twentieth century will be found in Fintan Vallely's encyclopaedia The Companion to Irish Traditional Music, which appeared in 1999. The academic study of Irish traditional music at university level, which began in a desultory way in the 1920s, has come into its own in the second half-century: Sean Ó Riada was appointed lecturer in Irish traditional music in University College Cork in 1963; his successor Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, who studied ethnomusicology at Queen's University, Belfast, greatly expanded the study of the subject in innovative ways in Cork from 1975, and, in his present position of professor of music at the University of Limerick, has established a postgraduate centre, the Irish World Music Centre, which specialises in the study of Irish traditional music. In recent years, traditional music has begun to be accepted as performance in second-level and third-level music courses, and specialist performance degrees in traditional music are now being offered in the Dublin Institute of Technology College of Music and the Irish World Music Centre. Other recent developments have been the establishment of traditional-music schools, such as that of Galway, and of intensive year-long performance courses that also involve the study of business and technology, such as Ceoltóir in Dublin and Northern Rhythms in Donegal. In an odd and late outcropping of post-colonialism, the London College of Music introduced in Ireland in 1997 a graded examination course in Irish traditional music of the nineteenthc-entury British-Empire type. It was followed in this in 1998 by a similar course devised by the Dublin Royal Irish Academy of Music and Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. Thousands of children are now being 'certified' as Irish traditional musicians, in oblivion it would seem of better educational practice in continental Europe and North America. Irish traditional music is still not listened to, played, studied or taught in most Irish primary and secondary schools.
Publishing
An even more obvious growth area than education has been the commercial publishing of sound recordings. Since the Second World War, and with the introduction of tape recording and long-playing records in the 1950s, an unprecedented amount of Irish traditional music has become available to the public. Over 13,000 commercial recordings are held by the Irish Traditional Music Archive, and the number is growing by the day. The introduction of the cassette tape from the 1960s and of the CD from the 1980s has boosted the process, and in the last decade or so an increasing amount of earlier archival sound recordings are also being made available. Prominent publishers in the field include Gael-Linn, Claddagh, Tara, CCÉ, Ossian, Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Topic of London, and in America Shanachie and Green Linnet.
Availability increases on every side: a large number of tune and song collections have been published since Breandán Breathnach's Ceol Rince na hÉireann appeared in 1963, and the learner is faced with an embarrassment of riches to choose from. Aloys Fleischmann's 1999 publication Sources of Irish Music alone presents 6,500 melodies, and it only covers sources up to 1855. Many instrumental tutors have become available in print and on video, and the availability of music and information about music has been greatly increased by archival development, notably that of the Department of Irish Folklore in University College Dublin, the successor of the Irish Folklore Commission of the 1930s, and that of the Irish Traditional Music Archive, founded in Dublin in 1987.
The Turn of Another Century
If the interested person who had looked around at the state of traditional music in Ireland at the beginning of the century were to look around similarly on 31 December 1999, he or she would hear and see what is essentially the same material, but in different proportions and with modem stylistic admixtures: oral-tradition songs in Irish and English, instrumental airs and dance tunes such as jigs, reels and hornpipes, solo dances and group dances. The many changes that occurred during the century would be noticed, more changes than a similiar audit would have revealed for any previous century: what was almost entirely a private domestic music has become to a great extent a public music; a patchwork of local traditions has been obliterated or obscured by national repertory and style; singing has declined; instrumental music has flourished, to an extent; dancing has also flourished to an extent, while becoming more artificial and controlled; traditional music is less varied, there are fewer kinds of songs and fewer kinds of tunes being performed; the individual performer is more and more subsumed into the group; traditional music is more available than formerly and is more frequently performed; its status has increased — it now rarely provokes violent antipathy and it has achieved a generally accepted symbolic meaning in Irish identity; but from being widespread and national within Ireland, it has become a minority culture; outside Ireland, it exists without a necessary connection of blood or race; accompaniment has become a norm for singing and playing, and the prominence of melody has declined; instrumental virtuosity has increased, and less spectacular players are sometimes overshadowed; instrumental groupings have increased in size; music has become on average faster and more rhythmic; from being relatively unpublished and unstudied, it has become intensively so, and contemporary performers are profoundly influenced by detailed documentation of the past; perhaps most significantly, from being purely oral it has become also electronically mediated and print mediated, and has achieved a secondary orality in audio-visual forms.
Irish traditional music should develop in the future as it always has done: in a free, random and chaotic reaction to the world in which it exists, and directed only in a loose and individually incremental way by the tastes and activities of the general body of composers, performers and listeners. And it will. Disquiet must be felt at evidences of latter-day landlordism in the music, reminiscent of the eighteenth-century enclosure of Irish common land by avaricious individuals: recent claims to have composed tunes that were in print two hundred years ago; the disregard of the anonymous composers of previous centuries; the ignorant attempts to levy licence income from public-domain traditional music; the licensing of traditional music performance; the general drive to power and control, and money, which, if successful, would choke the life from traditional music in ways that have happened in other forms of music. But like quicksilver, cohesive and yet infinitely variable, Irish traditional music will evade such fumbling with it and maintain its underlying continuity. The creativity now bubbling in thousands of young and old traditional performers and composers, and their informed communion with the past, is the real guarantor of the future.
This article is based on two illustrated lectures given by the writer in 2000: the Breandán Breathnach Memorial Lecture of the Willie Clancy Summer School on 1 July, and the opening lecture of the Bantry Traditional Music Festival on 13 October.
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