Gerry Godley’s article on the common ground that traditional musicians and jazz musicians share reminds me again that there is an extraordinary amount of music out there that I don’t make enough time to seek out and listen to. Every now and then I come across a radio programme which reinforces this fact – Gerry Godley’s excellent Reels to Ragas on Lyric FM is certainly one.

However, in my endeavours to stretch my listening, I find that the advance of a broadband internet connection is having a profound effect. Suddenly, I have access to a pristine signal from unlimited radio stations abroad, including every BBC radio channel. Not only that, but because of the nature of radio internet streams, on the BBC web-site I can listen to a night-time world music, jazz or contemporary music programme the morning after it was broadcast – and even pause the programme while my one-year-old interrupts and contributes her own improvisatory sounds (see Andrew Cyprian Love’s article on the relationship between infant babbling and musical improvisation for more on that!). It is a far cry from the din that was BBC radio when I was child – posh voices discussing big subjects that were barely audible over the interference and high pitched tones. My father would somehow persevere and leave it on, baffling us children with this noise.

Some days, I feel I am engaged in a sort of ‘emigration of the imagination’ as I work at my desk – listening to British radio, e-mailing people around the world, reading an article from foreign media online, and it occurs to me: I really could be anywhere in the world. Politicians today would probably call me ‘outward looking’, one of the blessed youths of modern Ireland who have not been afflicted by that great boogie monster of the soul – ‘Irish and inward looking’. But they avert their eyes from the fact that Irish people may be looking away from Ireland for reasons that are not so benign.

In general, there is a commitment to ideas in other countries that for some reason Ireland does not have. It is the reason why we are, for example, such easy pickings for the neo-liberal agenda so well described by Kieran Allen in his article in this issue. For an increasingly educated population, this is hard to stomach, so we look away. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t just me who grew up hearing ‘posh voices discussing big issues’, and that we as a country, noting the particular place where that sound was emanating from, decided that that was not, culturally speaking, how we would like to sound – so we went the other way.

Toner Quinn
Editor