A Eagarthóir,

Richard Pine notes in his article ‘The National Ear’ that if the term ‘heritage music of Ireland’, rather than ‘traditional music’, was adopted as a title for our single-melody structured musical inheritance, cross-disciplinary musical endeavours might have occurred more naturally and much sooner. A different name, I agree, would have helped, but there were more significant factors involved.

Since the founding of the state the music was fenced off from other types of music in order to establish pride and develop our cultural uniqueness. The frame of reference was narrowed to only allow the playing of music that has been handed down‚ and the precise English word, traditional’, was decided upon. It is ironic and quite sad that republican cultural conservatives used England’s Oxford Dictionary to define Ireland’s musical inheritance.

Like most musicians, my understanding of the word ‘traditional’ would lean more towards its associated words in a thesaurus, i.e. ‘customary’, ‘conventional’, ‘usual’, ‘ritualistic’ or ‘ancestral’. I would have continued to use it but for the amount of times the misnomer ‘that’s not traditional!’ has been used to disenfranchise imaginative musicians. I propose we change how we name this music to ‘Ceol Gaelach’. This way the English language will no longer be used as the authority by which we understand our collective musicality.

‘Heritage music of Ireland’ and its Irish language equivalent ‘Ceol Dúchasach na hÉireann’ lays, I believe, too much emphasis on the music’s past. ‘Ceol Gaelach’, however, having no linguistic restrictions, allows for many interpretations whilst also suggesting the stylistic similarities between yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s incarnations of the music.

But most importantly, by adopting the title ‘Ceol Gaelach’, it will place the custodianship, and the expression of the music, firmly in the hands of each and every Gaelic musician, which is where it should have been all along.

Rossa Ó Snodaigh
Dublin 8