A major change in economic policy in the late 1950s finally moved the Irish nation towards the program of modernization envisaged in the 1920s. The development of an outward-looking economy brought a proliferation of social and musical changes to Ireland67 and a degree of prosperity that allowed the generation that came of age
in the 1970s the opportunity to stay in Ireland rather than emigrate. It also created an environment in which a viable Irish music industry and new musical forms could flourish.
Recording companies set up by culturally motivated groups — Gael-Linn, with its promotion of the Irish language and traditional music, and Claddagh, the project of ‘gentlemen pipers’ Garech Browne and Ivor Browne — promoted both established traditional musicians and members of an urban revival alongside radio and television programs devoted to traditional music. At the same time, the
international marketing success of the English and American folk revivals allowed such Irish ‘ballad bands’ as the Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners to become international stars performing an Irish repertoire.
In the early 1970s, the group Planxty performed Irish ballads and traditional dance music in exciting new arrangements that brought together elements of the ballad bands’ repertoire with the Chieftains’ intricate arrangements using a combination of instruments new to traditional music: bouzouki, mandolin, guitar, uilleann pipes, whistle and bodhrán (Musical example 2468). Their commercial success and musical
innovations had profound and lasting effects on the presentation of Irish traditional music, spawning new groups that took performance styles into more contemporary,
67 The growth of an Irish tourist industry utilizing images of Ireland based on past constructs of national identity is discussed further in Chapter Five.
68 Planxty perform one of their signature songs, ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ (vocalist Christy Moore) and segue dramatically into an instrumental, Tabhair dom do Lámh (‘Give me your Hand’), a harp tune composed in 1603 and published by Bunting in 1840 (Bunting c1969). Recorded 1972.
rock-influenced directions. These included the Bothy Band, noted for reckless speed and driving rhythms (Musical example 2569) and De Dannan’s ‘Galway sound’
(Musical example 2670). Each of these bands featured the newest instrument to have
been absorbed into Irish traditional music’s ‘river of sound’: the bouzouki.
While Irish traditional music groups have continued to exert an influence on performance styles and instruments among amateur musicians, the growth of
informal group performance in the session (discussed in Chapters Four and Six) has at the same time seen the circulation of a new form of traditionalism that overlooks, or is ignorant of, the fact that these recent innovations have been only recently incorporated into ‘the tradition’.
This chapter set out to account for the ways in which popular dance music in Ireland became ‘traditional’ during the twentieth century, and in doing so, to trouble the distinction between modernity and the traditionalism so often found in histories of Ireland and Irish culture. The experiences and recordings of musicians
demonstrate that this distinction is not clear-cut. For most of the musicians whose performances of ‘The Morning Dew’ have been discussed in this chapter, Michael Coleman’s recording was the touchstone and the point of departure for
interpretations of the tune that performed community, or memories of community, but also spoke of individual creativity and ambition.
These performances took place within ‘imaginative cultural narratives’ (Frith 1996: 124) that emerged from their lived experience as citizens of the Irish state or as emigrants. For example, when musicians in East Clare adapted their music-making to the new context of dance halls and the ceili band, the standardized group sound and professionalized function of the music changed its social meanings, but earlier experiences and understandings of music continued to reverberate in rhythm and repertoire. In post-war London pubs, immigrant musicians from rural Ireland voiced the defiant gaiety of a disdained underclass along with the pain of homesickness —
69 The Bothy Band formed in 1975, the year Planxty broke up, their band’s name reflecting the revivalist ambition to recreate the atmosphere of the emigrant camps (called bothies in Scotland, destination of many Ulster itinerant workers). The set of reels performed here, ‘The Salamanca’, ‘The Banshee’ and ‘The Sailor’s Bonnet’ (the last popularized by
Coleman in his famous ‘Tarbolton’ set) was on their self-titled first album (1975), featuring Donal Lunny’s ‘wall of sound’ in which bouzouki, mandolin and guitar create a complex harmonic and rhythmic backing to the melody, exchanged among Paddy Keenan’s fiery piping, Matt Molloy’s flute and Tommy People’s gutsy fiddling.
70 An example of ‘the Galway sound’ of De Dannan, formed in 1974. Recorded 1980. Bouzouki is played by English-born Alec Finn.
or homelessness, for the rural Ireland they had left behind was not the ‘home’ idealized in nationalist rhetoric. Nationalist ideology provided a narrative within which this music remained both Irish and traditional, but it could not re-create in new contexts the lived experience in which rural dance music had flourished.
In the case of the Chieftains, the urban concert hall demanded a strong, clear sound that was in perfect tonal pitch, standardized arrangements that could be
reproduced at each performance, and a stage presentation in which the music was introduced in an educative but entertaining way, while listeners sat in silence. What links this formal presentation with its informal precursors as ‘traditional’ is the imaginative cultural narrative of nationalist ideology. Significantly, this cultural narrative is not that of the ballad bands that emerged in the 1960s under the influence of folk revival movements in the USA and in England, where songs in English were sung with manly vigour to the accompaniment of modern instruments such as the banjo and guitar. On the contrary, the repertoire of the Chieftains draws on much earlier narratives of a uniquely Irish culture, as suggested by their name (referring to an ancient Irish nobility) their repertoire (which includes eighteenth- century harp music) and their instruments (which include both the gentleman’s uilleann pipes and the genteel harp).
As I have argued, musical performance neither represents nor expresses the common attributes of a particular group but (following Frith) that music ‘articulates in itself an understanding of both group relations and individuality, on the basis of which ethical codes and social ideologies are understood’ (Frith 1996b: 111). Reg Hall has written that Irish traditional music, as a reproduced and revived music, is an imitation that has passed its meaningful time (1999). Those involved in Irish traditional music as performers, listeners, critics and commentators have rejected this view, however. The vast, wealth-producing tourism and music-production industries and their offshoots continue to promote ‘the tradition’. Recordings from the vinyl era have been reissued on compact disc with the cleaner sound and more varied sequencing that contemporary consumers demand, along with booklets explaining the music’s authenticity, framing the musicians’ lives in a newly mythologized rural past and their ethnicity as a newly conceived, transportable Irishness.
The question of authenticity in Irish music has concerned intellectuals for over two centuries. It has variously been located in geographical places (such as the west of Ireland), in private and public spaces (rural households and, later, pubs), in lineages
of musicians (who had learned directly from acknowledged masters or from their pupils), as well as in particular instruments, performance styles and repertoires. Since the beginning of the revival of Irish traditional music in the late 1950s, this concern has also become that of musicians.
The popular dance music of rural Ireland, with its mix of musical styles and sources, came to be understood as Irish and traditional (rather than simply ‘music’ or ‘dance music’) from the beginning of the twentieth century, as its texts were widely
distributed, as it was heard on recordings and on radio, as it moved into public spaces in supervised dance halls and emigrant meeting-places, and in new forms of presentation for wider audiences.
While the state, the Catholic Church and cultural nationalists in the urban art-music field failed to invent a national art-music that was recognized as ‘Irish’, revivalists from the 1950s onwards succeeded in bringing together musicians under a
nationalist credo and fostering a popular movement. Some of the effects of this were to ‘discover’ musicians previously unknown outside their own districts and make them stars. Other effects were to establish a new set of criteria for judging musical performances, teaching young musicians and educating audiences, in line with revivalist notions of authenticity (discussed in the following chapter). At the same time, young Irish musicians in the 1970s embraced new instruments, performance styles and repertoires, reaching a new generation of audiences and inspiring a surge in participation, paradoxically ensuring the continuity of Irish traditional music while also changing it radically.
Throughout this period it can be seen that Irish traditional music was Irish not only in the sense that it was played in Ireland, or by Irish musicians in other places, but also within the discourse of nationalist ideology that claimed the music as
emblematic of Irishness. As discussed in Chapter Two, this Irish ethnicity was claimed on behalf of all inhabitants of the island, but in reality took a more limited form: Gaelic, republican, Catholic, and ideally also Irish-speaking, an identity that was brought into relief by defining it against ‘foreign’ popular music.
Brendan Mulkere (1994) recollects London music pubs as a resistant, secretive sub- culture. In the twenty-first century, Irish music culture is more public than ever, its secrets displayed, discussed, laughed about and argued over throughout the world. Irish traditional music has become a globalized commodity and performance practice, but at the same time some musicians and listeners imagine themselves still
to be contained within a tradition, to be ‘innocent’ of the outside or of being an outsider. Understandings of Irish traditional music from beyond the worlds of rural Ireland, American recordings and London pubs are the focus of the next chapter.
CHAPTER FOUR
MUSICAL COMMUNITIES:
IDENTIFYING (WITH) IRISH MUSIC IN AUSTRALIA
A diminutive old man pumps out a reel on his button accordion. Seated on a garden bench placed against a caravan, he looks beyond the camera, his mouth fixed in a half-smile. Beside him Lucky Oceans, a man several decades his junior and the presenter of a daily ‘world music’ program on national radio, strums a dobro. After ten seconds, Lucky smiles broadly at the camera and introduces this television documentary on Irish music in Australia (The Planet 2001) by announcing: ‘I’m sitting with Billy Moran in his suburban Melbourne garden. The man is a master, a living treasure of Irish music in Australia!’ Billy’s expression does not change; he keeps playing, but the scene changes before his tune comes to an end. Forty seconds.
If Billy Moran is a master and a living treasure, why does Lucky Oceans not speak directly to him or let him speak for himself? Why does he mispronounce Billy’s surname? And why picture him with the old caravan, as if he lived there, instead of in his house?1 Why does Lucky strum chords as if he ‘knows’ Billy’s music, talk over
his playing, and cut him off mid-tune?
In the next scene, two Australians in their early twenties, ‘Matthew’ and ‘Simon’,2 play a jig together on fiddle and flute, then respond to Lucky
Oceans’ questions about Irish dance tune-types. They play a reel, this time joined by the other members of their band on mandola and guitar. When they finish the tune, Matthew explains that this ‘nice blend’ of instruments gives the music its ‘driving sound’.
If Billy Moran is a master of Irish music, why are these young Australians the experts and why do we hear more of their playing than of his?
This chapter attempts to find answers to the questions posed above by examining musical and social interactions among musicians in Melbourne’s Irish traditional music scene3 in which I have participated for over twenty-five years. Where the
1 There is a strong association between caravans and Travellers, Ireland’s itinerant underclass.
2 The names of participants have been changed, the pseudonym appearing in quotation marks the first time it is used. Billy Moran has kindly given permission to use his name. 3 I adopt the term ‘scene’ because it is local usage — ‘the folk scene’, ‘the Irish scene’, ‘the Irish music scene’, ‘the trad scene’ — and thus does not set up a barrier between my research collaborators and an academic discourse. Will Straw advocates using the term ‘scene’
previous chapter examined ways in which Irish musicians created individual and collective identifications with Ireland through their playing, this chapter explores the social experience of playing in Irish traditional music sessions4 in Melbourne,
Australia, where a struggle for dominance is played out according to conflicting notions of Irishness and differing positions in relation to other social categories including gender and class. It argues that young Australian musicians experience Irishness as a citational ethnicity, depoliticized and commodified. Older Australian musicians, on the other hand, experience Irishness as relating to Irish musicians, but only partially to their music, while musicians from Ireland bring to the session their personal historical sense of nationality and ethnicity. Australian music industry authority Lucky Oceans constructs Irishness as transportable and translatable within a celebratory discourse that commodifies Irish ethnicity and includes Irish traditional music as one among a series of ‘world’ musics circulating in a global field of cultural production.5
In this chapter I analyze the ways in which individual musicians invest their cultural capital in a struggle for both symbolic power, or authority, and economic power. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital as the accumulated cultural knowledge, skills and dispositions that secure social status is useful for analyzing this musical scene, in which cultural capital is a set of knowledge and skills, not only musical but also social. Its unequal distribution is one aspect of the struggle for dominance, but
because of its neutrality in indicating a collective identity that is neither oppositional, nor disruptive, nor entirely manipulated by the music industry. ‘Scene’ also avoids the
normative value and implied homogeneity of the term ‘community’ (Straw 1991). I do not begin with this assumption, for the scene I examine also includes aspects of what Howard Becker called a ‘world’ (in his research, the art world) to convey the interrelatedness of the visual artist with promoters, entrepreneurs, collectors and others (Becker 1982). Ruth Finnegan follows Becker in using the term ‘musical worlds’ for the various musical networks she examines in The Hidden Musicians, a study of music-making in an English town (Finnegan 1989: 32). Like Finnegan, my focus is primarily on musical production among musicians who construct collective identities within a set of discourses and values. I choose not to use the term ‘musical world’, however, in order to distinguish this particular
network of real, imagined and virtual relationships from that of ‘world music’ and ‘Irish music world’, which may imply that each ‘world of music’ is essentially different from but equivalent to any other and that all are universally translatable into any local context. This, indeed, appears to be the implication in the earlier use of ‘world music’ as an alternative to ‘ethnomusicology’ in American textbooks (for example, see Titon 1984). 4 Colin ‘Hammy’ Hamilton defines the session as a ‘loose association of musicians who meet, generally, but not always, in a pub to play an unpredetermined selection, mainly of dance music, but sometimes with solo pieces such as slow airs or songs. There will be one or more “core” musicians, and others who are less regular.’ (Hamilton 1999: 345). The genesis of the session in England and Ireland is discussed in Chapter Three.
5 Bourdieu’s concept of the field as a relatively autonomous but dynamic network of power relations includes the field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1993) that competes with other fields such as those of commerce, politics and education. The Irish music scene in Melbourne can be thought of as one of an almost infinite number of lesser cultural fields.
equally important is the difference in value that each age cohort of musicians assigns to the various forms of cultural capital.
As outlined in Chapter One, Bourdieu has identified three forms of cultural capital: embodied (for example, the ability to make aesthetic judgements); objectified
(specialized skills such as the ability to play a musical instrument); and
institutionalized (as in the standardized knowledge acquired through formal music education) (Bourdieu 1986). In the Melbourne Irish music scene, the most effective forms of knowledge are acquired outside institutional settings, and, as I argue below, demonstrate a structural correspondence, not with class (as Bourdieu’s research indicates), but with ethnicity. Young Australian musicians bring to the session an institutionalized cultural capital that the Irish musicians do not possess, while devaluing the embodied cultural capital that has accumulated as the Irish musicians’ musical style (a generative form of taste, or aesthetic). This situation changes over time, however, as the young musicians begin to ‘unlearn’ what their formal music education has taught them and to recognize and value more highly the Irish musicians’ embodied knowledge.