Protocolos de clase

During the nineteenth century, two waves of cultural revival and political nationalist movements saw Irish music employed in the service of patriotic texts. An early example was Thomas Moore’s harvesting of airs from Bunting’s 1796 collection for his sentimental verses in Irish Melodies, published between 1808 and 1834 and ‘deplored’ by Bunting for violating the airs’ melodic integrity (Bunting c1969: 5). Moore (1779–1852) was one of the few Catholic students at Trinity College, Dublin, where he associated with supporters of the failed 1798 rebellion (Vallely 1999). His most popular song lyrics, although cushioned in sentimentality, evince a deep (if pessimistic) sympathy for that cause: they weep and sigh over Ireland’s hopeless suffering, dream of past glories and mourn their loss. Music is a balm to assuage grief and to keep alive in the ‘death-like moan’ of the harp a memory of ‘noble pride, now turn’d to shame, And hopes for ever gone’.13 _{Hardly fighting words.}

A later generation of cultural nationalists mobilized this nostalgic view of Ireland’s lost glories — a view that continues to circulate due to the lasting popularity of Moore’s songs among the English-speaking middle classes. Bunting’s further objections to Moore’s co-option of Gaelic airs indicate the difference between their projects:

13 _{The song quoted is ‘Sing, Sweet Harp’. The selection of Moore’s work used is from Charles} Villiers Stanford and Geoffrey Shaw (eds) (1958)The New National Song Book. London: Boosey & Hawke. In his Preface to the original (1905) edition, Stanford writes that this collection of ‘British Folk-music’ draws on ‘two distinct racial types’, namely the ‘Keltic’ and the English (1958: iv), a clear example of the discourse of Celticism, discussed below.

The world have been too apt to suppose our music of a highly plaintive and melancholy character, and that it partook of our National feeling at the state of our country in a political view, and that three parts out of four of our tunes were of this complaining nature. Now there never was anything more erroneous than this idea. (from a draft of the preface to Bunting’s 1840 collection, cited in White 1998a: 43)

Although, as argued above, Bunting had transformed Gaelic music in his published collections, he disapproved of his contemporaries’ ‘drawling dead, doleful and die- away manner’ of performing the songs, comparing it with the ‘spirited, animated and highly lively style’ of the Belfast festival harpers, ‘which certainly and in truth accords more with the natural character of the Irish’ (White 1998a: 43). In Moore’s lyrics and his adaptations of his musical sources, the imputed national character was transformed from spirited to plaintive. His sweet and melancholy song became the expression par excellence of a nostalgic view of Irish history.14

A second period of revival from the 1830s, again mobilized by Protestant patriots seeking an image of an ancient and uniquely Irish culture that they might

comfortably identify with, looked to the period of medieval monastic settlements, which had achieved a highpoint of spiritual, artistic and social cohesion. This change in orientation, at a time of growing political agitation amongst the Catholic Irish, focused attention on a pre-Reformation golden age untroubled by sectarian difference (Hutchinson 1987: 75). The ‘ancient’ music was again employed as a potent emblem of Irish identity.

The central figure in this movement, George Petrie (1790–1866), was an antiquarian scholar who in 1855 published a collection of musical transcriptions ‘to aid in the preservation of remains so honourable to the character of my country’ (1967: x). Unlike Bunting, Petrie acknowledged that a melody might exist in variant forms, attributing this to the dilution of an original ‘pure’ form (in contrast to current understandings of orally transmitted music as continually changing). Petrie, like the intellectuals driving other European cultural nationalist movements, believed the conduit for these honourable ‘remains’ was the peasantry: the tenant farmers and agricultural labourers whose deaths in the mid-century famine years and loss

through emigration accounted for a twenty per cent depletion in their number during the decade from 1841. This traumatic event increased the sense of urgency that Petrie, in common with other revivalists, derived from his understanding of the past

14 _{The complexity of the concept of nostalgia and its implications for Irish music and} identity are discussed in Chapter Seven.

as a lost golden age whose surviving artefacts and practices were on the point of vanishing. This indicates a conception of culture as static, rather than as a process that is continuously revised and continually reinterpreted according to

contemporary priorities.15

Both Bunting and Petrie published the oldest music they could find, resulting in a very small proportion of dance tunes in their collections.16 _{Yet the dance craze that}

swept Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century had enthusiastic

participation among the Irish peasantry, as English geographer Arthur Young noted in 1780:

Dancing is very general among the poor people, almost universal in every cabin. Dancing masters of their own rank travel through the country from cabin to cabin, with a piper or blind fiddler; and the pay is sixpence a quarter. (Young cited in Ó hAllmhuráin 1998: 46–7)

The dancing masters taught mainly solo dances of their own invention to young people who performed them at outdoor venues in a spirit of athletic competition and courtship. The dances were in jig time until late in the century, when Scottish reels and English hornpipes began to circulate widely. The dancing masters also popularized group dances like the minuet and stimulated the early nineteenth- century passion for set-dancing (quadrille sets adapted to local steps, figures and music) that had spread from France and England (Ó hAllmurháin 1998; Breathnach 1977; Hall, R. 1995; Vallely 1999). The collectors’ selectivity reflects their aim to establish a noble lineage of art music, identifying with Gaelic aristocratic audiences of former times rather than with contemporary musicians or those for whom they performed. In this, Irish cultural nationalists differed from their counterparts in other European countries.

In the 1870s, popular musical practices in Ireland changed dramatically. Musicians in the rural Ireland of the early-nineteenth century had been artisans, not amateurs. They had accompanied itinerant dancing masters, provided music within one district, or travelled opportunistically to ‘winter out’ with well-off farmers for whom they played music for dancing and performed Gaelic airs for listening (Hall, R. 1995). The social reconstruction and land reforms that followed the Famine

15 _{This anxiety is evident among twentieth-century folk revivalists and imbues the} research ethic of researchers in the fields of folklore, ethnomusicology and anthropology. 16 _{Breathnach claims that ‘Bunting’s three volumes did not contain a dozen dance tunes,} and the complete Petrie collection [of almost 1600 items] less than 300’ (Breathnach 1977: 117).

brought improved conditions for those who owned or could buy land, with changes in farming practices and bigger holdings, better incomes, and larger houses.17 _{When a}

reformed and puritanical Catholic Church moved to eradicate outdoor dancing, most of the dancing masters lost their livelihoods, dancing moved inside and dance movements were adapted to the domestic setting. Around the same time, the increasing availability of affordable instruments (melodeons, concertinas, whistles, fiddles) saw amateur music-making flourish in rural Ireland. Repertoires changed and the number of reels and hornpipes expanded in what musicologist Reg Hall (1999) claims was the ‘heyday’ of Irish traditional dance music.

Published collections of Irish music in the late-nineteenth century included an increasing proportion of reels, jigs, marches and hornpipes collected from dance musicians, in addition to the older airs and harp tunes.18 _{Yet they still bore titles}

such as The Ancient Music of Ireland, consolidating the naturalization of dance music (including English hornpipes and Scottish reels) into a national musical canon. In this way, popular musical practice in Ireland came to be regarded as both ancient and Irish, an example of the principle of ‘absorption’ proposed by D.P. Moran in The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Moran 1905) as part of an increasingly politicized movement to purge Irish cultural life of indigestible English elements.