El suero de leche

The aim of the late-nineteenth-century literary revival, of which the poet William Butler Yeats was the central figure, was one of ‘de-Anglicization’, the building of a national tradition and literature in the English language (now the main language spoken in Ireland) that drew from Celtic mythology and Gaelic legends rather than historical figures, and imitated the Gaelicized English spoken in the West of Ireland. The main exponents were again Anglo–Irish (who once more assumed that they, as the ruling class, would eventually lead an independent Ireland), along with members of the emerging urban Catholic middle class.

17 _{This excluded farm labourers, a large proportion of whom had died or emigrated as a} result of the Famine. Land reforms in the second half of the nineteenth century resulted in an increase in the number of landowners, and a consequent decrease in the number of landless labourers (Coohill 2000).

18 _{These include Patrick Weston Joyce’s Ancient Irish Music (1873); James Goodman’s Tunes}

of the Munster Pipers (1860s) (published in an edition by Hugh Shields in Dublin in 1998), and unpublished collections by William Forde (1840s) and Stephen Grier (1880s). Early collections of dance tunes include those by Walker Jackson (1724), John and William Neale (1726), and Patrick O’Farrell (1804–10) (Vallely 1999; Breathnach 1977).

Members of this literary revival drew on the discourse of Celticism promulgated through the work of English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, whose approach assumed a ‘positional superiority’ (Cairns and Richards 1988: 48; Arnold 1973; Said 1978: 7) in proclaiming the Celt a loser in war and politics who possessed to a fault the ‘feminine’ qualities of emotionalism, sensuality, aestheticism and

spirituality (a dichotomy analogous to the continued perception of Irish music as both spirited and plaintive). This characterization of the native Irish as Other to the Teutonic English — wild, untamed and outside modernity — implicitly boosted the case for an Anglo–Irish leadership.

In 1893 Douglas Hyde founded Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League) in Dublin, with a mission to revive the Irish (Gaelic) language, which Hyde saw as ‘the life-line of that ancient Gaelic civilization that alone justified Irish claims to a historic nationality’ (Hutchinson 1987: 1). With widespread membership in cities and rural towns throughout Ireland, the League’s activities attracted those with a more

political agenda, who eventually took over the leadership and used the organization to promote political independence. The Gaelic League’s de-Anglicization program included building a more self-sufficient Irish economy and substituting Irish for English cultural forms. This transformation could not, however, achieve a

translation between cultures. When music and dancing competitions were initiated in 1897, tension arose between the continuing rural tradition of sean-nós singing and the bel canto style of the urban middle class (Vallely 1999) (Musical examples 4 and 519_{). Music competitions favoured the instruments and repertoire that had been}

adopted in the drawing rooms of Dublin, especially the uilleann pipes played by ‘gentleman pipers’.20 _{Irish music in this context was art music to be judged according}

to virtuosity, stage performance and presentation, rather than qualities valued in its continuing rural practice, such as timbre, melodic and rhythmic variation, and the ‘telling’ of a song.

19 _{The difference between these styles is evident in these recordings of the same song, ‘Cáit} Ní Dhuibhir’ (Kate O’Dwyer) performed in sean-nós style (‘old-style’) by Nioclás Tóibín (1964) and in bel canto style by Julie Mulvihill (1963).

20 _{These gentlemen rate as a separate category in O’Neill’s Irish Minstrels and Musicians} (1987), where he gives biographical summaries of thirteen, indicating an engagement with Irish music among the upper and middle classes dating back to the late-eighteenth

century. See also Vallely 1999: 151. The popularity among ‘gentlemen’ may account for the development of the pipes in the nineteenth century to a complex (and expensive)

instrument capable of producing harmonic accompaniment (an innovation indicating its proponents’ adoption of an art-music aesthetic).

One of the League’s lasting interventions was in promoting a form of popular social dancing that was viewed as uniquely Irish. The League’s dancing commission denounced as ‘foreign’ the most popular social dances of the day — quadrille sets — in favour of ‘ancient’ figure-dances newly choreographed for the urban ballroom (Vallely 1999).21 _{These later became known as ceili dances through their}

performance at Gaelic League social nights or ‘ceilis’ (a term borrowed from Scottish revivalists). Meanwhile, in many rural areas, people continued to dance ‘the sets’.22

In a parallel move, the Gaelic Athletics Association (GAA) reinvented participatory rural sports as spectator sports suited to an emerging consumer society and

promoted the restoration of Irish language and music, within an ideology of political, but non-violent, nationalism (Connolly 1997).23

Why did Ireland, unlike other new European nations, fail to fashion a national art music from its ‘folk music’? Musicologist Harry White argues that cultural

nationalists defined ‘Irishness’ as Gaelic and Catholic. The identification of art music with the Protestant Ascendancy, he claims, led to its rejection as a possible vehicle for cultural nationalist sentiment. ‘Irish music’, as a result, is synonymous with Ireland’s ‘ethnic’ music (White 1998a; 1998b; 2001). This argument, however, overlooks the fact that the Protestant Ascendancy had been intimately involved with cultural nationalist movements in Ireland, especially the literary revival of the 1890s, but had sought cultural models in pre-Reformation Ireland, thus avoiding any association between Irishness and Catholicism. In addition, following the Act of Union that had dissolved the Irish parliament and brought about the subsequent decline of Dublin as a centre of European bourgeois culture, Ireland had fewer resources (audiences, music education, skilled musicians) to support Irish composers of art music.

While collectors from Bunting onwards refer to the emotional power of Irish music to express essential characteristics of Irish people across the ages, there are problems with such reductionism. First, there is disagreement about what exactly the music

21 _{As discussed in the next chapter, this was one of the few instances of the ‘invention of} tradition’ as defined by Hobsbawm and Ranger in their The Invention of Tradition (1983) although, in a more general sense, tradition is always invented, as it only becomes known

as tradition after it has been viewed at a distance in time or space, its value becoming symbolic rather than solely functional.

22 _{Ironically, set-dancing has experienced a vigorous revival in Ireland since the early} 1980s and is now widely regarded as more ‘authentic’ than ceili dancing.

23 _{Both the Gaelic League and the GAA (founded in 1884) survive in Ireland today. The} GAA organizes local, regional and national competitions in Irish football and hurling, and exerts a conservative, republican political influence.

expresses, as in the perception that Irish music is simultaneously joyful and melancholy. Secondly, the notion that the urban middle class could become more Irish by performing Irish music suggests that Irishness, rather than being an essential quality shared by all those who had been ‘absorbed’ into Irish culture, was

something that could be acquired, with the further implication that people could possess Irishness to differing degrees.

Section 2.3 ended with the redefinition of dance music in Ireland and its admission to an ‘ethnic repertory’ (White 1998a). This process was facilitated by an Irish musician who had emigrated to America, Francis O’Neill (1848–1936), whose work is discussed below.