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Féile John McGrath, Westport, Co. Mayo – Fact, fashion or fetters?

Paper for Féile John McGrath, May 2012

 Fact, fashion or fetters?

Issues of perception, passion and patriotism raised in the compilation of The Companion to Irish Traditional Music.

In 1999 a large number of the diverse strands that make up Irish traditional music were brought together in The Companion to Irish Traditional Music. Effectively an encyclopedia, its 478 pages covered music, song and dance, tunes, style and lyrics, people, practices and transmission. It filled a need in the Irish education system which was by that time teaching the music at university levels. The book sold some 5000 copies over five years, creating demand for a second edition. Now published, at 900 pages this is twice the size of its predecessor. That can be interpreted as a response to a broadening of its field of reference, a loosening of genre boundaries in music in Ireland and of course expansion of interest in the music, academically as well as internationally. The book is not a memorial-style  ‘Digital Tír na Óg’ for Irish Traditional music data however. On the contrary, it is an affirmative document of an active canon. Questions are raised by the fact of the book’s compilation and by its use in education. Will the book make it easier to teach the music in schools, and will it expand music-lover’s knowledge usefully? Is it of confidence value to musicians? Does inclusion or non inclusion of items indicate greater or lesser importance? Might it lead to music performance becoming prescriptive? Might blowing away many of the mysteries leave the music less enchanting? Does the internationalization it illustrates devalue the music’s core Irishness? These and other such points are explored by Fintan Vallely in a discourse on how the book took shape between 2008 and 2011.

Start: 25 May, 2012
End: 26 May, 2012
Venue: Féile John McGrath
Address:
 Westport, Mayo, Iran (Islamic Republic Of)

Craiceann – Inniseer Bodhrán Festival

Paper to be given at the 2012 Craiceann summer school on Inniseer island, off Co. Galway.
‘Hunting for borr- án – shaking a stick at the origin myths of the Irish drum’
The paper challenges myth, imagination and wishful thinking in the currently accepted history of that unique Irish percussion, the ’bodhrán’. It explores the perceptions of Irish drum culture, looks scientifically at the evidence of the drum’s antecedents,  and questions the meaning of the word ‘bodhrán’ itself. The interim conclusions of this work in progress are that the famous Irish drum has no ancient artistic past: it was always just a tambourine. The Irish device, from which the word ‘bodhrán’ comes, was an agricultural and domestic tray or container – even a sieve. Indeed, the history of the bodhrán that we have is riddled with holes. Yet the bodhrán IS around, and being brilliantly played, as solid an art and presence as the harp or the pipes, and by now emblematic of Irishness. But we borrowed the rhythms from dancers’ feet, the device itself from either black and white minstrels or the Salvation Army, and synthesized the modern playing style from the sounds of Ulster Lambeggers, Indian tabla tippers and Scottish pipe-band snare drummers.
Start: 25 June, 2012
End: 25 June, 2012
Venue: Craiceann Festival
Address:
 Inis Íar island, Co. Galway, Ireland

North Atlantic Fiddle Organisation Convention 2012

Fintan Vallely is the academic convenor of the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention’s biennial conference in late June, 2012. This is a unique conference set in a week of exceptional music performances in Derry city and Co. Donegal which addresses a challenging issue for Traditional musics in the 21st century – the shift of emphasis from music for dancing to music for listening. The conference continues the train of thinking begun at the Crosbhealach an Cheoil conferences in 1996 and 2003.

NAFCo’s guest speaker will be Neil Rosenberg, Professor Emeritus, Department of Folklore,Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is editor of the seminal 1993 book Transforming Tradition (the major analysis of Traditional musics revivals) and of key works on Bluegrass music

Theme of the conference: Traditional music has moved from a primary purpose of servicing dance, to expressing artistic preference. This is particularly so for the fiddle, one of the most versatile, accessible and universal of acoustic instruments. The conference will explore its current popularity in North Atlantic musics in terms of the shift of folk cultures’ interest from social process to aesthetic product. Now predominantly a free-standing performance genre, at its outer fringes traditional melody-making now shades into other forms – jazz, contemporary classical, rock and pop – and indeed the antithesis of genre, so-called ‘world’ music. Does this bring Alan Lomax’s ‘cultural grey-out’ closer to reality? Might traditional fiddling disappear in a cloud of intermeshed idioms and clichés expounded with fabulous virtuosity? Could Traditional musics lose their sense of aesthetic just as easily as their once-local meaning in relation to dance? Ó Cos go Cluas broadly addresses the process, product and the potential of this progression in 20 sessions which have 80 papers from all regions of the North Atlantic.

Conference website

Summary of papers

Conference Programme (interactive)


Start: 27 June, 2012
End: 1 July, 2012
Venue: Ulster University
Phone: 028 70123456
Address:
 Northland Road, Derry

Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy

Teaching flute for the week during the summer school.

Start: 7 July, 2012
End: 14 July, 2012
Address:
 Ireland

Catskills Irish Music Week, New York

Teaching flute for the week and launching the Companion mid week

Start: 15 July, 2012
End: 21 July, 2012
Address:
 Ireland

Tocane, France, launch concert for The Companion

Concert presentation for the launch of the Companion in the Perigord region of France. In the church in the village of Tocane St. Apre.

Start: 17 July, 2012
End: 17 July, 2012
Address:
 Ireland

From amateur professional to professional amateur… reflections on the Traditional singing genre

“A Changing Traditional Landscape : The Folklore, Song and Music of Ireland” - symposium in the Princess Grace Library, Monaco, September 2012.

Session title: Connecting the Dots: Identifying Key Changes and Developments in Irish Music, Song and Folklore in Recent Times

Paper:

From amateur professional to professional amateur … reflections on the Traditional singing genre.

Traditional song forms in Ireland have ceased to have popular functional relevance and (as with dance) have been supplanted, via media, by global-style Rock and Pop (much of which in Ireland is of Irish composition). Traditional song as such has by now been set aside by the onetime subalterns, and has itself become subaltern to that which is merely ‘popular’. It is now typically best articulated by aesthetically committed specialists, for many of whom it is a ‘genre’, an artistic life’s pursuit, and for some a profession. The latter, as paid artistes often draw on the ‘the fireside’ to authenticate their studied art, the inverse of the unpaid specialism of céilí-house singers prior to the revival period. This paper explores such crisis questions as thrown up by revival: what is ‘the community’? Are we merely extending the shelf-life of redundant cultural fashions by preserving them in a syrup  of 18th century, Enlightenment philosophy? How can we be certain that it is all – artistically – ‘worth it’?

Start: 27 September, 2012
End: 27 September, 2012
Venue: Princess Grace Library
Phone: +377 93 50 12 25
Address:
 9, rue Princesse Marie-de-Lorraine, Monaco-Ville, Monaco, 98000
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