Beating Time was launched by Kevin Conneff at the National Museum of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin on July 2nd.

The launch was structured to present words and music which illustrated and complemented the book’s breadth and content

Fintan Vallely’s words:

Thank you all for travelling, and coming out this evening, some of you undoubtedly out of a passion for the bodhran. But most of you perhaps out of interest in or curiosity about an instrument which even though it has had quite a phenomenal rise over the last three quarters of a century, not much has been known about it. This book, yes, is a history of a uniquely Irish drum, but not one which can be shown to have any deep tradition in Ireland. Rather it has evolved in a short time to create a totally new dimension to the music – a percussion form and practice that empathises with the acoustic and decorative detail and aesthetics of traditional music-making.

It’s an honour and privilege to be launching in such a magnificient venue as the National Museum – reminiscent of Greek/Roman architecture, amid priceless gold, bronze and stone. For this is home to all the treasures and artefacts that since as far back as 4000 years ago have shaped who we are and how we behave.
Unlike the gruesome ’bog body’ Clonycavan Man however — he who is installed in a glass case behind us — no ‘bog bodhrans’ have been discovered to date. But, from writings, manuscript and folklore we do know that the original bodhran was a vital, fundamental farming and household utensil, and would have been familiar to such a person, for:

Turn the bodhran on its side — you have a dish, tray or container that was commonplace in all agriculture-based settlements, and also was a winnowing device for tossing grain in the air to remove chaff; make holes in it and you have a sieve, essential for processing grain after grinding.

The display in this room also has the original bodhran and a skin slieve, items from the National Museum’s unique collection of sixty or so such objects.

These device bodhrans thrived in a climate of relative poverty. Simply made, they were vital to living in a subsistence economy, they lasted as long as prosperity didn’t intrude, well into the age of photography. Indeed, over on the far side of Leinster House here, in the National Library, there are photos on file of sieves or bodhrans being sold at a market in Waterford city around 1900, and there are photos too of it being used in more modern time, in winnowing in Co. Down and Donegal well into the 1900s.

But it should also be said that if you turn a bodhran on its side you have a kind of drum. And indeed there are accounts from the 1800s of bodhrans being improvised as drums in this way. But whether or not this was done in ancient times can only be speculated: there isn’t a word written about an indigenous Irish drum in manuscripts, for the music of this island has been historically reported as centred on melody: strings a thousand years ago in the form of the tiompán, the guitar-like, lyre ancestor of the fiddle, and then the harp; later we had reeds and pipes.

There ARE of course remarkable instruments of music on display just behind you in this building in plenty – the Co. Offaly Dowras hoard with eleven bronze horns, other horns from Armagh, Kerry and Antrim, These are from the millennium before Christ, and appear to be instruments of authority. And, significantly, these are mentioned in manuscript accounts — as are the harp, tiompán and harpers, all of which are cited in manuscripts or seen in drawings, even though there are no relics of such ancient instruments made of wood, skin, or gut.

But for an Irish drum, however, there is no evidence: no words, folklore or objects: no indication of an ancient drumming culture.

Yet we can of course speculate that drums were there, and may just not have been considered of sufficient status to be mentioned in the various annals,

The first actual drums to be documented in Ireland appear in the late 1500s — but they are with the English military. And indeed the English themselves had borrowed the concept from the Saracens, the Turks, during the Christian Crusades in the Middle East a few centuries earlier.

What has become very clear, however, with the opening of digital access to nineteenth century presses, is that we do have lots of evidence of the introduction of the tambourine to Ireland (the tambourine is like a bodhran with jingles attached). And this instrument was brought in with staged, commercial music in the 1700s, rising to a peak in the later 1800s with the touring from America of the so called ‘Black and white minstrels’. The ‘minstrels’ main instruments were tambourine, bones, banjo — as well as fiddle or early accordion or concertina.

A politically-repulsive concept indeed, but those performers were the beginnings of one-audience, ‘popular’ music. They toured world wide, coming to Ireland for nearly sixty years; in the earlier days many of them were themselves first or second generation Irish. And in this country they inspired local and parish copycat minstrel troupes —everywhere — all of which are reported in the late 1800s press — and which seem most likely to have influenced the rural making of tambourine copies. That tambourine came to be used seasonally on the Wren each December, and was made nationally visible in 1959 by its use in John B Keane’s play Sive. It was subsequently re-named, modified and then heralded as ‘bodhrán’ by Seán Ó Riada in his group Ceoltóirí Chualann, promoted by him in his radio shows, and popularised by CCÉ and the fleadh.

So what this book suggests is that today’s bodhran is probably not our oldest instrument, but one of the newest: It is the Irish version of the tambourine, a tambourine without jingles that has been dubbed with the name of a related rural ancestor.

And hopefully this study will encourage a rational stream of thinking on a drum which over the few decades that we have known it, we have been content to mythicise, romanticise, imagine or fabricate its history.

I owe a lot to the wisdom and support of the Arts council and its Deis scheme for financing parts of this project. But primarily Cork university Press must be thanked for undertaking such a demanding publication. I must acknowledge too the superb collaborative design input of Martin Gaffney, and the wonderful portraits and music shots by Jacques Nutan. I also thank James Fraher for use of images from his book with Gregory Daly on Connacht fiddles (In Nearly Every House), and in particular for his exceptional images of the iconic bodhran maker Charlie Byrne. For the sourcing of the book’s other few hundred images, I am grateful to many, including the Kennelly archive, Colm Keating, CCÉ, and The Department of Irish Folklore at UCD.

The Irish Newspapers Archive for me opened the curtains on the hidden years of the tambourine in Ireland, and for the actual bodhran data in earlier periods I must thank Dúchas, the national heritage service and its Schools’ Collection of folklore, UCD also, The National Library, the Trinity College Manuscripts Department, the Royal Irish Academy, the ITMA, and UCC Traditional music archive. And among the scores of sources and provocative influencers in these pages there have been many, many knowledgable figures, all of whom are credited in the book.

 

It must be said that this study could not have happened without the the pioneering research of folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair in the 1940s, of Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin in the seventies, Janet McCrickard in the eighties, — and Svend Kjeldsen in the 2000s, he who has been a tremendous psychological ally for generosity in sharing access to his meticulous research.
I am particularly grateful to Barra Ó Seaghdha for early reading and guidance, to Barbara O’Connor, and Svend Kjeldsen too, for critical reading, to Terry Moylan, Peter Browne and Nicholas Carolan for invaluable refernces and reading. To Liam Ó Bharáin we all owe considerable gratitude for his unique, perceptive following up of Rosa Anglica and the Poole Glossary,
And on the more prosaic side I have to thank Páiric McNeela for his wisdom and skills in trying out the ancient bodhrán recipes, Malachy Kearns for skins, Seamus O’Kane for making the Maclise tambourine copy.

Thanks finally to Clodagh Doyle and the National Museum for the use of this wonderful venue: it is like being in a splendid Cathedral. What a mark of distinction for an instrument that in just a few decades has risen from invisibility, through suspicion and scorn to be now emblematically portrayed on our passports!

In the end, however, my deepest thanks are to my bean céile Evelyn Conlon without whose patience and advisory tolerance this whole symphony of historic words and images could never have got beyond the first beat. May she never again have to hear the B word.

*Pictures by Trevor Conlon Grant

Top:Kevin Conneff launching

Mid: Cathy Jordan speaks and sings; Fear an Tí Cathal Goan is on the right.

Mid: Colm Murphy plays to the music of Pádraic MacMathúna

Bottom: author, Fintan Vallely playing flute along with the book’s designer Martin Gaffney, with the launcher Kevin Conneff on bodhrán

 

ENDS