Launch of Beating Time: The Story of the Irish Bodhrán

Willie Clancy Summer School

Miltown Malbay, Co. Clare, Sunday 6 July 2025

 Words by Nicholas Carolan

This very day last year, when I was launching the third edition of Fintan Vallelly’s encyclopedic Companion to Irish Traditional Music on this very spot, I thought he had outdone himself with the scope and the depth and the magnitude of that achievement. And now here we are just a year later and he’s outdone himself again with this new and very different publication – one which has been many years in preparation. Beating Time: The Story of the Irish Bodhran is a dazzling social and musical and visual history of one of the instruments of Irish traditional music.

Now, we’ve all suffered at the hands of bad, rhythically challenged, socially deaf bodhran players, and I know that some people will be rolling their eyes to heaven at the very idea of calling it a musical instrument. We may even be bad bodhran players – in a moment of madness a few years ago I appeared on the TG4 Television news beating a bodhran and ineptly leading an ensemble of 91 bodhran players on Inisheer in the Aran Islands.

But whatever your experience of the bodhran and whatever you thought about it when you came into this room, I guarantee that you’ll have a changed perspective when you read this book in all its extraordinary detail – or even when you look at the wealth of drawings, paintings and photographs it contains. When you buy the book, at today’s special launch price, the first thing you’ll notice on taking it up is that it’s very heavy. It’s been published by Cork University Press on a high-quality gloss paper which has enabled very clear and crisp image reproduction – it’s a de luxe publication.

The first thing you’ll notice on opening it is that it’s a highly illustrated book – there’s hardly a page that doesn’t have some original and fascinating image, and most of them you won’t have seen before. Jacques Nutan and James Fraher are particularly credited for providing illustrations but there’s a wealth of images from many many other sources, Irish and European. The next thing you’ll notice is that it’s a very well designed book. Flute player and graphic designer Martin Gaffney has also outdone himself here and has put his own unique visual stamp on the volume with his creative interweaving of images and words.

But the core of the publication is of course the text – which is entirely the work of Fintan Vallely. Fintan has been tirelessly researching the topic of the bodhran for many years, he’s taken full advantage of the wonderful range of historical and literary information that digitisation programmes have been uncovering in recent decades, and he’s produced here both a definitive history of this Irish drum, and also an exemplar, a template for writing the social and musical history of the other instruments of Irish traditional music. This volume touches on ancient Greece and Rome, on Italy and the continent of Europe generally, on the United States, and on Ireland in the Middle Ages, but by far the bulk of it concerns Ireland in the last three centuries.

Musical instruments reflect the countries in which they are played, and the bodhran seems to me to reflect three Irelands.

There’s the old immemorial rural Ireland here of poverty and making do and mending. Beginning somewhere in the mists of time as a multi-purpose round shallow agricultural tray which was used for winnowing corn or for holding potatoes on the dinner table or organising skeins of wool, it was also pressed into occasional service as a drum, as a noise maker at seasonal festivals, biddy-boy incursions and wrenboy outings on St Stephen’s Day in certain parts of Ireland, especially in counties Limerick and Kerry. That centuries-old tradition has continued into our own day.

Then there’s the 18th- and 19th-century Ireland which was a generally unwilling part of the developing British Empire and which was thus opened up to international trade and travel. In comes the commercially made tambourine with its metal jingles; in come the pre-Famine touring companies of  blackface minstrels with their tambourines. A new Irish tradition begins of shop-bought and home-made tambourines which were used in music-making across the country even up to our own time, and used of course as a child’s toy. I certainly remember them being played by blackface minstrels in variety concerts in Drogheda in the 1950s.

And finally there’s the bodhran of modern Ireland, a story which begins as late as 1959 and which involves, as you’ll read here, the Kerry dramatists John B. Keane and Bryan McMahon and the innovative Cork musician and composer Seán Ó Riada, and the very important fact that there was some money in the country for the first time since the foundation of the state, thanks partly to my townsman Kenneth Whitaker. All kinds of creative energies were released in Ireland in the 1960s by what was a relative prosperity, and it was then that the bodhran really came into its own as a musical instrument.

In the course of the following decades, new playing techniques and new forms of the instrument evolved, in Ireland and abroad, and its popularity has been such that, thanks especially to Irish soccer fans, it is now to some extent a symbol of Ireland, a more challenging and agressive one than the harp or the uilleann pipes.

The full story of the Irish bodhran drum in all its complexity is to be read and viewed here. It will open your eyes as it’s opened mine. It won’t make you a better bodhran player but it will make you a more informed and enriched one. I recommend it to you, and I congratulate Fintan on yet another important contribution that he’s made to the analytical and historical literature of Irish traditional music.