Does Ireland have its own way of thinking about music? How might it have developed? And could it explain the current dynamism in Irish musical life? Journal Of Music editor Toner Quinn explores these questions and more.
Four months ago, I published the book What Ireland Can Teach the World About Music, and I realise this title may sound presumptuous, but in reality every country has something to teach the world about music, because every country has its own history and musical traditions. Ireland, therefore, should have something that it can offer the world, particularly given the impact we have had, and even if, publicly, we tend not to talk too much about what that might be.
Ireland's relationship with music can be complicated. One of the reasons I started writing about music was because of the various ways we use the art form in Ireland – politically in order to make a statement, economically to sell the country, and socially for big occasions. I don’t think it should all go unquestioned.
The truth is that Irish music is a powerful symbolic force and there are historical reasons for this. When so many other forms of expression were closed to us, articulating ourselves through music took on a deeper significance. Politically we were disenfranchised, religiously we were penalised, and linguistically – the very words coming out of our mouths – we were repressed. Music absorbed some of that cultural pressure; perhaps it absorbed a lot of it.
There are significant repercussions for Irish music as a result. In our public conversation today, music is often completely overwhelmed by the political discussions around it, such as whether or not we should be in the Eurovision because of Israel’s involvement, why Irish bands boycotted the SXSW festival in Texas in March, or what broadcasting direction RTÉ 2FM should take. I write and speak about these issues too – they are important – but it often seems that these conversations are our only public discussions around music. Irish music rarely becomes part of the national discourse unless there is a controversy around it. I think it is important that we start talking more about what is happening within the music and rebalance the conversation.
Inside Irish music
Today, we have something quite remarkable: a multi-faceted contemporary musical life across all genres but with an incredibly strong, vibrant and historically continuous folk music right at the heart of it all. From hip-hop to contemporary composition, artists draw on this tradition and are inspired by it, just as traditional musicians move in and out of genres all the time, while still holding on to a robust core tradition of solo performance.
This music is dance music, and at the time that it emerged in Irish history, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, dance was one of the main social activities for Irish people.
The question we have to ask, however, is how did we get here? We have a general idea of the historical reasons, but they would not be enough on their own to produce the vibrancy we are witness to. I think that there is something else at work.
I want to suggest that, along with the repertoire of traditional music and song that has been handed down to us, we have also developed a way of thinking about music, and that this way of thinking is more responsible for the dynamism of Irish music than any symbolic value it may have. I think we could even call it a musical philosophy, but because we don’t talk about it in any in-depth way, or communicate it to the wider public, it is being thinned out all the time. This way of thinking is most evident in Irish traditional music – and you will see it come alive at festivals throughout Ireland this summer – but it also spills out all the time into other aspects of our musical life.
Among the everyday
A key characteristic of this traditional music thinking is the value that we put on sheer spontaneity in Irish traditional music – raw, spontaneous performance in community settings, literally among people in the everyday of life. It’s not uncommon in traditional music sessions for musicians to play with people they have never played with before, and may never even have met before, for hours on end, with hardly a plan about what they are going to play, and regardless of whether there is an audience or not. In this way of thinking, music is something that can be played anywhere, anytime, with anyone, and in almost any environment – and it spills out into society in different ways. A recent example is the group of Cavan teenagers who last November started playing on a delayed Aer Lingus flight from Frankfurt. The social media posts show a vibrant session with accomplished musicianship and a positive response from passengers on the flight.
However, when the footage began to spread online, the response was mixed. The session was breaking the rules of modern public decorum. The Irish media picked up on it, there was a mocking article in the Irish Times, and Newstalk radio asked the concertina player Edel Fox to come on air to explain. She pointed out that it is not that uncommon for traditional music to have this spontaneous element and made the case for taking pride in it.
We could also ask, however, what kind of thinking informs this spontaneity, and how did it come about? What have these Cavan teenagers absorbed through Irish traditional music that tells them this is a natural part of the art form? The Cavan plane session isn’t an isolated incident. There are videos online of Irish musicians playing in all sorts of environments – Daoirí Farrell starting a sing-song in an airport (a video that has over 29 million views), the late Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and Liam O’Flynn playing tunes on the whistle on a plane with members of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland (including a teenage Mairéad Hickey, the renowned classical music violinist), as well as plenty of other footage of Irish musicians on planes, trains, boats, the Tube in London, on streets, and of course in pubs.
These scenes could be dismissed as just a little bit of fun, but this kind of spontaneity is everywhere in traditional music. There is, of course, footage online of people from other countries playing in public places, but not to the same extent. Spontaneity – embracing the moment – seems to be a key value in Irish music.
Music of the displaced But why is this? Firstly, we could note that this art form emerged as an outdoor music, played by fiddlers and pipers at fairs, dances and markets, and the music had to be robust enough to adapt. We could also remember that this is the music of a displaced people. The Irish were a displaced population; we were forced to leave our land – both within the country through waves of colonisation, pushing us from east to west and all other directions, and of course expelled abroad too. We had to constantly adapt, accept the environments we found ourselves in, and find the potential for expression within.
If this is too speculative, then we could also consider that there may be a precedent for this adaptability. This music is dance music, and at the time that it emerged in Irish history, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, dance was one of the main social activities for Irish people. When one reads about this time, for example, in Mary Friel’s Dancing as a social pastime in the south-east of Ireland, 1800–1897, it’s clear that this very same kind of spontaneity was part of the culture.
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Watch, via RTÉ Archives: Dancing at the crossroads in Dunleer, Co. Louth
The image of Irish dance that has come down to us (and I mean long before Riverdance) is the Irish 'dancing at the crossroads’ – but that was only a part of it. The Irish danced everywhere.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, dance was part of the farming and religious calendar in rural Ireland and integral to social occasions. Travellers to Ireland often commented on this: people danced at cattle fairs, market days, hurling matches, horse races, bonfire evenings, weddings, when the harvest was completed, after mass on Sunday, and even during rests when working on the bog – at lunch they would find a grassy patch called the móinín and organise a dance. If there were no instruments one or two might lilt the tunes.
They would also dance on village greens, in barns with the dancing master when he would visit, at religious celebrations, in bars and síbíns, and at crossroads. The reason they chose crossroads was, in part, because they were meeting points at the edge of parishes so that if a priest came along they could move to the next parish. The clergy were constantly discouraging this music, and again this encouraged our adaptable approach.
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Watch, via RTÉ Archives: A Galway step dancing competition, circa 1979
Even on ‘coffin ships’ during the Famine, dance was present. Every Irish child learns about the coffin ships at school, boats full of death, disease and misery that carried Irish people to America and Canada away from the Famine. But there is also documentation of young people organising dances up on deck while terribly sad situations were taking place below, for example, in Robert Whyte’s 1847 Famine Ship Diary. The deck was a perfect place for a dance because of the space and the sound it would make. Similarly, in the early 1800s in Ireland, Irish people would often take the cottage door off its hinges and put it on the ground to dance on, to obtain the battering sound.
As Friel writes, ‘Dancing was an activity that could happen at anytime, anywhere, in the life of the lower classes. No ballroom was required. A musician was a bonus but one could dance to whistling, singing or lilting if the need arose … music could move the Irish peasantry to dance spontaneously wherever they could find a space’.
It seems, therefore, that this spontaneity was part of our culture of dance when this music emerged. Is it somehow now encoded in our culture? However it arose, it is a clear characteristic today. I think that if there had been a broader appreciation of this facet when the Cavan plane session broke out – that there may in fact be deep cultural reasons for this spontaneity through displacement and our history – we would have had quite a different public conversation. Instead of the negative reaction, the public would have said, ‘Ah yes, that spontaneity is Irish music’, and know the reasons why.
This is an edited extract of a lecture given at Farmleigh House, Dublin, on 11 May 2024, as part of the OPW's cultural programme. To read the full text, see here. Toner Quinn's new book, What Ireland Can Teach the World About Music, is available here.
