Via The Journal Of Music: Cork University Press has recently published Beating Time: The Story of the Irish Bodhrán by Fintan Vallely, a major new study of the instrument with portraits of renowned bodhrán players by Jacques Piraprez Nutan. Tristan Rosenstock reviews.
We bodhrán players have a thick skin. It comes with the territory. Every bodhrán player will recall a time when they sat down to join a session, only to encounter a passive-aggressive wall of resistance. Then there are the countless bodhrán player jokes. (In other traditions, banjo and accordion players suffer the same humiliation.) And, of course, Séamus Ennis' often-repeated jab: 'What’s the best way to play the bodhrán? With a penknife.’ Ouch. Bodhrán beating can cause much bleating!
Bodhrán aficionados, however, clung to the idea that ours was an ancient drum. A uniquely indigenous, Irish instrument. Up there with the harp and the uilleann pipes, unlike recent blow-ins such as the fiddle, accordion and flute, which have only been part of Irish music for a couple of hundred years. One need only look inside an Irish passport to see our glorious goatskin adorning its pages. This is surely testament to its venerable vintage?
Beating Time – The Story of the Irish Bodhrán is Fintan Vallely’s latest book and in it he conducts a hugely comprehensive investigation into the background of the bodhrán in Ireland – a ‘cold-case’ file, as he states in the preface. He is guided and informed along the way by four major information areas – objects, images, writings and folklore.
What follows over 17 chapters and 349 pages is an international odyssey exploring drums of various shapes and sizes as found in written, visual and artefact sources. From military drumming to shamanic practices to musical entertainment in countless cultures across many continents, the breadth of his undertaking is astonishing and places our own music in a rich global context.
Tambourine origins
Early in Chapter 1, the author flags that ‘it is taken for granted in the writing that follows that the bodhrán is a form of tambourine, and that the term "bodhrán", though Irish, is originally known to have indicated an agricultural and domestic tool or utensil.’ The tambourine, unsurprisingly given its global reach, features prominently in Chapters 2, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 11, and in pre-Christian times was performed mainly by women marking birth and death. Vallely explains how the tambourine was later masculinised by Christianity, and even outlawed in the sixth century by Pope John III.
Chapter 6 shines light on the tambourine’s introduction to Ireland and we learn that ‘it had a prominent presence on popular-music stages all through the 1800s up until the 1920s’ with touring ‘blackface’ minstrel bands adding to its popularity. According to Vallely, the tambourine ‘had two centuries of a head start on today’s bodhrán’.
Much of the mystery surrounding the bodhrán’s origins are etymological. And a curious musical instrument mentioned in Old Irish sagas – timpán – is the culprit. No evidence exists to elaborate on what it might have been and various lexicographers throughout the ages defined it as both a stringed instrument and as a drum of sorts.
Drawing on his methodological rigour, Vallely systematically eschews the suggestion that the timpán might have been a drum. Beginning with Cambrensis’ twelfth-century Topographia Hibernica, and citing the Annals of the Four Masters/Annála na gCeithre Máistrí among many other sources, we arrive at the conclusion that the timpán was, in fact, not a drum. But with a note of caution, Vallely adds that we can’t be certain that there wasn’t a frame drum in ancient Ireland, but that the timpán was not it.
The term itself is defined differently in dictionaries, as explored thoroughly in Chapters 3 and 4, and up to twenty-five various spellings can be found across a broad range of dictionaries and manuscripts. Bodhar, of course, is the Irish for deaf and a bodharán is included in dictionaries as a deaf person. (Some bodhrán players I have encountered left me with the impression that they were hard of hearing.) Dinneen’s dictionary – the gold standard, and a trove one can easily get lost in – describes it as ’a sieve-like, shallow wooden vessel’.
From sieve to Sive
When visiting the Museum of Country Life in County Mayo a number of years ago I remember being shocked – and crestfallen – to witness early examples of the bodhrán with holes in them. These utensils were a wecht, or a winnowing tool, used to separate the wheat from the chaff. Playing it as an instrument was confined to St Stephen’s Day alone. As Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, who himself contributed enormously to our understanding of the bodhrán, once recalled: ‘All the old lads I talked to around 1970, ’71 told me "you take out the bodhrán any day of the year other than the 26th December and you’re mad. It’s like wearing shamrock on the 1st of June" ’. So what happened?
The tambourine had long been a feature in Wren Boys’ activities, but it was John B. Keane’s masterpiece Sive that introduced it on the national stage in 1959. The sight and sound of live tambourine playing on stage – and also in a recorded adaptation on Raidió Éireann – created a huge sense of excitement around the instrument. Seán Ó Riada was working in the Abbey Theatre at the time and its potency and potential did not go unnoticed. Ó Riada would give his imprimatur to the goatskin, and favoured the term bodhrán. If Keane’s play elevated the drum on stage, ‘Seán Ó Riada became midwife to the bodhrán as accompaniment in music,’ as Vallely notes.
Quotes from celebrated bodhrán players are included throughout the book and Kevin Conneff of The Chieftains adds heft to this conclusion: ‘I heard a bodhrán first on Raidió Éireann, with the song from John B. Keane’s play Sive, and then heard it played by Seán Ó Riada with Ceoltóirí Chualann at his GPO radio recordings.’
This, of course, was not good news for goats, and Keane observed in 1959 that ‘more goats are being stolen this year than in any other year I can remember – and they are being killed for the making of bodhráns.’
Makers and players
The bodhrán makers receive a well-deserved chapter, with leading craftsmen under the spotlight. The late Charlie Byrne was one of the key figures in the 1960s who not only sought to keep up with the new demand, but also developed the drum to an extremely high standard. Byrne mentored others and bodhrán makers have developed the drum into a much more sophisticated instrument with inbuilt tuning mechanisms to suit modern playing styles. The jingles that featured in tambourines would not appear on the bodhrán. Many of the bodhráns on the market today have a very thin skin, a wide rim, and players tap them with a brush rather than the traditional cipín. This has led to a ubiquitous, bland, beige style that relies on unsympathetic syncopation. The sound of the wooden stick (or hand) on a thick skin is what gives the bodhrán tonal definition and many of today’s performers would do well to go back and listen to Ó Riada’s solid, muscular bodhrán playing.
But while the bodhrán makers are quite rightly included (where would we be without them?), there is very little discussion in Beating Time regarding the bodhrán players who were central to its development as an instrument. Photographs of players are peppered throughout the book in a slightly erratic selection and Chapter 17 features a ‘Bodhrán Portrait Gallery’ with photographs by Jacques Piraprez Nutan, James Fraher and Martin Gaffney.
Ó Riada may have introduced the bodhrán to sit-down music, and added greatly to both its stature and popularity in Irish music, but there is another hugely important figure who reimagined how the humble goatskin could sound. Johnny ‘Ringo’ McDonagh is a towering figure in the bodhrán’s story and anyone playing the bodhrán today owes many aspects of their playing style to his groundbreaking approach, which he developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. McDonagh created tonal variation, ornamentations and syncopation (tasteful and articulate in McDonagh’s hands, intrusive and obnoxious in the hands of others). He also differentiated his accompaniment from the first part to the second part of each tune, faithfully following the core melody. His many recordings with De Danann, Arcady and others are a delight, but his accompaniment on Mary Bergin’s iconic whistle albums Feadóga Stáin and Feadóga Stáin 2 offers a masterclass in bodhrán accompaniment that continues to inspire us all these years later. McDonagh’s singular contribution to the bodhrán’s development as a musical instrument is so significant that it is difficult to understand how it was omitted from this study, aside from passing references and two photographs.
The bodhrán’s morphing from tambourine to bodhrán underpins the book from Chapter 9 onwards and the renowned Kerry poet and singer Gabriel Fitzmaurice explains that ‘Unlike the bodhrán, its more refined cousin of today, the tambourine was the instrument of the outdoors…’. Mel Mercier – another key figure in the instrument’s development – recalls in the book how when his father Peadar Mercier, yet another bodhrán giant, taught him to play the instrument in the mid-1950s ‘it was still primarily associated with the annual St Stephen’s Day tradition of hunting the wren. It was considered to be a ritual instrument rather than a musical one’.
Returning to the study’s core question – ‘is today’s bodhrán a timeless, ancient Irish percussion, or not?’ – no evidence has been unearthed to clearly indicate that there was a percussion drum in ancient Ireland. That, of course, does not rule out the possibility of such a drum having existed. We simply don’t have the evidence.
But should we be surprised that the bodhrán is a recent addition to traditional music? Why would there be a requirement for a percussion instrument when stamping feet more than sufficed? As Vallely observes, ‘Hollow, sprung wood floors were preferred for céilí dance from the 1920s to 1960s, and it is the end of that dance period that is indeed the beginning of the rise of the bodhrán as a popular element in the newly-reviving traditional music.’ Again, Ó Riada’s adamant case that this was sit-down music that merited active listening changed people’s attitudes towards the music, who may have seen it as background music that served dancers. The bodhrán begins to step in as dance began to step out.
Definitive account
Fintan Vallely has contributed enormously to public discourse surrounding traditional music over the course of a long and fruitful career as a critic and commentator, academic and author, musician and mentor. A flute player and composer of note, he brings with him a lived experience to match his academic prowess. His Companion to Irish Traditional Music is a monumental achievement and an invaluable source of information. Vallely deserves our utmost gratitude for all he has bestowed upon the traditional music community thus far.
His most recent study leaves us in no doubt that ‘the device is a frame drum, the form is a tambourine, the Irish type is a bodhrán’. Cork University Press (celebrating its centenary this year) has yet again produced a handsome hardback that is a delight to hold. While academic in nature, the book is also part coffee-table book due to its many visuals and airy layout. One could easily dip in and out of it. There is no doubting that Vallely has produced the definitive account of the bodhrán and unmasked it as a new arrival in the world of traditional music. Now, beat that!
Beating Time: The Story of the Irish Bodhrán by Fintan Vallely, with portraits by Jacques Piraprez Nutan and special images by James Fraher, is published by Cork University Press - find out more here, and read more from the Journal Of Music here
