IrishMusicInfo
The Sunday Tribune Weekly Traditional Music Column by Fintan Vallely
990214
South Roscommon singers launched their song album at the G—il’n club in Dublin this weekend, the Nenagh 'circle' had been the first to branch into recording a year ago. Interesting about both of these is their mix of song material - 18th century politics can rub shoulders with the 1980s Dunne's' Stores lockout, nostalgia sits with humour, eclecticism and personal taste are the stamp, local identity gets no particular reverence. Wexford Singers' festival last weekend however was considerably more focused on place. Sentimental purpose saw era as no impediment, as the centuries were hopped with the mythic athleticism of Finn: Sarsfield to Fr. Murphy, Roddy McCorley to Gaelic-revival reconstruction, Black and Tan killings in Tipperary and again to modern-day hurling heroes. Defeat at Vinegar Hill was no less meritorious than the triumphs of the Rackards in Croke Park, all prompting a Dublin wag's remark: "What would the songs be like if they had won?". This challenges the imagination in the festival's present-day setting at Rosslare - almost antiseptic neatness of a tourism-driven attention to image, the perpetual throb of the ferries that now bring wealth rather than export the subjects of balladry. Contemporaneous with the designer-decadence of the local ersatz-country-kitchen bars, the vivid imagery of battle clamour, crimson tide and pikes gleaming bright with Saxon gore is a paradoxical sight and sound show that beats the widest fantasy of any interpretative centre's reconstructive, 21st century microchip imagination. The fruits of pens inspired a century after the events, yet another hundred years later this recasting of defeat as heroic glory still inspires. While new light may have been cast on the era during last year's pageantry, what remains in the mouths of singers however is what flew to their inner ears from the 1798 Pandora's box: the period is their history to interpret as they see fit, informed cynically within the average festival-goer's lifetime by thirty years of observation of imperial shenanigans in Central America, South Africa the Middle East and Indonesia. The art of the poet and the scribe to condense historical, aesthetic and emotional experience to a handful of coded words that can be instantaneously exploded to full original vigour is still vastly more profound that the potential of a single CD ROM to hold all the pages of two thousand novels. Thus songs and singing persist. Once the socially- necessary information vehicle of pre-journalism, the carrier of history and the medium for fantasy and escape 'Traditional' singing is now busily sorting out a new niche for itself in an age in which it should have logically been superseded. The Inishowen Song Seminar is next on the calendar on March 27th, this year addressing itself to the humorous song.
©Fintan Vallely, IrishMusicInfo.com
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