IrishMusicInfo
The Sunday Tribune Weekly Traditional Music Column by Fintan Vallely
990307
Any history is subjective, and its reader is obliged to allow for the defects of memory and priorities of the author. Thus as things stand, the only ever government-sponsored document on Traditional music will (mis)inform posterity that in 1999 we had only one body of worth (CCƒ), and that there are fifteen others worth mentioning, even if only for the sound of their names. The labours of the other 140 groups will not exist for consideration by historians. O'Brien Press's Pocket History of Irish Traditional Music should therefore be well placed to set the record straight, for, refreshingly, the ex-Co. Clare author Gear—id î hAllmhur‡in is a musician. This book views players, music and instruments through the lens of history, is graphically informative, particularly valuable to both visitor and second-level student. It fits in the pocket (handy for boring Senate debates), and it is a history (surprising stuff). Ita effusive tour takes to the air in 400BC and like an albatross circles the globe of centuries observing Celts, Christianity, Norman colonisation, Gaelicisation, heyday of the bard and harp, Henry VIII's proscription of music, the Elizabethans' 'hang the harpers wherever found'. A pity the Ulster Plantation loses its English ingredient (and Ulster, Orange and political song are never located) but further south the smoke, clatter and clash of cannon and sword marks Cromwell's 'silencing in the land of song'. We are drawn through the Penal Laws to dancing, 1798, the quadrilles, Young Ireland balladry, songs of the famine, the Celtic revival, depression and emigration, exile in the USA and Britain, finally coming to earth in pub culture and Riverdance. Music - mostly song - is grafted on to history, sometimes gratuitously, romantically and, unavoidably, selectively. Questionable is the use of the description 'Traditional' for the music throughout this chronology - the term only came to be used here in 1913, and is invested with the politics of its modern era - 'Irish' seems more appropriate. More critically, the significance of the intellectual - universities, literature and archives - might have been observed. Understandable this, for the author does not live in Ireland, and his emphasis is unapologetically on the tenacity of the makers and custodians of the music. But one's memory is challenged about eras too: the professional, pub-session culture hardly began in the 1960s, and if musicians left cŽil’ bands in those years for the lounge bar, was it to play Traditional music? All that is forgivable. But no index? Still, this is the long-overdue, uncomplicated, handy companion to history-books which consistently ignore the practice of a music assumed in the past to be a 'given', and 'peasant Irish', of no consequence. Gear—id î hAllmhur‡in here fills some of the social gap between the words and inspires a broader vision. A great pity some people didn't get it in their 1998 Xmas stockings.
©Fintan Vallely, IrishMusicInfo.com
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