IrishMusicInfo
The Sunday Tribune Weekly Traditional Music Column by Fintan Vallely
990919
The release of a new Dord‡n album strongly featuring Kathleen Loughnane's harp underscores the versatility of and potential for that instrument in Traditional music today. Its wind player Mary Bergin continues to mark out too the expressive ability of the tin whistle. Her own grounding in music came in home sessions at Blackrock, Co. Dublin, the kind of circumstance which was to escalate into the pub session today, an event which American Barry Foy's book 'Field Guide to the Irish Music Session' (distributed by Townhouse) stabs at humorously. With imprimaturs from Martin Hayes, Boston College's in-house fiddler Seamus Connolly, Mick Moloney and Irish American musician-scholar Gear—id î hAllmhur‡in, its Picasso-style sketches emphasise a light approach. Wit is the author's vehicle to address the dilemma of the 'new' player whose local session "has no inner logic or natural momentum ... isn't bringing out the best in the musicians, nor ... the listeners". His musician is a 'he', and the man knows his onions even if it seems odd to state that guitars, bouzoukis and bodhr‡ns are permitted at the rate of 'only one per session' (in fact players are often shyly tolerant of several of each in a session). Maybe that is tongue-in cheek, but then he goes on to say that drink is necessary, overlooking the revival of Traditional music being built on tea and sandwich sessions, and the many AA, water and coffee drinkers, health-freaks, drivers and young, not-yet drinkers who play today. Foy's analysis of the role of the tune types is shrewdly in-house too, but in scorning 'planned' tune-sets he rules out the generous inclusiveness of many big-name players and teachers, and of paid musicians toward strangers. 'Aural' and 'oral' are suggested as meaning the same thing, literacy and knowing tune-names and pedigrees are pooh-pooed (literacy is high, pedigrees and names are important 'handles' to memory and are often the subject of great session debate). His dismissal of individual 'breaks' as negative 'party pieces' however suggests that seriousness isn't prime in his treatise - for how else can a player 'grow into' a tune, get confidence, ego boost or develop the ability to play alone? Foy's session is: "the wellspring of Irish music, its beating heart" (this despite its modern invention as the child of emigration, the fleadh, prosperity, O'Riada and the EEC). While he may not have intended to be read so literally, and may have targeted a very different scene in the US, nevertheless the 'idiot's guide' humour does not seem to work for Ireland, foundering on the very vagueness of what a session is in reality. For while it is no harm to laugh at one's-self, his dependence on moralistic and mythic anchor points frustrates this presumed objective. And his 'Dear Frankie' solution shrinks too from major session truths - ignorance, elitism, closed shops, publicans, idealism, community, art, generosity - and payment.
©Fintan Vallely, IrishMusicInfo.com
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