Written by a scholar with a deep appreciation and understanding of ‘Irish Traditional Music’, this title makes an excellent addition to Ashgate's Popular and Folk Music Series.
The introduction establishes the theoretical, methodological and archival parameters within which the study is to be conducted. The initial discussion of globalisation in its political, economic, cultural and musical contexts is succinct but effective, providing a structure which will be fleshed out in the remainder of the book. Despite the international dimension of the Celtic Tiger, globalisation, it turns out, is ‘not a recent phenomenon, but one that can be traced back through Irish musical history’ (p. 6).
The main body of the book is divided into eight chapters, each of which engages with some aspect of the local/global divide. Chapter 1 attempts to define that particular relationship within the context of the continuing evolution of Irish traditional song, considering issues of repertoire, taxonomy and performance style. Like any good book on this subject, it sends the reader back to the music itself, demanding we listen again with newly sensitised ears.
The following six chapters focus on various ‘divides’ which continue to bear upon both the production and reception of Irish traditional song: time, language, ethnicity, space, politics and institutions. This provides the author with a framework within which many different aspects of the tradition may be engaged.
The opening chapter traces the development of song performance through various periods, and covers issues such as the Moore/Bunting debates of the early 19th century; the emergence of the much-maligned country ‘n’ Irish genre; and the rather later appearance of heavily globalised forms such as Celtic (for example, Enya) and world music (with the Afro-Celts providing the most obvious example). As Motherway argues, the debates tend to coalesce around issues of authenticity and innovation, and in particular the ways in which changing patterns of international consumption relate to the desires and fears encoded within the idea of an Irish traditional music.
The following chapters cover issues such as the derivation of sean-nós (unaccompanied ‘old style’ singing in Gaelic) and the emergence of a ballad tradition; marginalised language traditions within Ireland (such as Shelta and Yola); the music of Ireland's travelling and Ulster-Scots communities; the status of diaspora culture, including an extended case study of Irish music in Newfoundland; musical practices associated with various political philosophies such as nationalism (e.g. the rebel song) and unionism (e.g. party songs); the Irish contribution and response to the international folk revival of the late 20th century; and the unhappy history of Irish music's fate in the hands of the official imagination.
The final chapter returns to the central idea of ‘Irish Traditional Song in a Global Context’. The book's post-nationalist credentials emerge in a call for institutions to ‘adapt to global market forces, rather than trying to curtail cultural change. In so doing, they can harness the potential for cultural growth in Ireland and safeguard the roots of the tradition’ (p. 181). I think this is called ‘having your cake and eating it’. Ireland, and Irish music, it appears, will survive in the global market place only if they come to signify something other than tradition would have.
Of course, it's not insignificant that ‘global’ is a term which comes into focus in the first instance as an economic descriptor: in this respect, the history of Irish traditional song is to a defining extent the history of pressure being brought to bear upon established practices by commercial considerations. This may seem reductionist, and there's always plenty of support for more ‘culturalist’ models – those stressing modes of musical engagement outwith or anterior to the economic imagination.
The case of Riverdance is exemplary; indeed, insofar as it provides Motherway with a point of departure for this study (pp. 1–2), it remains the phenomenon in terms of which the debates attending Irish music in the contemporary period come into focus. After its first appearance as an intermission item during Ireland's hosting of the Eurovision Song Contest in 1994, Riverdance went on to become an enormously successful global cultural product, filling theatres across the world and selling enormous amounts of linked products. It did so, moreover, with reference to a highly romanticised vision of how the local and the global might connect within the context of Irish history.
If Riverdance has set the agenda for discussions about the ‘Irishness’ of Irish music in the age of digital reproduction and of high-speed, mobile, multinational capitalism, this book argues that such is but the latest stage in a debate which has attached itself to the practice throughout history. ‘Local’ and ‘global’ may have meant something different for Giraldus Cambrensis and Turlough O'Carolan, for Thomas Moore and Thomas Davis, for John McCormack and Willie Clancy; every time they performed or listened to a piece of Irish music, however, each of these figures would have been obliged to negotiate the question of where the music came from and how it functioned in relation to the various contexts (temporal, linguistic, ethnic, spatial, political and institutional) within which it was being employed. Irish music, in other words, was not awaiting the advent of the postmodern in order to have the question of the global imposed upon it; that question was always there in the music already.
In the meantime, the debates – and Riverdance – will run and run.
Motherway's prose style is rather stilted at times, and there's an occasional turn to jargon in order, apparently, to demonstrate full and proper engagement with specialised fields. There are rather more typos here than I would have expected from such an otherwise diligent publishing concern (copy editor take note). At a more fundamental level, one might criticise the book for its overly assiduous taxonomical imagination – for finding ingenious ways to fit so many diverse musical activities within one overarching vision. I have always felt, however, that one of the great strengths of music as a cultural practice is its insistence that there is not necessarily a place for everything, nor does everything necessarily have a place.
The Globalization of Irish Traditional Song Performance represents nonetheless an important contribution to the debates emerging from a much-loved and extremely successful modern musical field. Ashgate are to be congratulated for their dedication to the continuing scholarly engagement with that field.
