This volume represents a contribution to the ethnomusicological tradition which focuses on issues of local music making and identity. Following in the wake of scholars such as Sara Cohen and Ruth Finnegan, Angela Moran (a fine Irish name) offers an in-depth analysis of what passes for Irish music in and around Birmingham, along the way encountering a series of key issues relating to the ongoing negotiation of modern Irish identity. As an Irishman whose own family has links with the British midlands, I was particularly intrigued to discover what might lie therein.

Moran's central point is one that has been increasingly obvious in Irish musical (and indeed cultural) studies for some time: ‘Irish’ culture is not spatially restricted to the produce of that smallish Atlantic island which bears the root signifier (Ireland), but is rather a system of practices and locations geographically dispersed and historically negotiated. As the Irish Times columnist and critic Fintan O'Toole once put it, ‘Ireland is something that often happens elsewhere’ – in this case, in Birmingham, England.

Of no cultural practice is this spatial dispersion more true and more obvious than Irish traditional music. The myth was always that this form of music emerged pristine and fully formed from the cabins and village halls of the Irish agricultural heartlands. When scholars started began to turn their attention towards it during the 19th century, the idea was to ‘know’ this music as fully as possible, to identify its characteristics and its accents, and to learn to reproduce it as accurately as possible.

In fact, Irish traditional music has always been as much an urban as a rural phenomenon, and much of the time these urban milieux have been located at some considerable remove from the home sod – in London, Liverpool and Glasgow or in Chicago, Boston and New York; and, as this volume forcefully argues, in less traditionally ‘Irish’ environments such as Birmingham, especially among the great numbers of immigrants who fetched up in Britain following World War II. For it was in cities such as these that Ireland, Irish music and Irishness were to some extent invented by expatriates and their children – people whose very geographical distance coloured their attempts to reproduce the ‘original’.

As a member of the Irish diaspora in Birmingham, Angela Moran is ideally placed to undertake a study of the changing role and representation of Irish music in that city. After a wide-ranging introduction encompassing issues of methodology and theory, she conducts this study over the course of chapters focused on the geographical parameters of the city of Birmingham and the emergence of an Irish element amongst the city's soundscape; on the establishment of a branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (Association of Irish Musicians) in the suburban home of a first-generation Irish immigrant; on a recovery of the ‘lost’ history of Birmingham's influence on Luke Kelly – lead singer with the Dubliners, significant elements of whose musical and political imagination were formed during his time living in the city; on the influence (ideological and spatial) of the Catholic Church in contributing to a sense of identity among the Birmingham-Irish community; on the changing fortunes of the city's St Patrick's Day celebrations, which in a generation or so have moved from complete silence (after the IRA bombing campaign in the city in 1974) to the cacophony of the third-largest event of its kind in the world (after Dublin and New York); and finally, on the contribution of the Birmingham Irish to the city's multicultural identity, and in particular, Irish music's presence as an element within the city's ever-evolving soundscape.

The nature of the study determines (and is in turn determined by) the range of supporting materials drawn upon by the author – in this instance, a combination of historical, sociological, philosophical, political, cultural-critical and (inevitably) ethnomusicological sources. Given the subject matter, such sources are inevitably possessed of both an Irish and a wider international provenance. Alongside the exalted likes of Adorno, Bakhtin, Benjamin and Derrida, one finds many a ‘Mac’ and an ‘O’ in the bibliography; for every high-powered monograph on modern Irish cultural experience (from the likes of Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd or David Lloyd), one will find a modest study of Irish music in Liverpool from Kevin McManus, or an online biography of Mick O'Connor, from Eugene Chadbourne, or a reminiscence of the Birmingham Pipers' Club from Kieron Concannon. In this way, the conversation between Irish music and the various identities and practices against which it defines itself is continued into the realms of methodology, archive and theory.

Two voices I would have expected to hear more of in the circumstances are those of Sean Campbell and Stuart Hall. Campbell's Irish Blood, English Heart (Reference Campbell2011) is likely to remain a benchmark for studies of second-generation musical experience in England for some time to come. I realise that the musical genres are markedly different in each case, but I expect that there are theoretical and methodological implications emerging from Campbell's study which would be seminal for a study of this kind. And Hall, if for no other reason than that the Birmingham ‘school’ with which he was associated was so focused on issues of marginal cultural identity, and was, figuratively speaking, just around the corner. It's a throwaway remark, but perhaps the environmental factors that bear upon cultural identity also influence institutional discourses (such as one finds, for example, in academia), in which case Moran missed a trick by not making more use of theories which were, so to speak, forged in the same furnace as those which constitute her principal focus here.

Nevertheless, this sturdily (if not particularly handsomely) produced volume makes an important contribution to the emerging story of Irish music – no need for scare quotes (as in ‘Irish’ music), no need for national qualifiers (as in ‘Irish-British’ music) – arguing convincingly that Birmingham, no less than Ballaghboy or Boston, represents a key co-ordinate on the map of the modern Irish musical imagination.