In this expansive, densely-packed journey into the world of Irish traditional music through the prism of a regional imaginary hewn from the west coast of Ireland, Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin establishes a goal “to challenge Clare’s sonic remoteness and re-centre its soundscapes within longue dureé global flow that influenced Irish music history during the past two centuries” (p. 2). Armed with considerable experience as an academic and musician, and supplementing the resultant text with online audio/visual materials, the author explores the dynamic relationship between the local and the global in Clare as manifest in its ever-changing soundscape. Presented in a largely chronological format across seven chapters that are bookended by an entreé and l’épilogue, the deftness with which the author covers a vast amount of social, cultural, historical, political, and sonic materials is astounding and instructive. He includes insights into French cultural influences and the Great Famine’s profound legacy in nineteenth-century Clare; the tectonic societal shifts brought about by mass emigration; the shaping of the modern state through cultural nationalism; the impact of regional economic development and global tourism; and increased music professionalism and the rise of “Celtic stars.” By tracing the “impact of cultural flows on this ‘isolated’ soundscape from the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s to the Celtic Tiger [economic] boom in the period 1995–2005” (p. 2), Clare’s apparent “peripherality” is dismantled. Ajurn Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996) supplies the book’s theoretical linchpin as the author creatively “uses Appadurai’s prismatic scapes as barometers of longue durée change” (p. 4). Clare, as both region-specific and synecdoche, is therefore reconfigured and understood in terms of ethno-, techno-, finance- media-, and ideoscapes. A dizzying array of theorists form a support cast, from Boym to Adorno, Tuan to Husserl, Giddens to Ricoeur, all sitting cheek to jowl alongside local Irish historians, folklorists, anthropologists, musicologists, and local musicians, in an interdisciplinary research project that draws on “history and ethnomusicology, memory and orality studies, cultural geography and media ecology” (p. 10).

Flowing Tides should be read in productive dialogue with, and in some cases, in tension with Irish music research from established ethnomusicologists Sean Williams and Adam Kaul, as well as Irish music scholars Helen O’Shea and Lillis Ó Laoire, whose critical, ethnomusicologically informed music research makes significant contributions to the discipline. All of the above are mentioned by the author but are not engaged with in a sustained way. Therein lies an interesting tension in what the book also seeks to achieve: to break “new theoretical and methodological ground in Irish and, more broadly, Celtic ethnomusicology” (p. 3). Self-identified as both a cultural historian and ethnomusicologist (who was trained in Belfast by John Blacking), throughout this book there is an implicit—and sometimes explicit—critique of the limitations of the ethnographic present research model in ethnomusicology. In particular, he takes aim at practice by those he terms as “outsiders” who do not appreciate, at least from Ó hAllmhuráin’s perspective, the degree to which Irish music research should be informed not just by a longue dureé perspective but also by the nuanced and embodied positionality of the culturally informed and musically experienced, performing “insider.” Such ideas challenge Bruno Nettl’s position—and much conventional practice—of informed outsider as ideal ethnomusicological researcher. For all of his largely successful, deliberate efforts to eschew unproductive and simplistic binaries, such as centre/periphery, rural/urban, traditional/modern, etc., this is one binary Ó hAllmhuráin seems unwilling to let go. It is a debate that has long plagued vernacular music studies in Ireland (and its associated diaspora), circulating around issues of authority, intelligibility, and agency when it comes to thinking and writing about Irish music. This is not unique to Ireland. In many post-colonial contexts, the discipline of ethnomusicology may be viewed rather warily as a top-down, imported means of gazing at and understanding the “other.”

As someone who has long engaged with Irish and Irish-American/Irish-Canadian music topics from an Irish Studies position (first at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and more recently at Concordia University), Ó hAllmhuráin’s book proves provocative but, from this reader’s perspective, does not result in the configuring of a new “Celtic Ethnomusicology” to which the author aspires. It does, however, help extend the conversation about how music history and ethnomusicology productively intersect, and ideally it should contribute to discussions about methods in the sub-discipline of historical ethnomusicology while concomitantly testing the insularity of certain Irish Studies perspectives. While Clare music is no longer configured as an impervious, bounded regional music style and repertoire, but rather as something far more sophisticated that is in flux, some exceptionalist discursive and imaginary tendencies lurk beneath the sinuous and elegant prose. But as a book forty years in the making, according to the author, this is undoubtedly a very engaging and informative read from a teacher, writer, and musician whose extensive local knowledge and unbounded passion for his subject matter is clearly evident on every page.