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The Making of Irish Traditional Music(Hardback - 2008) €39.00 |
Price: €39.00
Add to Bag“The Making of Irish Traditional Music provides a valuable, theoretically informed cultural history of the retrieval and codification of Irish music in the context of an emergent Irish nationalism. It offers a valuable critique of notions of identity and authenticity at the very inner sanctum of an essential mode of Irish self-expression, but does so with considerable sensitivity to the pressures that draw people to adhere to notions of ethnic or national identity. The historical dimension of this work, from Bunting in the late eighteenth century and O'Neill in the late nineteenth to the emergence of independent state cultural institutions and their effect on the formation of ‘traditional’ and official versions of Irish music, is one of the very best continuous accounts available.”
David Lloyd, Professor of English, University of Southern California
The first critical study of Irish traditional music, The Making of Irish Traditional Music draws on the author’s observations and participation as a musician. It analyses the experiences of foreigners playing Irish music at summer schools, where they encounter the tourism industry’s ‘Ireland of the Welcomes’, and in the heart of Ireland’s traditional music empire, County Clare. The book concludes that a view of Irish traditional music as expressive of an ethnically pure, geographically bound, masculine, national culture is an inadequate basis for a multi-ethnic Irish society.
Helen O’Shea is a Research Fellow at Monash University, Australia
Hardback: 2008
Printed Pages: 230
Size: 234 x 156mm
ISBN: 9781859184363
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Book Reviews
Dolly Mackinnon, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies
February 15, 2012, 8:03 am
Many myths about Irish traditional fiddle music and the rural idle are burst in the pages of this book as it becomes evident that the diaspora’s influences can alter the soundscape of Irish traditional music sounds within Ireland. Nationalism, like nostalgia, is compelling and highly emotive, but only up until the point where the nationalist mirage vanishes precisely because it lacks substance, and cannot stand up to close scrutiny when tested against the historical and sound-recording evidence. All musicians performing Irish traditional music need to talk about their traditions, its actual past, its influences, its ongoing metamorphosis, its politicisation and its transformation over time. Musicians need to hear O’Shea’s critique— however uncomfortable and confronting at times the ‘locals’ may find it to be. What is most impressive about parts of this book is O’Shea’s own journey, and as she states, her ‘greatest reward as a scholar has been to penetrate the thick skin of received knowledge about Ireland and Irish traditional music’(p. 4). This she has certainly done in part, and it is now up to others (musicians and cultural historians) to unflinchingly head off in the myriad of directions she has pointed them towards to continue the quest to unravel what makes and remakes Irish traditional music.
CHOICE
July 22, 2009, 13:20 pm
this informative thought provoking study is an excellent addition to the existing literature on Irish music.
