Saturday, 16 November 2024
Armagh Robinson Library

Good afternoon everyone. 

It’s a real pleasure to be here in Armagh to give the 2024 William Kennedy Lecture, and thank you to Brian, Ciarán and Caoimhín of the festival for the invitation. I have never been to Armagh before though I have been aware of this incredible festival for many years and the extraordinary work of the Armagh Pipers’ Club.

Ciarán Ó Maoláin kindly sent me the book collection of William Kennedy Lectures edited by Brian Vallely, which is a fascinating read, and I can see that my lecture will be one of the few that doesn’t focus on piping, although I think a lot of the ideas that I’ll discuss will resonate with the piping community as much as any part of traditional music.

I should mention that I publish the online music publication The Journal of Music. It was a print magazine for ten years, and has been fully online for the past fourteen, but we have actually recently returned to print by starting to publish books too, the first of which is a collection of my writing titled What Ireland Can Teach the World About Music. So my talk today is an extension of some of the ideas in that book, but also lots of other things I have been thinking about since that book was published in February of this year.

I should also say that although I write about music, I don’t see myself as a music journalist or a critic or anything like that. I’m more a musician who writes, if that’s even a category. I play traditional Irish fiddle. So everything I have to say today is informed by my experiences as a musician first and foremost, playing, sitting with musicians, listening, watching, talking to them.

How Ireland uses music
One of the reasons I started writing about music twenty-five years ago was because of the way Irish traditional music is often used in society – both in the north and the south. As a musician, I didn’t think it should all go unquestioned. 

Irish music is used politically in order to make a statement in a multitude of ways; it is used economically to sell the country abroad; and it is used socially for big occasions. Some of this is benign, some of it is pretty inconsequential, some if it is twee, but some of it is pretty blunt, and I think we as a music community need to be at the very least part of the conversations about how Irish music is used, for the very simple reason that how music is used shapes the response of the wider public around us, which in turn shapes the opportunities available to musicians. For me, it is often as practical as that. I care about the environment in which we are playing and creating music, and that includes the intellectual environment, so I think that we need to tend that too. And by public conversations, I mean the public noise that is all around us, in the traditional media and online

The reality is that Irish music – particularly Irish traditional music, but also, as we have seen, Irish rock and pop and hip hop, and even classical music – can be a powerful symbolic force, for reasons of our history. I don’t need to recount the reasons.

But there are significant repercussions for music because of the meanings that have become attached to it. In our public conversation today, the actual music – the sounds that we are creating – is often completely overwhelmed by the political discussions around it. I could give you many examples, such as the controversy around why Irish bands boycotted the SXSW festival in Texas last year, whether or not Ireland should have been in the Eurovision this year because of Israel’s involvement, or whether or not music and arts organisations should be taking a stance on the war in Gaza, or whether or not Kneecap’s lyrics are controversial. I write and speak about these issues too – they are important – but it often seems that these conversations are our only public discussions when it comes to music. Music rarely becomes part of the public conversation unless there is a controversy around it. If you care about musical life, that is incredibly frustrating.

The most recent example I experienced was when I was on my way to Belfast last weekend. There was an hour-long interview on RTÉ on primetime morning radio with the singer Christy Moore because he has a new album out called A Terrible Beauty. I know the album title is a Yeats quote that refers to Easter 1916, but Moore says right at the beginning that he took the name from a painting of a country rural scene by a school friend. And if you actually listen to the album, you will hear that musically and lyrically, it is probably one of Moore’s finest albums for years. The songs are strong, the songwriting is tighter, the lyrics are more distilled and original, there’s more variety in the textures, and as a result the performance from Moore seems to have more intensity. Musically, it is full of surprises. The songs are about relationships, humanity, family, frailty, fathers and sons, and of course there are political and social themes too, but when it came to the discussion about the album – I was watching the clock – it was four minutes before the interviewer steered the conversation towards politics. And every time Moore would hint towards his creative process, or his voice, or his love of traditional music, or how we developed the songs working with the songwriters who sent them to him, the interviewer steered it back to politics by dragging up YouTube clips from the past fifty years. The interviewer even said at one stage ‘I want to get back to the political thing’. This is in 2024. The entire conversation could have taken place thirty years ago and we mightn’t notice the difference. Where do we go from there, if we can’t move our conversation forward even when an artist presents new music to us?

I think that that scenario is replicated all the time when it comes to our public conversation around music.

And the political controversies around music just keep coming. A recent development is the way Irish music is now used in anti-immigrant protests: crowds marching banging a bodhrán in Wicklow in April, or playing Sinéad O’Connor and the Chieftains at the protest in Dublin in May. I don’t know if Irish music was used in the protests in the north recently. Possibly. The irony is that so much of traditional Irish music and song documents the migrant experience for people from this island – folk songs like ‘Spancil Hill’ and ‘Skibbereen’ and modern songs such as Luka Bloom’s ‘City of Chicago’ and Christy Moore’s singing of Bobby Sands’ ‘Back Home in Derry’ – even The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’, which you are going to hear one thousand times over the next month, is about the Irish emigrant experience. These are songs that tell of Irish desperation, isolation, poverty, marginalisation, rejection, suspicion and discrimination.  And now people are using Irish music to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment. It’s a complete disassembling of our public discourse, a disconnection from our past, and it’s based on fear – the same fear that saw Trump elected. I watched his New York speech. He has terrified the American people with eight years of fear-mongering over immigrants.

Those immigrants now coming into Ireland; that was us going abroad not so long ago. In the south of Ireland, we have lost our historical perspective, and we need to figure out how we are going to regain that.

Inside Irish music
In this talk, however, believe it or not, I actually want to move the focus away from political uses of Irish music to the music itself, because, as I say, what is happening within the music tends to get lost in the national conversation.

Today, we have something quite remarkable on this island: a multi-faceted contemporary musical life across all genres but with an incredibly strong, vibrant and historically continuous folk music and song tradition right at the heart of it all. From hip hop to contemporary composition, artists draw on this folk tradition and are inspired by it.

The question we have to ask, however, is how did we get here? We have a general idea of the historical reasons and the modern development of Irish music, but I think they would not be enough on their own to produce the vibrancy we are witness to. My suggestion is that there is something else at work.

I want to suggest that, along with the repertoire of music and song that have been handed down to through the generations, combined with the styles and techniques, a way of thinking about music has also come with it – a way of thinking that values spontaneity, adaptability, community, education, passing it on – and that this way of thinking is more responsible for the dynamism of Irish music than any symbolic or political value it might have. I don’t want to imply that everyone on this island thinks the same way, but I do think that there is a way of thinking about music here that informs our relationship with music. I think we could even call it a musical philosophy, but because we don’t talk about it publicly in any in-depth way, or communicate it clearly to the wider public, it is being thinned out all the time, swamped by politics, and it’s quite possible that this way of thinking is in danger of just fading away, like so much of our culture that we have already lost.

I imagine that this way of thinking developed over time in response to the constraints on cultural expression that people were grappling with, and the huge cultural loss they were experiencing, but it also seems to have deeper roots that we can only speculate upon. It balances some difficult things: an extreme flexibility of approach, but also a paradoxical rigidity – a real seriousness about the music.

The result of this history and dialectic, however, is that music in Ireland has characteristics that make it very dynamic. These features are most evident in Irish traditional music and song, but they spill out into many aspects of our musical life. They bubble over. It’s a way of thinking that informs how the music is performed, taught and shared, as well as the role of music on social occasions, and the combination of all these aspects.

I think that if we understood this way of thinking more, talked about it publicly, and encouraged a wider appreciation of it, then we would not only strengthen musical life further but other communities outside Ireland could learn from it too. Visitors to Ireland, north and south, often look at the musical life here and wonder what is driving it, and I am not sure we have given them a satisfactory answer.

Among the everyday
The first characteristic I would like to draw attention to is the value that musicians in Ireland put on sheer spontaneity in traditional music – raw, spontaneous performance in community settings, literally among people in the everyday of life. It’s not uncommon in traditional music for musicians in sessions to play with people they have never played with before, and may never even have met before, for hours on end, with hardly a plan about what they are going to play, and regardless of whether there is an audience or not! In this way of thinking, music is something that can be played anywhere, anytime, with anyone, and in almost any environment. 

I’d like to give you just one example of how this aspect of music in Ireland, and also how it can get misinterpreted: last November, a group of Cavan teenagers started playing on a delayed Aer Lingus flight from Frankfurt. Did anyone see that? The footage shows a session and a positive response from passengers on the flight.

However, when the footage began to spread online, the response was mixed. The session was breaking the rules of modern public decorum. The Irish media picked up on it, there was a mocking article in the Irish Times, and Newstalk asked the concertina player Edel Fox to come on air to explain. She pointed out that it is not that uncommon in traditional music to have this spontaneous element and made a strong case for taking pride in it.

We could also ask, however, what kind of thinking informs this spontaneity? How did this thinking about music come about? What have these Cavan teenagers absorbed through Irish traditional music that tells them this is a natural part of this art form? 

The Cavan plane session isn’t an isolated incident. There are videos online of Irish musicians playing in all sorts of environments – Daoirí Farrell starting a sing-song in an airport (a video that has over 29 million views), the late Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and Liam O’Flynn playing tunes on the whistle on a plane with members of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland, as well as plenty of other footage of Irish musicians on planes, trains, boats, the Tube in London, on streets, and of course in pubs. 

These scenes could be dismissed as a little bit of fun, but this kind of embracing of the moment is everywhere in traditional music – and I do think it is driven by some urge for disrupting the constraints of whatever environment they are in, but why is it in this music? There is, of course, footage of people from other countries playing in public places, but not to this extent. Spontaneity, disruption, seems to be a key value in Irish music.

Music of the displaced
But why is this? Why is this need to bring music into the everyday of life so strong in Irish culture? Firstly, we could note that this art form traditional Irish music emerged as an outdoor music, played by fiddlers and pipers at fairs, dances and markets, and the music had to be robust enough to adapt. We could also remember that Irish traditional music is the music of a displaced people – it emerged as the harping tradition and Gaelic society was in terminal decline. The Irish were a displaced population. Musicians had to constantly adapt, accept the environments they found themselves in, and find the potential for expression within.

If that is too speculative, then we could also consider that there may be a precedent for this adaptability. Irish traditional music is dance music, and at the time that it emerged in Irish history, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, dance was one of the main social activities for Irish people. When one reads about that time, it’s clear that this very same kind of spontaneity was part of that culture. 

The image of Irish dance that has come down to us (and I mean long before Riverdance) is Irish people ‘dancing at the crossroads’ – but  that was only a part of it. The Irish danced everywhere.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, dance was part of the farming and religious calendar in rural Ireland and integral to social occasions. Travellers to Ireland often commented on this: people danced at cattle fairs, market days, hurling matches, horse races, bonfire evenings, weddings, when the harvest was completed, every Sunday after mass, and even during rests when working on the bog – at lunch they would find a grassy patch called the móinín and organise a dance. If there were no instruments one or two might lilt the tunes. They would also dance on village greens, in barns with the dancing master when he would visit, at religious celebrations, in bars and síbíns, and at crossroads. 

Even on ‘coffin ships’ during the Famine, dance was present. Every child studying Irish history learns about the coffin ships, boats full of death, disease and misery that carried Irish people to America and Canada away from the Famine. But there is also documentation of young people organising dances up on deck while terribly sad situations were taking place.

As Mary Friel writes writes in her book on dance, Dancing as a social pastime in the south-east of Ireland, 1800–1897,  ‘Dancing was an activity that could happen at anytime, anywhere, in the life of the lower classes. No ballroom was required. A musician was a bonus but one could dance to whistling, singing or lilting if the need arose … music could move the Irish peasantry to dance spontaneously wherever they could find a space’. It seems, therefore, that this spontaneity was part of our culture of dance when this music emerged. Is it somehow still encoded in our culture today? However it arose, it is a clear characteristic. I think that if there had been a broader appreciation of this facet when the Cavan plane session broke out, that there may in fact be deep cultural reasons for this spontaneity through displacement, we would have had quite a different public conversation. Instead of the negative reaction, the public would have said, ‘Ah yes, that spontaneity is Irish music’, and know the reasons why. 

But how often do we hear talk like that in our public conversation? We don’t.

All sounds the same?
The second thing I want to say about spontaneity is that it not only relates to where and when the music is played, but it is also embedded within the overall structure of the music itself. It is too often said that Irish traditional music is ‘repetitive’, which it is, but traditional musicians can also play for hours without repeating a tune. And in the hands of really great musicians the music is constantly changing. Traditional musicians play tunes in sets and the tune can change every 90 seconds, and they are always thinking about what to go into, so there’s this liminal space where anything can happen, and again I don’t think we talk about this enough. We have allowed the image of Irish music as repetitive ‘diddly-aye’ to become embedded in Irish culture because we don’t speak back publicly about what is actually happening in the music.

I want to show you an extraordinary example of this spontaneity in Irish music. It is footage online of Martin Hayes and Steve Cooney playing at the Doolin Folk Festival in 2018. Hayes plays three tunes, beginning with the ‘Maghera Mountain’ reel and then moving into ‘The Crooked Road’ at a faster pace. A deep intensity arises in the second tune, and suddenly, rather than moving on to the third reel, ‘The Foxhunter’s’, they decide to continue playing the second one, and you can witness the total unpredictability at work. In this liminal space, anything can happen.

Maybe not precisely like this, but this same kind of unpredictability and spontaneity can be seen in traditional music sessions. This adventure is not something novel in the music, nor exclusively the domain of exceptional musicians like Hayes and Cooney. It is an intrinsic value and one of the qualities that gives the music its strength. I don’t think we talk about it enough, and if we don’t talk about it, then it just starts to fade away in our culture.

Passing it on
A third characteristic that I notice among musicians in Ireland is the seriousness with which they take the passing on of the music to the next generation. This is a really important part of what traditional and folk musicians do. They don’t hesitate to share their knowledge with younger musicians, regardless of whether they are their ‘teacher’ or not. Many traditional musicians describe themselves as ‘self-taught’, but it is only in a community in which everyone is your ‘teacher’ that this could happen. 

I am often struck by the status that a young musician can have at a traditional music session. A child playing a simple tune will sometimes command more attention than experienced artists. Young musicians are taken seriously, and listened to closely by the community, and they are talked about and held up as signs of vibrancy in the music. Again, this is informed by our history. If you didn’t ‘pass on’ the music – the style, repertoire and techniques – it simply faded away. This is why traditional musicians always talk about where they obtained a tune before playing it. It reflects the values that are deep within the music.

I want to try and demonstrate the importance of transmission, or passing on, by showing just how much knowledge and information is passed on by aural transmission, through listening, from musician to musician, down through the generations over years. I am going to play a tune called ‘Father O’Flynn’ that I learnt from my first teacher Tom Glackin when I was starting off – you see, I just did the same thing! I’m going to play it straight first of all, playing just the notes as they are written down on the page – the page I would have been given as a child. And then I am going to play it as I would today, with the knowledge that I have picked up from other musicians over the years, aspects that are not written down and often can’t be written down, but which would have been passed down by listening and talking and playing, and you will be able to hear the difference quite clearly. Anyone here who is experienced in traditional music will know this process well already, but I think it’s good to illustrate it and think about it.

[Performance of ‘Father O’Flynn’]

So there you can hear the amount of additional information that is not written down, and probably hardly ever talked about, but is an essential part of the tradition. 

Helping us through
One advantage of having such a robust process for handing on this music is the continuity it creates with the past, and this is something else that traditional musicians seem to constantly emphasise. It gives Ireland a cultural and social strength that can be drawn on at challenging times.

The most recent example was the pandemic, which cut people off from their families, and caused the death of over fifteen thousand people on this Ireland. Musicians, as soon as the pandemic struck, instinctively reached out to people online and tried to create a sense of community again, and that set the tone for how the country dealt with the pandemic thereafter – as a community. But then, after almost two years of restrictions and all that trauma, something else happened that shocked the whole country, the death of Ashling Murphy. A 23-year-old excellent fiddle player and primary school teacher who was also learning the uilleann pipes, she was out for a run near Tullamore in the midlands and was murdered. It shocked the whole country.

Just two days later, on 14 January 2022, the Late Late Show on RTÉ television broadcast a tribute to her and invited a number of traditional musicians and singers to perform. Two of the artists that night were Séamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlátharta from An Áird Mhóir near Carna in Conamara, and as a tribute they sang a sean-nós song called ‘Anach Cuain’. It is a performance that is both ancient and modern because they use harmony, but the skill of their traditional singing is what makes it so powerful. Caoimhe and Séamus are a result of the kind of thinking in traditional music that I have described already. I launched Féile Joe Éinniú – the Joe Heaney festival of sean-nós singing in Conamara in May – which is now in its 38th year and is run by a voluntary committee. Every year the festival provides workshops for children to learn sean-nós. Caoimhe and Séamus literally grew up with that festival, learning through it and from those involved with it. 

On the Late Late Show, they sing just one verse and it is only two minutes long, but you can see how our rooted music tradition comes to the fore at moments like this, and how all of the power and learning that this art brings expresses a grief that is beyond words.

It’s extraordinary isn’t it? ‘Anach Cuain’ is a song written almost two hundred years ago about a drowning in Galway, and it is sung in a language that not everyone watching the programme would have understood, and yet it is incredibly moving. Once again, Irish music is an expression of community, helping communities through these difficult moments, and I think we need to talk more about how having such continuity in music gives us a social solidarity that helps us deal with these kinds of shocking events, and will again in the future.

Everyone together
The last characteristic of Irish traditional music that I would like to discuss is communal involvement, the idea of involving everyone in the music. In Irish traditional music sessions, musicians will often reach out to a singer in the room who is not necessarily part of the group of musicians, and they may not even know them, or if there are people from abroad who are listening they will often ask them to sing, or they may ask a musician to join them for a tune, or encourage people to be involved somehow. I know these aspects of Irishness can be caricatured in popular culture – like in the film Titanic – but there is a genuine impulse behind them. It is almost as if the more people musicians can get to connect with the music, the more powerful it is, and it may be again related to history and the significance that Irish music took on. For musicians in Ireland, having more people involved means they are getting closer to what they may instinctively feel this music is about, which is community, nurturing that sense of community, and maybe even building resilience.

Of course, we see communal involvement in all types of music, but it seems to be a particularly important value in Irish traditional music, and then it spills out into other aspects of musical culture in Ireland, north and south.

I want to give you a couple of examples. The first is a video by the singer/songwriter Joshua Burnside from near Belfast, I believe, in Lisbane. It’s the video for his new song ‘Marching Round the Ladies’, which I understand is a traditional Belfast street song that he has beautifully reimagined. But the video has a very interesting juxtaposition: Burnside describes it as an ode to marching bands in the North so most of the musicians are in marching band uniforms, but they are sitting in a situation that is very familiar in traditional music, which is sitting around in a pub playing tunes. Personally, I think it’s a fascinating juxtaposition and may suggest this impulse at work of communal involvement at work. As I understand it, this is not a typical situation for marching band members, but you will be able to tell me either way. So here is Joshua Burnside – Marching Round the Ladies: 

Is that a typical situation for marching band culture?

Did anyone catch what was written on the drum? It’s a quote from the lyric and it says:

Marching up the Shankill
Marching up the Falls
Doesn’t matter where you’re from
The Tories fuck us all

Finally, as an example of this communal involvement, I’d like to show you a clip from the Ceiliúradh concert from almost exactly ten years ago in April 2014. This concert took place at the Royal Albert Hall in London and it was organised to mark the first visit of the President of Ireland to Britain, following the Queen of England’s visit to Ireland three years previous. This was an historic visit and a cathartic event for  the two countries.

In this clip, we are right at the end of the Ceiliúradh concert, when a whole host of Irish and British Irish musicians are on stage singing the ‘Auld Triangle’. Conor O’Brien from the Villagers takes a verse, and then Glen Hansard takes over and you will see what happens and I think there is the influence of Irish traditional music communal culture at work.

The response from the audience is instinctive: the entire Royal Albert Hall stands up and sings a capella. Clearly, from an Irish perspective, the evening would not have been complete without involving everyone in the room, and everyone understood this. 

Not every music is like this
I think many of you may be familiar with the characteristics I have described above.They are referenced in popular culture all the time, from The Simpsons to Titanic to Fr Ted, but sometimes I don’t think we realise how powerful they actually are, and that not every music is like this – or at least they have not managed to hold on to these characteristics in the same way.

This musical culture has developed over centuries, and the way of thinking that accompanies it is essential to it, but unless we deepen the discussion around this music, and broaden the public conversation, then these characteristics will inevitably fade away, as they probably already have in certain areas.

On the other hand, if we can expand our understanding of what makes music on this island  such a valuable part of our society, support these innate characteristics, and temper the politicisation of the music, then we can look forward to an even more vibrant musical life into the future.

Thank you very much.