ethnic music. The preservation and collection of
music in Ireland was originally conceived as an antiquarian enterprise and as an act of cultural redemption. Such motives prompted Edward Bunting to publish his
General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music in 1797. This volume drew in turn from material which Bunting had annotated at the
Belfast Harp Festival (1792) and from other collectors. The historical significance of this publication was twofold. First, it entered a decisive claim for music as an integral part of Gaelic culture, and second, it proved the frail but unbroken continuity between that culture (in terms of Celtic antiquities) and the circumstances of the present day. Bunting's collection undoubtedly inspired the creation and publication of Thomas Moore's
Irish Melodies (1808–34), in which some of the airs collected by Bunting were both romanticized and politicized by dint of their association with Moore's verse. Two further collections were issued by Bunting in 1809 and 1840, and throughout the 19th century his practice of collection and publication of the ethnic corpus of melody (vocal and instrumental) was widely emulated.
In the post‐Famine period, it was George
Petrie above all others who added significantly to this corpus, having amassed about 1,000 airs hitherto unrecorded. Petrie published a volume of melodies in 1855, and an edition of his entire collection, prepared by Charles Villiers Stanford, appeared between 1902 and 1905. Other notable collectors include Samuel Forde, John Pigot, Peter Goodman, and Patrick Weston Joyce.
This plenitude of ethnic melody was not unproblematic in the history of Irish music. The cult of musical preservation, frequently identified by ideologues of Gaelic culture in terms analogous to the preservation of the Irish language, patently inhibited the growth of original (art) music in Ireland. In addition, the use of the ethnic repertory as an intelligencer of political sentiment entailed a remarkable degree of cultural stasis, by which ‘Irish music’ and ‘folk melody’ were judged to be synonymous. This was notably the case in the verbally dominated ambience of the Celtic revival. In the 20th century, the renewed publication of Irish airs, especially by the London‐based Irish Folk Song Society, and the systematic archival recordings undertaken by Radio Telefís Éireann, the folklore departments of the universities, and the Irish traditional Music Archive, have added significantly to an awareness of the corpus of ethnic music. The phenomenal revival of interest in this music as a living tradition since the early 1960s (exemplified by the unprecedented success of music festivals, summer schools, and individual exponents) attests to the cultural significance of the ethnic repertory in contemporary Ireland. The inherent interest of this repertory has at last transcended its symbolic resonances of political and cultural autonomy. The widespread (although not complete) failure of this vast resource to integrate with the techniques and strategies of art music is likewise undeniable.
Bibliography
Breathnach, Breandán , Folk Music and Dances of Ireland (1989)
Harry White
