music

music. The condition of music in modern Irish history can briefly be characterized as a more or less polarized development of colonial and ethnic ideologies of culture.

Sources which preserve Irish music prior to the mid‐17th century are remarkably few, although the literature of early and medieval Ireland repays close scrutiny with regard to the presence of music as a vital seam in the fabric of pre‐Christian and early Christian culture. The oral transmission of the music itself (sacred as well as secular) poses considerable problems for the historian: the few manuscript sources which appear to record elements of the (sacred) Celtic rite, for example, date from the 15th century, and must thus be regarded with circumspection, in terms of recovering what in probability was a rich tradition of monophony. Sporadic but instructive comments by outsiders, from Gerald of Wales in the 12th century to Spenser in the 16th, clearly attest to the prominence of music in Gaelic tribal culture. Gerald's remarks are disinterested, in so far as he was concerned with the technical prowess and civilizing influence of musicians, but Spenser's famous antagonism towards bardic culture apostrophizes that reading of Irish music as an instrument of political resistance which was to endure in the minds of English and Irish commentators alike.

The radical changes wrought in Irish society by the defeat of the Gaelic aristocracy at Kinsale in 1601 were reflected not least in the fragmentation and decline of music. Although Gaelic literature in the 17th century retained its learning and technical complexity (notwithstanding the permanent sense of dispossession and expectation which it evinced), the status and condition of music markedly deteriorated. Set against the newly imported icons of English musical culture, the art of the native executant, ‘illiterate and blind’, seemed peripheral and (at best) an object of curious delight.

The comparative stability enjoyed by the Protestant interest in Ireland after the Williamite War produced a corresponding measure of musical continuity from within the Pale throughout the 18th century. Although the Protestant ascendancy did not espouse a taste for serious opera in Italian, it patronized other forms of high musical culture, and a number of gifted musicians (among them, Matthew Dubourg, Johann Sgismond Cousser, and Francesco Geminiani) settled for long periods in Dublin. The distinctive feature of ascendancy taste, apart from the popularity of ballad opera, was the promotion of major choral works (oratorios, odes, and anthems) for charitable purposes, including the support of hospitals and the relief of prisoners in the city jails. The choirs of St Patrick's and Christ Church cathedrals provided the backbone of many of these performances, with distinguished soloists invited from London. The climax of these activities was the extended visit which George Frideric Handel paid to Dublin in 1741–2, which culminated in the premiere of Messiah on 13 April 1742 in Neal's music hall, Fishamble Street. Nevertheless, a continuing disdain for art music as a harbinger of popery ensured that it occupied a marginal place in Irish intellectual life. Attempts towards the end of the century to narrow the gulf between Gaelic and ascendancy musical cultures vividly illustrated the differences between them. While Joseph Cooper Walker, in his Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786), sought to identify Turlough Carolan (1670–1738) as the proper focus of Irish musical endeavour, Charles Burney, in 1787, contemptuously dismissed the role of the Irish bard as ‘little better than that of piper to the Whiteboys, and other savage and lawless ruffians’.

A small number of collections of ethnic music had been published throughout the 18th century (beginning in 1724) but it was not until the appearance of Edward Bunting's General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music (3 vols., 1797, 1809, 1840) that the anglophone tradition took any real cognizance of the native repertory. Thomas Moore's (1799–1852) Irish Melodies, which appeared in ten volumes between 1808 and 1834, drew liberally from Bunting's publication, and in the process provided further evidence of disparity between two traditions of Irish music. Whereas Bunting (and the collectors who succeeded him) laboured to preserve the ethnic repertory essentially as an antiquarian, Moore politicized this repertory from within the fold of the colonial establishment. Although Bunting deeply resented this interpretation of Irish music, its appeal gathered momentum through the 19th century. When Moore's projection of Irish melody was cross‐fertilized with the ballad tradition (via the efforts of Young Ireland and the musical publications of Thomas Davis in particular), the polarized condition of ethnic music as the intelligencer of nationalism vis‐á‐vis the colonial status of art music was complete. Although several composers in the period 1760–1830 introduced the popular tradition of arranging Irish melodies, ‘the ostentation of science and mere trick execution’ appeared to be substituted for ‘the wonderful charm of melody’ ( J. Gamble in 1819).

With the passing of the Act of Union in 1801, the cultivation of music within the art tradition notably waned. Choral societies developed in Dublin from 1810 onwards and gained considerable strength in the Victorian period, while the lack of professional music‐making found some compensation in the surge of amateur activity fostered by the Robinson family and Robert Prescott Stewart, among others. The Theatre Royal in Dublin, which opened in 1821, was perhaps the most important of a number of similar venues in Dublin, Cork, and Belfast, where the international operatic successes of the day (including operas by Irish‐born composers such as Wallace and Balfe) were regularly given within a few years of their British or European premieres. The improved condition of Roman Catholics after Catholic emancipation (1829) was reflected in the surge of music associated with the devotional revolution. In particular Paul Cullen's steady drive towards the Romanization of the Catholic liturgy inspired a musical reanimation of astounding proportions. The strong connections which the Irish Society of St Cecilia (1878– ) formed with European associations also devoted to the scholarly and pragmatic dissemination of plainchant and High Renaissance church music attests to a vital chapter in Irish music which the colonial‐ethnic division tends to occlude. In essence, ‘Cecilianism’ speaks to the aspirations of a strong Catholic middle class in Ireland which sought and found in Church music an aesthetic raison d'être. One of its chief proponents was Edward Martyn, better known as co‐founder of the Irish Literary Theatre and sometime president of Sinn Féin.

The inauguration in 1897 of an Irish music festival, the Feis Ceoil, is illustrative of the division which continued to attend music in Ireland at the close of the century. Although the Feis did espouse ethnic music to a degree, it quickly became apparent that two kinds of music—however nationalistic the motivation of the Feis—required two kinds of festival. Efforts to merge the resources of European art music and the indigenous repertory languished, despite the prominence of music as a symbolic intelligence during the heyday of the Celtic revival. Music functioned in Irish poetry and drama as a commonplace metaphor of the literary imagination, but the development of Irish music itself was nugatory. The incidental music written by John F. Larchet for plays given at the abbey (including Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910) ) and the Irish opera Eithne (1910) by Robert O'Dwyer reflect efforts at synthesis which only partly succeeded. The early compositions of Arnold Bax were directly inspired by Yeats and the literary revival, but escaped the burden of the ethnic tradition.

After 1922, the cultural oppressiveness of the ethnic repertory worsened, in so far as composers were caught between the crisis of (musical) modernism abroad and that of nationalism at home. While critics recognized that a cosmetic arrangement of Irish melodies was a poor substitute for a wholly developed yet manifestly Irish art music, the raw politicization of Irish traditional music as national resource continued to inhibit composers. And as late as 1950, Brian Boydell could write (with justification) that ‘music in Ireland … is in a shocking state’. Boydell's concern was with the dearth of infrastructures which marked musical life throughout the country, a lack repaired in significant measure by Radio Telefís Éireann (the expansion of its orchestras) and by the improvement in educational facilities and opportunities for performance which followed upon the economic growth of the 1960s.

The 1960s also witnessed the troubled career of Sean Ó Riada (1930–71), perhaps the only composer to have been comfortably received by the verbally dominated cultural matrix of modern Ireland. Ó Riada's own crisis of artistic growth, in which he abandoned art music for a new and enduring recreation of the ethnic repertory, was undoubtedly born of that colonial–ethnic fissure which has been the signature of music in Ireland for three centuries. Although younger Irish composers (notably Gerald Barry, Raymond Deane, and John Buckley) have escaped the anxiety of his influence (both as to Ó Riada's own preoccupations and the expectations which his music created), none has overcome the paradox of a musical tradition which appears to remainder the enterprise of original composition.

See also musical institutions and venues; opera; ballads; popular music; ethnic music; belfast harp festival; dancing.

Bibliography

Daly, Kieran , Catholic Church Music in Ireland, 1878–1903 (1995)
Fleischmann, Aloys (ed.), Music in Ireland (1952)
Gillen, Gerard, and White, Harry (eds.), Irish Musical Studies (1990– )

Harry White