Music in Irish Cultural History (review)

Music in Irish Cultural History opens by quoting the philosopher Jacques Attali's defiant declaration that "For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible." Smyth's book, a collection of ten discrete essays exploring song, film, poetry, and fiction begins with the premise that sound, as a lived human experience, looms large in all cultural productions and should be recognized even in the medium of the visually based text. Smyth claims that such an approach to literary texts and other cultural productions "has not fared particularly well" in Irish Studies, though music has been immensely influential in Irish literary, cultural, and political arenas.

The essays fall into two basic groups, some exploring the relationship between music and political or social power in Irish history, while others develop and illustrate analytical or theoretical frameworks for the general study of music in texts. "Betrayal as Theme and Influence in Thomas Moore's On Music," is a helpful historical base for Smyth's movement from the musical to the political arena. Smyth's reading of "On Music" in Moore's Irish Melodies (1810) argues astutely—if not for the first time—that Moore's translation of "pristine Irish melodies" into the "romantic idiom of the drawing room—worse still, the English drawing room" is problematic, a vindication but also a betrayal of the authentic Irish cultural product.

Two essays take on and expose the musically inflected clichés associated with the "condition of Irishness." Smyth comments on the process by which the musical stereotypes of "Paddy Sad and Paddy Mad" have become embedded in the ideology of Irish national character. While Paddy Sad connotes "a history of dispossession and defeat," Paddy Mad is simply the "comic counterpart to his melancholy relative." Both characterizations are desperately misguided and misguiding when let loose in popular culture. Here, Smyth engages with the phenomenon of the global marketplace and the inevitable slippage into embarrassing cultural in authenticity, but he is careful to trace the genealogy of Paddy Sad and Paddy Mad in history and in theory, reaching back to Sydney Owenson's Wild Irish Girl (1806) as well as to discussions of the relationship between music and emotion in contemporary affective theory.

In "Celtic Music: From the Margins to the Centre (And Back Again)," Smyth argues that the power relations embedded in past cultural productions must be radically reoriented in the contemporary moment. Specifically, he observes that the appealing spatial model applied to discourses of music, in which a peripheral Celtic discourse is set off against the dominant center, is now inadequate. Due to modern technology, "cross-fertilization with other genres," and altered modes of dissemination, "traditional" Irish music has managed to escape the power dynamics ruling the spatialized relations between center and periphery. The theoretical basis of this chapter, employing Deleuze and Guttari to illustrate the web in which Celtic music now persists as a unit of flow, is remarkably lucid. Here and elsewhere, Smyth succeeds in presenting a distinct theoretical tool to bring to literary and cultural studies of music.

In fact, several essays explicitly foreground methods for undertaking a "musical" literary criticism. Smyth investigates Joyce's Dubliners, specifically "The Dead," to show different ways of using music as a critical prism. He illustrates Joyce's structural debt to the notoriously protean textuality of the ballad tradition. Joyce, he argues, was drawn to the fluid yet archetypal ballad form as a source for the energies he wished to activate within his own writing. A later chapter gives a structural reading of Bernard MacLaverty's "musical novel," Grace Notes (1997), and argues that the author incorporates the musical form of repetition in order to mimic the discursive strategies of nationalist and Unionist discourses in the "Troubles." To continue his reading of "The Dead," Smyth turns to music as experience, rather than...