Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives by Martin Dowling (review)

James Joyce's interest in the history of Irish music is evident in his "Early Commonplace Book," a notebook in which he collected information and quotations between 1903 and 1912.¹ Under the four categories of verse, biography and history, fiction, and speeches, Joyce lists hundreds of texts relating to Ireland and Irish culture. Evidently he was gathering information on traditional Irish music, since there are references to many sources including Patrick Weston Joyce's Ancient Irish Music and Song: A Collection of Songs in the Irish Language Set to Music, Alfred Perceval Graves's The Irish Songbook, With Original Irish Airs, and George Sigerson's Bards of the Gael and Gall.² From the evocation of "the old Irish tonality" in his short story, "The Dead," to the "native Doric" of Ulysses to the cyclical form and thematic concerns of Finnegans Wake, the imprint of his knowledge of traditional Irish music is apparent throughout Joyce's writing (D 210, U 11.991). While his many allusions to Irish song, and to the melodies that Thomas Moore created by penning English words to old Irish airs, are well known, the overall art form of traditional Irish music has been something of an absent presence in Joyce criticism. It has received considerably less attention than classical, opera, vocal, and music-hall traditions. This disparity stems in part from the critical lens of the early responders to Joyce, who placed his work, in particular, the extraordinarily innovative writing of Finnegans Wake, in the context of the European avant garde, often at the expense of recognizing the influence of an Irish cultural heritage on his linguistic and formal experimentations. The lack of critical attention to the topic may also reflect the gap that developed between the fields of traditional music and the study of literature in Ireland.

Contextualizing Joyce's work in a truly comprehensive Irish cultural framework, including a broad musical overview, in fact, remains a task to be undertaken. For this reason alone, a book promising to place Joyce within the historical and cultural framework of Ireland is welcomed. The scope of Martin Dowling's Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives is extremely ambitious; he traces the historical and socioeconomic events that influenced the development of traditional Irish music from the eighteenth century to the peace process in the North of Ireland in the last decades of the twentieth. Dowling brings the perspective of both a practicing musician and a historian to the field, which distinguishes his book from existing work on traditional music; in it, he sets out to demonstrate that "[t]raditional music is not the survival of some ancient and timeless manifestation of the essence of Irishness or the Celtic spirit, but rather a modern pursuit that kept time with the dramatic and sometimes violent modernisation of Irish society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (12). Despite the chronological span of the book's remit, one of the five chapters is devoted to "James Joyce and Traditional Song," while the preceding chapter discusses music at the time of the Irish literary revival, another context that has been inadequately explored in Joyce studies.

Given its front-cover image of Joyce playing a guitar, Dowling's book promises more in this area than it can be expected to deliver. The discussion of Joyce is limited to two stories from Dubliners, "The Dead" and "A Mother," and to the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses. This is not to suggest that some of the issues raised in the Joyce chapter do not have value in the wider debate on the role of traditional Irish music in Joyce's works. For example, Dowling weighs in on the issue concerning the absence of a "highly developed" art music in Ireland (179). The process whereby an indigenous musical tradition was quarried so as to provide the bones of inspiration for a new art music in the European classical...