Music in Ireland--Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (review)

We have come a long way since earlier publications with the title 'Music in Ireland'. But Aloys Fleischmann, editor of Music in Ireland: A Symposium (1952), would probably turn in his grave if he could see this volume. While one might criticize that venerable (and important) publication for the virtual neglect of traditional music in its 371 pages, a much later volume, Music in Ireland, 1848-1998, edited by Richard Pine (Cork, 1998), includes at least one chapter devoted to Irish traditional music in the course of 158 pages.

Now comes a new Music in Ireland, and the first one not published in Ireland. Immediately we are confronted with the prejudices about Ireland and Irish music which tell us that music in that country is invariably synonymous with traditional music. Whether the editors of this small volume were aware of their predecessors may be doubted, but the geographical distance from their chosen topic does not excuse a lack of research or information. As if to make up for past neglect in books with a comparable title, Dorothea E. Hast and Stanley Scott devote their pages exclusively to traditional music. Probably no one would object to this practice if the title did not read Music in Ireland: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture and if the book were not published by Oxford University Press, normally a guarantee of sound academic research. The book is part of the new Global Music Series (see also the preceding review (Eds.)), and the very use of the term 'global' nowadays appears to imply that we are moving in the realm of ethnomusicology, itself a highly debatable thesis. But somebody should remind authors, series editors, and the publisher that 'experiencing music' and 'expressing culture' may have different modes and forms, not least in Ireland. So what about art music, what about rock and pop music?

Of course, in an ethnomusicological publication nobody would necessarily expect any coverage of art and popular music. But first, other books in this series do have chapters on 'classical' music (such as the Music in America volume), so why can't this one? Second, it is time to put an end to stereotypical generalizations about what constitutes Irish music, at least when a respected academic publisher is involved.

It would have been easy to avoid this critique if the volume had been properly titled, as 'Traditional' or 'Folk' Music in Ireland, but then it would undoubtedly have provoked comparisons with the excellent books by Breandán Breathnach (Folk Music and Dances of Ireland (Cork, 1971)) and Tomás Ó Canainn (Traditional Music in Ireland (London, 1978)), which wouldn't have been all that favourable either. Incidentally, this points to another fault of the present volume, namely the quality of the bibliography (here called 'Reading' in the section 'Resources'): Breathnach's volume, a seminal publication despite its age, is not listed at all, and Ó Canainn's is listed as appearing at Cork in 1993 (true, but without a reference to the first edition). Similarly (remaining for a moment with the bibliography), Georges D. Zimmermann's volume Songs of Irish Rebellion, here listed as published in 2002, first came out in 1967, and the author's name is spelt with two 'n's, not one. This is more than nitpicking, for it speaks for the slipshod attitude to research that extends into the appendices.

When art music is mentioned in the book it appears to be an unconscious coincidence, as in chapter 2 ('Historical Continuities'), which devotes one page (p. 25) to a discussion of the Bunting collections and to Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies. The correct description of Bunting as being 'trained as a classical musician' seems not to prompt the authors to wonder what a classical musician is doing in a country so seemingly full of traditional music, whereas the incorrect description of Moore's pieces as 'popular parlor music...