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Reviewed by:
  • The Irishness of Irish Music
  • Ann Morrison Spinney
The Irishness of Irish Music. By John O'Flynn. (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. [xv, 239 p. ISBN 9780754657149. $99.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, discography, filmography, index.

The deceptively casual title of this book poses the essential challenge that ought to be asked of any musical genre that represents a group of people: what exactly in this music is identifiable with this group? To answer the question for Irish music, the author draws on fieldwork, popular media, and scholarly literature. Ireland is a particularly interesting case study in musical nationalism because during the last four decades rapid social change has transformed this island into a heterogeneous place interacting with the whole world, at the same time as Irish music has become a globally recognized brand. As Gerry Smyth notes in the jacket blurb, "a proper scholarly analysis" of Irishness in music has been sorely needed as a reference point for the theoretical speculation going on in all disciplines examining modern Ireland. O'Flynn [End Page 778] has accomplished this while couching his musical analysis in layman's terms, making his ideas accessible to a broad academic audience.

The book is structured conventionally: theoretical precedents for defining cultural styles are surveyed, and the field of study presented, before original analysis commences. O'Flynn cuts through definitional arguments surrounding "what counts as Irish music" (p. 1) by focusing on "music produced in Ireland" (p. 4). The three pages it takes to do this are symptomatic of the book's style, though there are more incisive passages. O'Flynn settles on three broad musical style categories: traditional, popular, and classical. These rubrics are carefully chosen and for the most part they work. After proposing an interpretive framework in chapter 1, the second chapter presents historical background on all three style categories. Such contextualization is important, because terms acquire social meaning; and specific associations have accrued to "traditional" in Ireland.

O'Flynn begins to substantiate his original contributions in chapter 3. By examining data about music consumption in Ireland he challenges assumptions long held to be self-evident truths. The next chapter, titled "Snapshots," describes and categorizes his primary source data. His fieldwork took place "between the years 1999–2001" (p. 65) at twelve domestic musical events, ranging across the three style categories of traditional, popular, and classical. His interview group was sixty-seven people, which he warns is too small to constitute a survey; but it is plentiful for a qualitative study. Thematic analysis drawn from the interviews is presented in chapter 5 to address crucial arguments about identity in music laid out in the first chapter's theoretical overview. O'Flynn also draws from published materials, principally music journalism and interviews with musicians. The collected data is rich—some statements have to be reexamined in subsequent chapters—and lively, and constitutes the heart of the book. "Irishness and Music in a Changing Society" (chap. 6) places the data in structural context. Chapter 7 teases out of the data musical style features that are considered Irish. O'Flynn's findings match my own (in press) among American fans of Irish music; his more extensive analysis of Irish identifications include proposing that the popular terms "Celtic pop" and "Irish rock" are " 'soft' and 'hard' formulations of the same phenomenon" (p. 163; see also Richard Peterson's 1997 monograph, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity [Chicago: University of Chicago Press]). His interpretation of "a preference for acoustic resources" among Irish popular artists (p. 164) could be challenged, given that this nation's most successful artists—Enya, U2—are heavily mediated by technology; but measured by numbers of artists he is undoubtedly correct, and this provides a significant link between popular and traditional styles in Ireland. Chapter 8 tackles the question of authenticity in Irish music, which O'Flynn views through the lens of dialectics. The principal binary opposition is of course authentic/inauthentic and he gives excellent attention throughout his discussion to the role of listener-consumers in the negotiation of authenticity. He seems to recognize that binary categories are a theoretical imposition when he cites Fintan Vallely's (1997) model of...

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