Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors' Notes

Traditional music plays an enormous role in offering the Irish, worldwide, ways to imagine themselves. It has become a truism to say that the music evokes antiquity and innocence—a cliché made even harder to assert when one considers the high-tech, intensely marketed, proprietary character of the music industry today. Who, in the end, now "owns" the music? And yet, behind the corporate packaging, we may still hear the intimation of the more communitarian, less mercenary world that went before us. Here, Dr. Christopher Smith reflects on how that world can inform the teaching of traditional music. Drawing on cultural anthropology, the essays of Gary Snyder, and on his own varied experience as teacher and performer, Smith arrives at a deeply humane pedagogic philosophy in which music and its teaching both resist commodification, and admit the reality of love. Christopher Smith is a much-recorded master of the Irish bouzouki; his publications include Celtic Backup for All Instrumentalists (1998) and essays on Miles Davis, Irish film, and the blues.

Oral tales, no less than traditional tunes, can also be contested sites, as Anne Markey notes here in a far-ranging survey of Irish folklore. Noting that "folklore" itself is a relatively recent concept, Markey shows that the line between literary fairy stories and authentic folklore was drawn, redrawn, and transgressed many times in the nineteenth century and after. While not always reliable in their collecting and editing of folktales, such early authors as Thomas Crofton Croker, Patrick Kennedy, and Sir William and Lady Wilde generally aspired to accuracy. Nearer the end of the century, Douglas Hyde called for an even more rigorously scientific approach to folklore collecting while asserting its intimate links to a Gaelic way of life. Yet as the Literary Revival flourished, such titans as Yeats and Synge strove to shift folklore out of received tradition and into a creative, literary milieu. An Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Scholar, Anne Markey has recently completed a doctoral dissertation on Oscar Wilde's fairy tales.

Now teaching at Babson College, poet and translator Mary O'Donoghue (b. 1975), like many younger Irish poets, displays global sensibilities informed by more than the Irish traditions of brogue and blás. These poets graze worldwide on all manner of artistic and intellectual artifacts; here, for instance, O'Donoghue's chilling poem "Dauernarkose" calculatingly uses mathematical terms to pity the "cure" of a female schizophrenic. O'Donoghue can also display a penchant for dark local ironies in poems like "Rockbed," wherein Diarmuid and Grainne are invoked at a trysting place in Boston Harbor—calling to mind not just Auden or MacNeice, but also Mahon and, particularly, Paul Muldoon. And in "The Stylist," she comically works the proposition that poems might be inscribed on single strand of hair—a detailed joke in the manner of a Flann O'Brien. Mary O'Donoghue is the author of Tulle (2001) and of Dürer's Green Passion, forthcoming from Dedalus Press.

The approaching centennial of Louis MacNeice's birth in Belfast in 1907 will no doubt bring renewed attention to this complex figure in British and Irish literature. Indeed, a planned centenary conference at Queen's University, Belfast is already in the works (see http://www.qub.ac.uk/heaneycentre/news.htm). Dr. James Matthew Wilson examines here the philosophical and ethical bases of MacNeice's understandings of both the self and the self's relationship to the community. MacNeice struggled to balance Aristotle's assertion that man was inherently a political being against the individualist claims of Kant, eventually (as would befit a poet in wartime Britain) favoring the former. "MacNeice engages the philosopher directly and explicitly," Wilson notes, adding that the poet "well perceived that Aristotle offered something radically different from—and more desirable than—the weltering of modern philosophy." James Matthew Wilson has contributed articles on modern poetry to the Yeats-Eliot Review, Christianity and Literature, and elsewhere.

A frequent presenter at the American Conference for Irish Studies and other gatherings, political scientist Timothy J. White has often published on cultural transformation in Ireland in such journals as the...