'Tis Like They Never Left: Locating “Home” in the Music of Sliabh Aughty's Diaspora

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-507
Author(s):  
TIM COLLINS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Irish Music ◽  
Irish Traditional Music ◽  
West Of Ireland

AbstractThis article, which builds on research in the fields of Irish traditional music, place, and diaspora, focuses on a community of diasporic musicians from Sliabh Aughty, an upland region of approximately 250 square miles that encompasses the musical storehouses of east Clare and southeast Galway in the West of Ireland. It examines the importance of home for these musicians, who have been resident in the United States for many decades. Their personal music geographies are explored to ascertain how traditional Irish music plays a critical role in transcending their sense of dislocation and reconnecting them with “home.”

Elias Howe, William Bradbury Ryan, and Irish Music in Nineteenth-Century Boston

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL F. WELLS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Irish Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Irish Traditional Music ◽  
Fiddle Tunes

AbstractRyan's Mammoth Collection is a compendium of fiddle tunes assembled by William Bradbury Ryan. Originally published in Boston in 1883 by Elias Howe, Jr., it has remained in print in one form or another ever since. It has been used as a source of tunes by many generations of fiddlers in different stylistic traditions, but its value as a descriptive document of the repertoire of late-nineteenth-century Boston, particularly the Irish community in that city, has largely been overlooked. Ryan, rather than Capt. Francis O'Neill of Chicago, should be regarded as the first great documentarian of Irish traditional music in the United States.

Queer as Trad

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tes Slominski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Ethnicity And Race ◽  
Irish Traditional Music

This chapter demonstrates that studying the experiences of queer musicians and dancers is vital to understanding the relationships among music, selfhood, and social identities in Irish traditional music. By breaking the silence around LGBTQ performers of Irish traditional music through ethnographic interviews with queer musicians in the United States, this chapter addresses the paradox that non-normative participants experience musical performance as simultaneously liberatory and confining. This chapter explores musicians’ feelingful experiences of “the music itself” as an escape and examines the issues queer musicians face in gaining recognition in the Irish traditional music scene. More broadly, this chapter begins a conversation about nationalist assumptions around sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and race still implicit in the (re)production of sounds and bodily practices considered “Irish.”

Creating a Community in Confinement

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
April Kamp-Whittaker ◽  
Bonnie J. Clark
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
The West ◽  
Incarceration Camps

In 1942 Japanese Americans from the west coast of the United States were forcibly relocated to incarceration camps scattered across the interior of the country. Relocation disrupted existing social networks, first through displacement and then through separation between the ten primary internment centers. Evidence revealed through archaeological study of one such site—Amache, Colorado—highlights the strategies of individuals living in these haphazard arrangements for creating more cohesive social groups and contributes to the disciplinary conversation about the critical role neighborhoods can play in community formation among the relocated.

Paddy Cronin: Musical Influences on a Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Player in the United States

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-489
Author(s):  
MATT CRANITCH
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Irish Traditional Music

AbstractIn the world of Irish traditional music, Paddy Cronin from Sliabh Luachra in the southwest of Ireland is regarded as one of the tradition's exceptional fiddle players. Although his music exhibits many characteristics of the Sliabh Luachra tradition, it also has other elements and features, primarily from the Sligo style. A pupil of Pádraig O'Keeffe (the “Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Master”), Cronin emigrated to Boston in 1949 and lived there for approximately forty years. Before he left Ireland, he had been familiar with the music of the Sligo masters, such as Michael Coleman and James Morrison, who had gone to the United States many years before him. In Boston Paddy met and played with many of the great Sligo musicians, and also had the opportunity to hear music in other styles, including that of Canadian musicians, whose use of piano accompaniment he admired greatly. This article considers his music before and after he left Ireland, and compares him to Coleman and Morrison by considering their respective performances of the reel “Farewell to Ireland.”

Mafias on the Move

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Varese
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Market Expansion ◽  
The North ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
At Will

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.

The Rise and Fall of Great Powers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geir Lundestad
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
The West ◽  
Economic Modernization

There are no laws in history. Realists, liberals, and others are both right and wrong. Although no one can be certain that military incidents may not happen, for the foreseeable future China and the United States are unlikely to favor major war. They have cooperated well for almost four decades now. China is likely to continue to focus on its economic modernization. It has far to go to measure up to the West. The American-Chinese economies are still complementary. A conflict with the United States or even with China’s neighbors would have damaging repercussions for China’s economic goals. The United States is so strong that it would make little sense for China to take it on militarily. There are also other deterrents against war, from nuclear weapons to emerging norms about international relations. It is anybody’s guess what will happen after the next few decades. History indicates anything is possible.

The Proximity of Other Skins

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celine Parreñas Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Korea ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Existing Frames ◽  
The Voice

Transnational films representing intimacy and inequality disrupt and disgust Western spectators. When wounded bodies within poverty entangle with healthy wealthy bodies in sex, romance and care, fear and hatred combine with desire and fetishism. Works from the Philippines, South Korea, and independents from the United States and France may not be made for the West and may not make use of Hollywood traditions. Rather, they demand recognition for the knowledge they produce beyond our existing frames. They challenge us to go beyond passive consumption, or introspection of ourselves as spectators, for they represent new ways of world-making we cannot unsee, unhear, or unfeel. The spectator is redirected to go beyond the rapture of consuming the other to the rupture that arises from witnessing pain and suffering. Self-displacement is what proximity to intimate inequality in cinema ultimately compels and demands so as to establish an ethical way of relating to others. In undoing the spectator, the voice of the transnational filmmaker emerges. Not only do we need to listen to filmmakers from outside Hollywood who unflinchingly engage the inexpressibility of difference, we need to make room for critics and theorists who prioritize the subjectivities of others. When the demographics of filmmakers and film scholars are not as diverse as its spectators, films narrow our worldviews. To recognize our culpability in the denigration of others unleashes the power of cinema. The unbearability of stories we don’t want to watch and don’t want to feel must be borne.

Building America

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean H. Baker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Water System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Early American ◽  
Transatlantic Exchange ◽  
The Us ◽  
Private Homes

Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe is a biography of America’s first professionally trained architect and engineer. Born in 1764, Latrobe was raised in Moravian communities in England and Germany. His parents expected him to follow his father and brother into the ministry, but he rebelled against the church. Moved to London, he studied architecture and engineering. In 1795 he emigrated to the United States and became part of the period’s Transatlantic Exchange. Latrobe soon was famous for his neoclassical architecture, designing important buildings, including the US Capitol and Baltimore Basilica as well as private homes. Carpenters and millwrights who built structures more cheaply and less permanently than Latrobe challenged his efforts to establish architecture as a profession. Rarely during his twenty-five years in the United States was he financially secure, and when he was, he speculated on risky ventures that lost money. He declared bankruptcy in 1817 and moved to New Orleans, the sixth American city that he lived in, hoping to recoup his finances by installing a municipal water system. He died there of yellow fever in 1820. The themes that emerge in this biography are the critical role Latrobe played in the culture of the early republic through his buildings and his genius in neoclassical design. Like the nation’s political founders, Latrobe was committed to creating an exceptional nation, expressed in his case by buildings and internal improvements. Additionally, given the extensive primary sources available for this biography, an examination of his life reveals early American attitudes toward class, family, and religion.

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