Features of Irish Dance Music

"The focus of this paper is to bring into light the traditional categories of Irish dance music, emphasizing the musical characteristics that differentiate them. Energetic and effervescent, Irish dance music is rarely analyzed, with Irish folklore lacking a school of dedicated musicologists. The topic of this article is important in the context of the tensions related to globalization, commodification, and transformations in Irish Traditional Music, that scholars are examining. The paper includes musical examples of the traditional Irish dance music categories, for a better view of the phenomenon. Keywords: Irish music, dance music, ethnomusicology. "

Shibboleths of Grief: Paul Muldoon’s “The Triumph”

The essay explores Paul Muldoon’s elegy for the fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson with a view to showing that “The Triumph” seeks to evoke a ground where political, cultural and religious polarities are destabilized. As the various intertextual allusions in the poem are traced, it is argued that Muldoon seeks to revise the notion of the Irish shibboleths that, as the poem puts it, “are meant to trip you up.” In lieu of this linguistic and political slipperiness, “The Triumph” situates Carson’s protean invocations of Belfast and traditional Irish music as the new shibboleths of collectivity.

Irish Music in Wellington: a Study of a Local Music Community

<p>The Irish session is a musical, social and cultural experience that has emerged from international popularisation and globalisation. In New Zealand today, communities of Irish music enthusiasts maintain links to an international arena, and the session is valued as a context for musical enjoyment and the affirmation of Irish identity. Throughout my research I immersed myself in Wellington's vibrant Irish music scene with fieldwork techniques that included participant observation, sound recordings, and performance. The major part of this study took place in two local Wellington pubs - Molly Malone's and Kitty O'Shea's - but I also observed sessions in other New Zealand cities and in Ireland. The similarities and differences between the two Wellington sessions were examined in detail and my research included extensive interviews with the participants. In addition to exploring Irish essions in the context of two Wellington pubs, this thesis explores session instrumentation and repertoire, and aspects of cultural identity that include the participant's experiences with Irish music. This thesis also examines how individual session members actively contribute and link their musical training and background to a transnational Irish music community. By studying the individual and musical identities of those actively involved in the community, this thesis reveals that Irish music in Wellington is an active and dynamic scene made up of enthusiasts with a variety of musical and cultural backgrounds. With music as its heart, the Wellington session community, is simultaneously localised in New Zealand but extends outward and connects with Irish communities globally.</p>

Irish Music in Wellington: a Study of a Local Music Community

<p>The Irish session is a musical, social and cultural experience that has emerged from international popularisation and globalisation. In New Zealand today, communities of Irish music enthusiasts maintain links to an international arena, and the session is valued as a context for musical enjoyment and the affirmation of Irish identity. Throughout my research I immersed myself in Wellington's vibrant Irish music scene with fieldwork techniques that included participant observation, sound recordings, and performance. The major part of this study took place in two local Wellington pubs - Molly Malone's and Kitty O'Shea's - but I also observed sessions in other New Zealand cities and in Ireland. The similarities and differences between the two Wellington sessions were examined in detail and my research included extensive interviews with the participants. In addition to exploring Irish essions in the context of two Wellington pubs, this thesis explores session instrumentation and repertoire, and aspects of cultural identity that include the participant's experiences with Irish music. This thesis also examines how individual session members actively contribute and link their musical training and background to a transnational Irish music community. By studying the individual and musical identities of those actively involved in the community, this thesis reveals that Irish music in Wellington is an active and dynamic scene made up of enthusiasts with a variety of musical and cultural backgrounds. With music as its heart, the Wellington session community, is simultaneously localised in New Zealand but extends outward and connects with Irish communities globally.</p>

The country and Irish problem

Country music has been popular in Ireland since the 1960s, most notably in the work of homegrown performers. Despite the durability of this appeal in the face of huge changes in Ireland and in the Irish music industry over a half-century, it remains curiously underexamined in the literature on Irish popular music. In this paper, I wish to argue the following: (1)Country music did not simply arise ‘naturally’ in Ireland as a reflection of musical or national characteristics: it was promoted as such.(2)Both popular and academic literature on the subject have tended to unreflectively echo the narrative that was introduced alongside the music in order to fix its audience.(3)In so doing, the literature reproduces a set of anxieties about modernity as it arrived in Ireland, about the postcolonial condition and about authenticity, even as it attempts to locate Irish popular music within these concerns.

Kerry Houston, Maria McHale, and Michael Murphy (eds), Irish Musical Studies 12: Documents of Irish Music History in the Long Nineteenth Century (2019)

A review of Kerry Houston, Maria McHale, and Michael Murphy (eds), Irish Musical Studies 12: Documents of Irish Music History in the Long Nineteenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2019). ISBN 9781846827242