The Preservation of Music and Irish Cultural History

Author(s): Harry White

Source: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music , Dec., 1996, Vol.
27, No. 2 (Dec., 1996), pp. 123-138
Published by: Croatian Musicological Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3108342

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H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2,123-138 123

THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC

AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY'

UDC: 781.1
HARRY WHITE
Original Scientific Paper
Izvorni znanstveni danak
University College Dublin, Received: November 18,1996
Department of Music, Primljeno: 18. studenog 1996.
Accepted: November 26, 1996
Belfield, DUBLIN 4, Ireland Prihvadeno: 26. studenog 1996.

Abstract - R6sum6

The preservation of traditional music in Ire- table fact of the past which could inspire the
land may be regarded initially as the outgrowth present in terms of extra-musical thought (po-
of antiquarian interest from within the Protes-litical and literary) but which silenced the claim
tant Ascendancy. With the development of aof an original art music upon the Irish mind.
nationalist political consciousness in the nine- Unlike the cross-fertilization of ethnic and art
teenth century however, music in Ireland rap- traditions represented by Bart6k's achievement
idly assumed symbolic connotations of emanci- in Hungary, the polarised condition of music in
pation and artistic regeneration which ironically Ireland has meant that the preservation of one
inhibited the growth of an independent art mu- tradition (represented in the first instance by the
sic. The preservation of the ethnic repertory con-great collectors) has not particularly enhanced
solidated the notion of Irish music as an immu- the cultivation of the other.

Late in his life, unhappy in New York, but resolute to the end, Bl1a Bart6k
delivered a lecture on the renaissance of Art Music in Hungary for which he him-
self (along with Zoltan Kodcly) was largely responsible:
The start for the creation of the new Hungarian art music was given first by a
thorough knowledge of the devices of old and contemporary Western art music (for
the technique of composition); and second by this newly discovered rural material of
incomparable beauty and perfection (this for the spirit of our works to be created).
Scores of aspects could be distinguished and quoted by which this [peasant music]
material exerted its influence on us; for instance: tonal influence, melodic influence,
rhythmic influence, and even structural influence.2

I An earlier version of this paper was delivered to the Graduate Seminar in Irish Folklore,
University College Dublin, on 22 April, 1995.
2 See B. SUCHOFF, ed., B6la Bart6k Essays, London 1976, p. 363.

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124 H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2, 123-138

I begin thus because there may be something instructive about the fact that
the greatest single collector of European folk music in the twentieth century was
also a vital presence in the amorphous tapestry of art music after the first world
war. It is a commonplace to acknowledge Bdla Bart6k as a seminal voice in the re-
emancipation of genres, ideologies and styles which had been explosively under-
mined by the sheer force of modernism in general and by the collapse of tonality in
particular. There were actually three Bart6ks in musical terms - the virtuoso con-
cert pianist, the scholar and collector of folk music, and the composer. All three
were reconciled under the auspices of a personality so aloof and forbidding that
even his intimates were inclined to speak of 'Bart6k the inhuman', 'Bart6k the
artist of uncompromising purity', 'Bart6k the severe, the withdrawn' (Cecil Gray,
Hans Heinsheimer and Kodaily, in that order).3 As a composer who engaged fully
with the maelstrom of European musical modernism, one is conventionally in-
clined to think of him as belonging to that titanic triumvirate whose sphere of
influence extended from the death of Debussy and Mahler to the present day. Al-
ienated as he was by the glittering intelligence of Stravinsky's presence on one
side, and by the fundamental radicalism of Schoenberg on the other, Bart6k never-
theless espoused much of the spirit of musical modernism: its extreme mode of
rhetorical discourse, its decisive repudiation of traditional tonality, its iconoclastic
self-consciousness in the representation of traditional genres (opera, symphony,
and so on). But it is Bart6k's lifelong preoccupation with the study and collection of
folksong which profoundly distinguishes his voice from that of his great contem-
poraries. He moved with uncanny deliberation between the notation and recension
of thousands of Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Serbo-Croat melodies, and the
composition of original music which was rarely explicit in its address upon these
resources. To be sure, Bart6k arranged many hundreds of Hungarian melodies for
voice and piano, for piano alone and for choir, but such works do not in fact com-
prise his original music. The operas, the string quartets, the concertos, the orches-
tral suites and rhapsodies, the concerto for orchestra and the Music for strings,
percussion and celeste: these are the works which confer upon Bart6k the stature
he enjoys as a composer, and none of them betrays an undigested expertise in folk
song. Instead, the imaginative presence of the folk music informs Bart6k's original
works in ways which are quite specific, but not blatant. Foremost among these, of
course, are the modal structures and rhythmic cells with which Bart6k reinvigorated
the language of his original compositions. However severe the countenance of cer-
tain works (particularly the later string quartets), the continuity of musical resource
which Bart6k thus established between the music of the peasant and his own es-
says at the extreme edge of modernist musical thought redeemed and underwrote
the integrity of his compositional voice. We might say, in fact, that the historical
significance of the collector in Bart6k's case is that the folk music of central Europe
thus became an absolute factor in the development of European art music. This is
on two counts; firstly in terms of the huge corpus of folk melody which Bart6k

3 See Malcolm GILLIES, Bart6k Remembered, London 1990, pp. 215-220, which includes a
series of 'obituraries and testimonials' in which these terms of description notably occur.

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H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2,123-138 125

rehoused in his own arrangements, and secondly in the cross-fertilisation between

Bart6k's musical imagination, his technical prowess and the specific influences of
the ethnic repertory which he so magisterially comprehended. It is not too much
to say, indeed, that the continuity which he established between the music of the
peasant and his own works was of moral significance to this most extraordinary of
mid-twentieth century composers. This assertion notwithstanding, it is possible to
claim for Bart6k's original music an international (one might say transnational)
currency which is neither inhibited nor compromised by its recourse to the ethnic
resources which distinguish it.
This question of international currency arises too in relation to Irish music.
One of the difficulties I shall want to acknowledge in this paper is the failure inher-
ent in Irish music to establish just that level of continuity so remarkably advanced
by Bart6k between the resources of indigenous culture and (for want of a better
term) the international community of art music. This is not a recently-discovered
impasse: people concerned with music in Ireland have voiced it now for the better
part of two centuries. The conventional understanding in relation to this problem
is that a plenitude of music has been (and continues to be) recovered, collected and
in some measure published, all of which proclaims a remarkable richness of musi-
cal lore in Ireland. Despite this abundance, no corresponding significance would
seem to attach to its influence as a source of creative art music. To step outside the
immediate terms of this discussion for a moment, it is as if the scholarly interest in
Irish antiquities espoused in the last century had signally failed to produce a Celtic
Revival. Contemplate for a moment the prospect of no Yeats, no Synge, no Joyce,
notwithstanding the impeccable scholarship of the Royal Irish Academy and the
forgeries of Mac Pherson. Of course this comparison, vulnerable as it is to all kinds
of contradiction, will seem even less tenable to those who would point to the phe-
nomenal revival of interest in Irish traditional music within the past thirty-five
years and specifically since the advent of Gael Linn and Seln (5 Riada's Ceolt6irf
Cualann.4 But I am not at all persuaded that this phenomenon relates directly to
the preservation of music in Ireland as this is conventionally understood. It is true
that the practice of Irish traditional music has never enjoyed such widespread sup-
port as it does in the Ireland of the 1990s: one might even say that the thing itself
has become something of a cultural fetish, in which the prospect of language re-
vival has been usurped by the kudos and 6lan of an outstandingly successful me-
dia event. One might observe that the technical finesse of traditional music as a
hugely successful projection of Irish culture depends on that 'Ireland' which se-
renely exists on the airwaves of Europe and the United States. And if it is a country
of the mind (and of the media) it is marvellously plural, value-free, unembarrassed:
one can hear sean n6s singing in its archival purity, the virtuoso brilliance of The

4 Gael Linn is an organisation dedicated to the reanimation of Irish culture (including music)
established in 1953. It is particularly noteworthy for its large catalogue of recordings of Irish music;
Ceolt6iri Cualann is the ensemble founded by Seain 0 Riada (1931-1971) in the early 1960s. Its de-
mise in 1970 overlapped with the creation of The Chieftains, many of whose members belonged to 0
Riada's ensemble.

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126 H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996)2, 123-138

Chieftains or a tepid admixture of ethnic and commercial traditions, and all of it

thrives happily under the mantle of Irish music. More recently, that powerful cult
of personality which 0 Riada first exploited and which is now artfully developed
(as in the television series A River of Sound) has effected a continuity very differ-
ent from that envisaged by Bart6k, but far more potent in widespread appeal.5 As
George Steiner has remarked of popular musical culture in general, the politics of
Eden come loud.
I'm not sure that the new mandarins of Irish musical culture would have us
believe that the historical significance of two centuries of musical preservation
proudly comes to repose in this fantastic popularity. There is certainly a diver-
gence to be observed between the painstaking quest for a scientific preservation of
the ethnic repertory (in itself a problematic undertaking) and its ebullient exploita-
tion in popular and/or commercial modes of musical discourse. I am sure, how-
ever, that three consequences of this success are: (i) that the adroit juxtaposition of
authentic and popular arrangements enjoys a far more untroubled cultural au-
thority than any previous incarnation of the ethnic repertory; (ii) that the question
of art music is decisively eclipsed, so that the precedent of Bart6k (to say nothing
of Irish composers) enjoys no significance whatever, and (iii) that the ethnic integ-
rity of the music itself is destroyed.

2.

The first thing to note about the collection or preservation of Irish music is
that from about 1792, when it was first undertaken on a systematic basis, it has
conventionally been the preoccupation of antiquarians and folklorists, rather than
of professional musicians. Which is not to say that such collectors have lacked
musical expertise (on the contrary) but that they have sought to preserve the mu-
sic itself for more than purely musical motives. I should add immediately that the
great span of collectors which is initiated in the late eighteenth century by Edward
Bunting and concluded some five years ago with the passing of Aloys Fleischmann
is nonetheless remarkable precisely because both Bunting and Fleischmann were
of course professional musicians.6 It was Bunting's knowledge of the 'science' of
music that led him in the first place to be appointed to take the dictation of melo-
dies at the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792; at the other end of the timespan, it was the
late Professor Fleischmann's scholarly ambition to realise a thematic index of Irish
traditional music which led him into a field hitherto known to him largely as a
composer. But these considerations aside, the proper perspective for the collector in

5 A River of Sound, devised by Micheil 0( Sfiilleabhaiin, was first broadcast by Radio Telefis
tireann and the British Broadcasting Corporation (Northern Ireland) in 1995: its explicit intention
was to demonstrate the conjunction of influences in Irish music from its revival in the nineteenth
century to the present day.
6 Bunting's A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music appeared in 1797; he also published
collections in 1809 and 1840. Aloys Fleischmann's Source Index of Traditional Irish Melody will be
published by Garland Press (New York) in 1997.

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H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2,123-138 127

in Ireland was initially that of antiquarianism.7 It was when such antiquarianism

collided with the aspirations of romanticism that the apparently uncomplicated if
arduous business of recovering Irish music became burdened with a significance
of mixed blessing. This significance was fundamentally political, but it was also
cultural and in no small degree social.
These various levels should attend our reading of the collectors right from the
outset. The impulse which motivated the preservation of Irish music cannot sim-
ply be interpreted as an act of scholarly disinterestedness, even if it is quite incor-
rect to impute too broad a measure of political meaning in a period of Irish history
which is characterised by a notably complex degree of debate, radical opinion and
rebellion against the status quo. To instance one example: the close association
between Edward Bunting and the McCracken family does not prove his direct
espousal of the revolutionary tactics of the United Irishmen, but it does have a
direct bearing on the outgrowth of his collections of Irish music. When Bunting
decided to omit the publication of Gaelic texts from his second collection (1809)
which had been painstakingly accumulated and transcribed by his erstwhile col-
league Patrick Lynch, one is forced to conclude that the omission was prompted
by Lynch's betrayal of Thomas Russell, a United Irishman executed on Lynch's
evidence and a close friend of the McCracken family with whom Bunting was to
live for a period of forty years.'
Of far more significance, however, for Bunting as for the collectors who fol-
lowed him, was the conventional association drawn between Irish music and the
articulation of verbal feeling throughout the nineteenth century. Seamus Deane
has remarked that the translators and collectors of Irish music were anxious to
preserve in English as much as possible of the original songs and poems they trans-
lated, with the result that the corpus of popular Gaelic song which they collected
'became an important weapon in the long war against colonialism.'9 However prone
to modification this interpretation, it has the great merit of isolating the prevailing
condition of music in nineteenth-century Ireland: music as intelligencer of the text.
It is not hard to discover the roots of this condition. They lie within the strik-
ing communion of interest between politics and music so powerfully evinced in
the period 1792-1848 (a period which coincides, of course, with the first great
wave of musical preservation in Ireland). The attempt to project a sense of Irish
music as the outgrowth of antiquarian research in the first instance and as the
expression of a politically coherent ideology in the second, would come to deter-
mine the status of music as the prepotent symbol of renascent culture (notwith-
standing the Irish language itself) in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One
cannot emphasise too much the role of the collectors in this development. The
pursuit of these ideals, indeed, in the collections of Bunting and his successor

See Harry WHITE, Carolan, Handel and the Dislocation of Music in Ireland, Eighteenth
Century Ireland 4 (1989), pp. 39-55.
8 Charlotte Milligan FOX, Annals of the Irish Harpers, London 1911, pp. 37ff.
9 Seamus DEANE, Poetry and Song 1800-1890 [Introduction], The Field Day Anthology of
Irish Writing, Derry 1991, Vol. II, p. 5.

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128 H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2,123-138

George Petrie, as in the songs of Moore and Thomas Davis's appropriation of

the street ballad, signifies a degree of cultural self-awareness which is unmis-
takable.'0 In each phase of this development, the original dialectic between
antiquarianism and romanticism which characterised, for example, the ten-
sions between Edward Bunting's impulse to preserve Irish music as against
Moore's explicit intention of re-animating it, informed the reception of Irish
music either as a carefully transmitted icon of the past or as an ideologically
motivated image of the present. Thus even within the boundaries of scholarly
debate, as in Samuel Ferguson's Dublin University Magazine review of James
Hardiman's Irish Minstrelsy (1831)11, the inherent aesthetics of Irish music were
superseded by Hardiman's own reading of the lyric as an expression of politi-
cal aggrievement and by Ferguson's counter-reading of Hardiman's trans-
lations, in which textual matters excluded any concern with the music itself.
I do not mean to suggest that this preoccupation with text can be laid solely at
the door of the collectors, but I do mean to allege that the music which they
made available was appropriated in the service of certain extra-musical claims
and in particular the claim of a coherent celticism.'2
Moore's borrowings from Irish music (famously, but not exclusively, from
Bunting), for example, are precisely determined by his reading of history and
in particular by the sense of outrage, injustice and degradation which explic-
itly attends so many of his writings on Ireland from the early poem Intoler-
ance (1808) through Captain Rock (1824) and his biography of Lord Edward
Fitzgerald. It is not my purpose to trace this outrage here, but if Moore's popu-
larity has transformed him into a hated darling of the Victorian drawing room,
this transformation should not be allowed to occlude his own conviction that
the setting of Irish airs was an authentic gesture rather than a fashionable en-
terprise.'3 If Moore and Bunting differed on one overriding issue it was the
former's romantic interpretation of precisely that body of music which the
latter had intermittently laboured to preserve. Bunting repudiated Moore's
political reading of Irish music and the sensibility of lament and deprivation
which he habitually attached to it, but he could not overcome the strength of
this association in a cultural climate which received Irish music as an essential
adjunct of textual feeling rather than as an independent art.'4

0 Petrie's Ancient Music of Ireland appeared in 1855; Davis's ballads were published in The Spirit
of the Nation, Dublin 1843, and Moore's Melodies appeared in ten issues between 1807 and 1834.
" Ferguson's magisterial review appeared in four issues of the Dublin University Magazine
published in 1834.
" This argument is pursued in detail in my forthcoming study, The Keeper's Recital: Music and
Cultural History in Ireland, 1770-1970.
'3 See Wilfrid S. DOWDEN, ed., The Letters of Thomas Moore, Oxford, 1964, vol. I, pp. 116-
117: >>But we are come, I hope, to a better period of both politics and music; and how much they are
connected, in Ireland at least, appears too plainly in the tone of sorrow and depression which charac-
terises most of our songs.<
14" Cf. the second chapter of Bunting's 1840 volume, cited in FOX, op. cit., p. 107: >The world have
been too apt to suppose our music of a highly plaintive and melancholy character, and that it partook of
our National feeling at the state of our country in a political view, and that three parts out of four of our
tunes were of this complaining nature. Now there never was anything more erroneous than this idea.<(

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H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (19%) 2,123-138 129

The development of Irish political history in the wake of Catholic emanci-

pation (1829) fortified this perception of ethnic music as the purveyor of extra-
musical feeling. The consequences of this fortification for the preservation of
music were two-fold. On the one hand, Bunting in particular enlisted his
younger contemporaries in an effort to fortify in turn the scientific apprehen-
sion of the native repertory (and its organology, for that matter) so as to liber-
ate it from the oppressive claims of nationalism. On the other, the principles of
music collection themselves became somewhat dissipated.'5 The advent of
Young Ireland, with its own very specific programme of musical and poetic
propaganda, meant that Thomas Davis and his colleagues on the Nation news-
paper harnessed elements of the ethnic repertory together with a hitherto un-
tapped resource of street ballads in the service of political and social ameliora-
tion. This meant that music - by which Davis meant exclusively Irish music
- must remain secondary, utilitarian and static. The cultural separatism
preached by Young Ireland embraced the music of the collectors, but only in-
sofar as it served its own ends.'6
The development of cultural nationalism did not belong exclusively to Young
Ireland. That Davis should regard music as a means of mobilizing political opin-
ion was remarkable, but not absolute. Two other elements were necessary to com-
plete this powerful admixture of cultural consensus as to the growth and percep-
tion of music in the later nineteenth century, namely the regeneration of antiquar-
ian research after the Famine (1845-47) and the projection of a new species of
cultural absolutism associated with the Gaelic League.'7 The ultimate condition of
music in Ireland would only become clear with its failure to function within the
otherwise abundantly fertile terms of the Celtic Revival, except as a symbol of Irish
cultural renaissance. In the meantime, that is, between the 1840s and the 1890s,
the impact of antiquarianism, romantic nationalism and cultural absolutism was
such that the growth of the music itself became secondary to the nurturing of
these interrelated ideas. In the literature of Young Ireland (as later in Yeats), mu-

5 This is borne out by sporadic attempts to systematise the collection of Irish music in the first
half of the nineteenth century and by the decline in the collection of music (as against the increase in
popular arrangements of Irish melodies) until the post-Famine period (1845--).
16 Davis in particular believed that music should be cultivated expressly to foster political ide-
ology, and his regard for the ethnic repertory was derived from this belief. His famous remark that
,,Music is the first faculty of the Irish<< should be seen in the context of his essays and ballads which
constantly advocate the preservation of Irish culture as a means of political advancement and radical
nationalism. See Essays Literary and Historical by Thomas Davis (Dundalk 1914) for several read-
ings of Irish music which sustain this rationale for the cultivation of music in Ireland.
17 The Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) was established in 1893 and consolidated a number
of powerful movements for the revival of Gaelic culture in Ireland at the turn of the century. The
wave of Celtic revivalism which began with the publication of the first part of Standish O Grady's
History of Ireland in 1878, and which embraced both Gaelic scholarship and an unprecedented Irish
literature written in English, also affected Irish music. The London-based Irish Folk-Song Society,
founded in 1904, was perhaps the most productive instance of musical preservation to have been
influenced by the Celtic Revival. This productivity, however, does not gainsay the cultural stasis
which overtook the cultivation of music in Ireland.

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130 H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2, 123-138

sic would function not literally but figuratively. It would always retain its sym-
bolic status with regard to the culture of the Gael, but it could also serve as a
symbol of the revival itself.'8
As the collectors and preservers of Irish music continued to work in this cli-
mate, a curious condition of cultural stasis ensued. A strange disregard for the
music (i.e., the thing itself, as against its symbolic value), entered the history of
Irish ideas. On one side, there was 'Music', an assemblage of indiscriminate ideas
(the collections, the ballads, the handful of well-loved arias); on the other, there
was the burgeoning condition of Irish literature in English at an imaginative rate
unprecedented in three centuries. Between these new polarities, the condition of
art music lapsed into mediocrity or silence. New music would remain strictly
incidental or irrelevant to the Irish mind. And as the preservation of the ethnic
repertory gathered pace, it functioned as an agent of sectarian culture.19
The consolidation of the concept of 'Gaelic Civilization' as a decisive trans-
formation of Celtic antiquities in the 1880s copperfastened this musical
sectarianism. Ideologues of Irish cultural history and of Irish music itself force-
fully upheld this cultural stasis. As the literature of Gaelic Ireland fed into the
complex of the Literary Revival, the music of Gaelic Ireland became ever more
distinct and unaccommodating of such acculturation and assimilation. How aware
or concerned the preservers of Irish music were in this respect is uncertain. What
can be firmly maintained is that the cultural divide between this music and what-
ever else there was of music in Ireland became impossible to bridge. Music itself
had become by the 1890s so closely identified with and symbolic of the culture of
Gaelic civilization that it became useless to consider the concept of 'Irish music' in
any other meaningful way. To detach part of the repertory in an effort to make it
hospitable to the norms of art music (to arrange an Irish melody, or to score a
song for orchestra) would only be to display the shibboleths of a remote culture.
Or a ruined one.

The Famine more than any other event in Irish history hastened this sense of
ruin. If the concept of Gaelic culture was initially the outgrowth of that great tra-
dition of Celtic antiquarianism and scholarship initiated, as it were, from within
the folds of the Ascendancy, then the act of cultural preservation itself became
imperilled by the devastations of the potato blight and the massive death and

8 The hostility and indifference with which Young Ireland regarded the art music tradition (as
an expression of imperial and colonial value systems) passed into the revival of Gaelic culture in the
closing decades of the nineteenth century. Douglas Hyde's famous lecture, >The Necessity for De-
Anglicising Irelando< (1892) apostrophises both the symbolic value of the ethnic musical tradition
and the cultural irrelevance of art music to the Gaelic League. Yeats, for his part, repeatedly drew on
music as a symbol of Celtic renaissance, but his indifference to actual music was absolute. For a
discussion of this difficult problem, see my Keeper's Recital (as note 12 above), especially >Music
and the Literary Revival<<.
19 The growth of music as an expression of sectarian culture undoubtedly originates not with
the collections themselves but with their assimilation into the political ideology of separatism
espoused by Young Ireland and the Gaelic League.

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H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2,123-138 131

emigration which it brought in its wake. This point is crucial, I think, with regard
to music, even if it has been made over and again in the assessment of Irish folk-
lore and literature in the nineteenth century. If the history of music in Ireland is
not to be seen as an amorphous and disinterested act of immense preservation,
one collection of folk music following upon the other with nothing but sheer ac-
cumulation and scholarly acquisition to justify it, then the Famine looms as an
event which can be put forward as one which drastically conditioned the signifi-
cance of the collector in Ireland. George Petrie is self-evidently central to this ar-
gument. His initially reluctant decision to embark on the collection of music (de-
spite a lifelong interest manifested in his close critique of and association with
Edward'Bunting) was directly inspired by the Famine and by his conviction that
the greater corpus of Irish traditional melody lay imperilled as a consequence of
its devastations.20 It is Petrie who is moved to rationalise this new commitment to
the preservation of music after a lifetime's devotion to the survey of a country
now radically endangered and altered. It is Petrie, doyen of Irish archaeology,
topography and local history, who now preserves the musical artifacts of a civili-
zation at once remote from and curiously subversive of good government in Ire-
land. Closely abetted by his colleagues in the Royal Irish Academy, it is Petrie
who can be advanced in the chain of thought which joins the broad conception of
'Celtic culture', with its attendant connotations of benevolence, to the more nar-
rowly defined issue of a nearly-depleted 'Gaelic' civilization. Unlike Bunting,
whose enthusiasm was also inspired by the imminent disappearance of the tradi-
tion he sought to record, Petrie belonged to an Ireland in which antiquarianism
had become so imbued with political resonance that the recovery of the past could
not but signify implications for the present. And in a present determined by the
aftermath of Famine, by violent struggle and by land reform, the Petrie Collection
(an entity which of course endures beyond the partial publication of his materials
in 1855)2 inevitably argued the existence of a cultural discourse radically at odds
with the Union and conversely at one with the now urgent claims of Gaelic civili-
zation. Despite the history of censure which attaches to his competence as an edi-
tor, his significance as a collector lies not only in the sheer volume of music which
he amassed but in the conventional understanding of music in Ireland which he
established all but absolutely.2 The equivalence which his work argues between
Irish music and Gaelic culture is one which was profoundly to inhibit the emanci-
pation of music in Ireland when that culture was eclipsed by new forms of artistic

S0 See the introduction to Petrie's Ancient Music of Ireland (1855), in which Petrie refers to the
Famine as the fact which >>more than any other overpowered all my objections, and influenced me in
changing to a determination to accept the proposal of the Irish Music Society<.
21 Only a portion of the melodies (some thousand) collected by Petrie appeared in the Ancient
Music of Ireland.
1 Stanford in particular took Petrie to task in his edition of the latter's melodies, but Petrie's
complete collection yet awaits scholarly publication. See Marian DEASY, New Edition of Airs an
Dance Tunes from the Music Manuscripts of George Petrie LL. D., and a Survey of his Work as
Collector of Irish Folk Music, Ph. D. Dissertation, National University of Ireland, University College
Dublin (Dublin 1982).

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132 H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2, 123-138

consensus, particularly that of the Literary Revival. As the sheer accumulation of

Irish music (i.e., the ethnic repertory) continued into the 1880s, it was fortified by
the wider growth of language revivalism and by the alignment of political self-
determination with cultural distinctiveness. The founding of the Society for the
Preservation of the Irish Language in 1876 and of the Gaelic League mark well-
known states in this cultural progression. If the Gaelic League was to be over-
taken by the Literary Revival in English, it nevertheless produced so powerful an
identification between political self-determination and cultural integrity that its
impact on music was crucial. Whereas the Literary Revival could bypass the lan-
guage question in its brilliant importation of celticism into English, music had no
such easy passage.
Meanwhile, the accumulation of Irish melody continued. The preservation
of music in post-Famine Ireland did not rest with Petrie: the manuscripts of Samuel
Forde and John Edward Pigot attest to the recovery of thousands of tunes, many
of them collected prior to Petrie's appointment by the Society for the Preservation
of Irish Music in 1853. And as Petrie followed Bunting, so Patrick Weston Joyce
followed Petrie: Joyce's five volumes of airs which appeared between 1872 and
1909 culminated in Old Irish Folk Music and Song, a book which attained to iconic
status among collectors in the field, partly because of Joyce's attempts to identify
the widespread duplication of material which to greater or lesser degrees charac-
terised the ninety or so volumes of Irish music which had appeared since Bunting's
original collection in 1796, and partly because he offered a more thoroughgoing
classification of the material than had previously been issued by his predeces-
sors.23

It is a singular irony that as the preservation of this material gained in schol-

arly rigour, the gap between the ethnic repertory and the aspirations of modern
Irish musical composition appeared to widen. This was not the case at first: on the
contrary, it seemed for a time as if the very concept of an Irish art music was
inexorably wedded to representations and arrangements of traditional Irish
melody. But however widespread this understanding, the consequence was that
Irish composers acknowledged the cultural pressure of an authentic mode of Irish
music by devising two voices, two virtually discrete models of musical discourse,
one of which projected the native repertory in a musical language that scarcely
transcended the vocabulary of the collections themselves and another, more com-
plex idiom which aspired to European pastiche and in the process avoided the
ethnic resource in its entirety. Those who attempted to blend the two quite fre-
quently arrived at a different kind of pastiche, embarrassing in its uneasy appre-
hension of a music which resisted assimilation. This is the difficulty, for example,
which circumscribes much of Charles Villiers Stanford's 'Irish music'. As editor
of the Petrie Collection, Stanford knew the Irish repertory as well as almost any

23 For a valuable survey of the collections of Bunting, Petrie and Joyce, Pigot and Forde, see
Eileen DOLAN, The Musical Contributions and Historical Significance of Edward Bunting (1773--
1843), a Pioneer in the Preservation of the Heritage of Irish Music, D.M.A. Dissertation, The Catholic
University of America (Washington 1977), pp. 176--217.

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H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2,123-138 133

one: he just didn't quite know what to do with it.24 Moreover, his concept of 'Ire-
land' was delimited by an exoticism which failed wholly to comprehend the Celtic
Revival and all this implied; instead he had recourse to a stage-Irishry which
proved to be quaint, anachronistic and utterly unconvincing. Stanford in fact as-
sumed and discarded 'the Irish note' at will, so that his creative response to the
Petrie collections is of far less significance than those of his works which whole-
heartedly aspire to what Arnold Bax called >>the outer darkness of Brahms.<< For
his part, Bax, an English composer who spent his formative creative years in Dub-
lin in the first decade of the twentieth century, claimed to be the first to have
>>translated the hidden Ireland into musical terms<<.2 There can be no doubt that
Bax encountered the Literary Revival with an intensity which escaped many (if
not all) of his composer contemporaries in Ireland. It is striking that his claim to
have been the first to render the essence of Ireland in musical terms was made in
virtual abeyance of the native repertory. Bax absorbed the resilient celticism of
the Revival not in music but in literature (he was known to Yeats and his circle
not as a composer but as a writer), with the result that he forged a musical idiom
that managed to escape, as it were, the enormous burden of the collections, and
hence of the repertory itself.26
This is a point of view which has to be approached with some circumspec-
tion. My argument is not that Bax's ignorance was a kind of creative bliss, but that
it spared him from the recurring problem which the music of the collectors posed
again and again for Irish musicians who aspired to the European aesthetic. Pre-
cisely because the native repertory carried so strong a burden of association with
Gaelic culture, one might say that the Collections functioned as a repository not
merely of Irish music but of music in Irish. Added to this, the symbolic force of
the collections as the definitive exemplar of Irish culture (apart from the language
itself) meant that they established a terrifying stumbling bloc, or more exactly a
musical cul-de-sac, in which creative enterprise was doomed to endless variation
of one air after the next. Thus it was not long before composers realised that each
tradition hopelessly compromised the other: hence the development of two dis-
tinct modes in Irish art music at the turn of the century. With very few exceptions,
notably in Bax's music and in certain tone poems by Hamilton Harty, the greater
part of creative Irish music succumbed to the dutiful presence of the air. One
might say that whereas Irish literature brilliantly effected a transition from the
Irish language to the English, Irish music collapsed inwards under the pressure
of its own cultural prestige.

24 See Charles Villiers STANFORD, Complete Collection of Irish Music as Noted By George
Petrie (London 1902-5). Stanford's reduction of Petrie's accumulation of 1582 melodies through the
elimination of 566 duplicates is further reduced by Deasy (op. cit.) For an incisive critique of Stanford's
use of Irish music in his own compositions, see Joseph RYAN, Nationalism and Music in Ireland, Ph.
D. Dissertation, National University of Ireland, St. Patrick's College, Maynooth (Maynooth 1991),
pp. 243-268.
25 Arnold BAX, 'A Radio Self-Portrait' [1949] in: Lewis FOREMAN, ed., Farewell, My Youth
and Other Writings by Arnold Bax (Aldershot 1992), p. 166.
26 This claim is borne out by Bax's explicitly Irish compositions which notably and uniquely
show no trace of the ethnic tradition, despite the intensity of his absorption of Irish literature.

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134 H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (19%) 2, 123-138

The existence of just one Irish composer of comparable standing to Yeats or

Synge would happily diminish this reading to insignificance. But the fact remains
that the cultural transformation of Irish art at the turn of the century was so over-
whelmingly verbal, that the native music itself receded as an agent of creative
renewal and functioned instead as a metaphor of the literary imagination. Yeats
is the obvious example of this process: his indifference to actual music was noto-
rious; his recourse to music as an image of the imagination was habitual and well-
nigh definitive. The 'supreme theme of art and song' in Yeats has little enough to
do with music. Yeats's regeneration of Irish art was self-evidently verbal, even if
there were to be occasional, passing references to the artistic integrity of the 'peas-
ant, who has his songs and his music'. And so as the early decades of the century
wore on and Ireland established a measure of political autonomy, the authority of
the collections, and thus the significance of the collectors themselves, enjoyed a
strange relapse into academic absorption. It is fascinating for an outsider to ob-
serve the activities of the London-based Irish Folk Song Society in the twenties
and early thirties which speak so confidently of an advance in scholarship that
inverts the creative impoverishment of art music at home.27 Two issues spring
from this ironic relationship. One is that the journal of the society sought to edit,
for the first time, the manuscripts from which Bunting had published his seminal
collections: this recension brought into sharp relief the whole difficulty of provid-
ing a definitive and/or authentic record of the native repertory, but it also repre-
sented Bunting's labours within a depth of scholarly exactitude hiherto
uncontemplated or unavailable. (To be sure, the Society's edition of Bunting it-
self was to endure considerable criticism, although an attempt to re-edit the edi-
tion as recently as 1983 met with strictures of its own).28 The second issue is that
for the first time composers managed to register the fact that despite the collec-
tions, music as an art form lay utterly remote from the Irish mind. Their means of
complaint were various, but certain themes recurred: the scathing neglect of mu-
sical infrastructures (to say nothing of impoverished musicians) was the prevail-
ing piece of evidence. In sum, the often hostile indifference to European music in
particular beggared the country's effete assumptions about a priceless heritage of
folk melody. Resentful of those shackles of cultural nationalism which inhibited
rather than emancipated art music, composers, educators and performers openly
avowed deliberately self-critical comparisons between the status and function of
art music in other countries of comparable size: Finland was the most frequently
cited instance of a country imbued with a similar degree of cultural nationalism
which yet managed to sustain a central cultivation of art music, no more persua-

27 1 refer here to the dearth of original music in the art tradition in Ireland by contrast with the
continued collection and recension of traditional Irish music in London in the 1920s and 1930s.
28 See Caitlin Ui EIGEARTAIGH, 'Bunting's Ancient Music oflreland. Edited from the original
manuscripts by Donal O'Sullivan with Micheal OS iilleabh in (Cork 1983)', Irish Folk Music Studies
4 (1982-5), pp. 72-73.

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H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2,123-138 135

sively proven than in the case of Sibelius himself.29 One might add in passing that
the sheer magnitude of Sibelius's music transcended national considerations to a
degree agonizingly distant from those who aspired to the well-being of art music
in Ireland.

It would be quite wrong to suggest, however, that Irish composers were uni-
form in their rejection of the ethnic repertory. At its most extreme, such repudia-
tion was as expressive of pragmatic frustration as it was of artistic crisis, even
though certain composers clearly despaired of the automatic assumption (which
was current through the 1950s and early 1960s) that the work of an Irish com-
poser inevitably entailed the arrangement or variation of an Irish air." In some
cases, composers not only took this point of view for their own, but heatedly con-
trasted the ideological coherence of the collections with the musical dissarray of
art music in Europe. More than that, the native repertory was advanced as a trove
not merely of musical remembrance but of psychological and expressive insight,
so that the individual air was (perhaps naively) aligned with the massive edifices
of German art music in particular, in order to show that one registered dimen-
sions of the Irish psyche inaccessible to the other.31
The conduct of this debate did not immediately affect the standing of music
in Ireland, but it did clarify certain assumptions and prejudices about the nature
of Irish art. It is hard from the vantage point of the 1990s to appreciate just how
impoverished was the situation even forty years ago, both as to opportunities for
the composer and the creative displacement of living in a country which had for
so long been dead to the language of contemporary music.
This observation returns me to the outset, and to Bart6k's priorities for the
renaissance of Hungarian music. It is significant, I think, that he was prepared to
put technical competence and Western musical education first rather than sec-
ond: it was just the failure to grasp this priority which prevailed for so long in
Ireland. The music of the Collections could be made to do service for all Irish
music indefinitely: such an arrangement deferred the painful business of repair-
ing centuries of neglect.
Seain 0 Riada's appearance in Irish musical affairs in the late 1950s pushed
this debate to breaking point.32 O Riada's own mental journey from the sources of
European modernism through the brief noontide of renascent Irish nationalism

29See Aloys FLEISCHMANN, Ars Nova, Ireland Today (July, 1936), p. 41ff., and ibid., Compo-
sition and the Folk Idiom, Ireland Today (November, 1936), p. 42ff for representative examples of
periodical literature concerned with the question of original composition and the ethnic tradition of
Irish music. This question was notably debated throughout the period 1930--1950 in the aftermath of
Ireland's political independence.
30 For an early instance of this disenchantment see Frederick MAY, Music and the Nation, The
Dublin MagazineXI (July--September, 1936), pp. 50ff. For a more detailed assessment of this debate,
see my Keeper's Recital, chapter six: 'Sean 0 Riada and the Crisis of Modernism in Irish Music'.
31 The Irish composer and ideologue Eamon 0 Gallchobhair (1906-1982) was foremost in the
articulation of this distinction between the ethnic tradition and the art works of central Europe.
2 For a useful assessment of 0 Riada's position see Bernard HARRIS and Grattan FREYER,
eds., Integrating Tradition: The Achievement of Sean 0 Riada (Ballina 1981).

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136 H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2,123-138

in the 1960s, to a decisive repudiation of European composition in favour of the

ethnic repertory, stands as the crucial encounter between an Irish composer and
the music of the collections in the twentieth century. The after-effects of this jour-
ney are being felt to the present day. Given especially the revival and spectacular
projection of Irish music to which I referred at the outset of this paper, the conse-
quences of 6 Riada's musical development are especially instructive of the native
repertory and its place in Irish cultural history.
However tantalising the pospect of 'a great Irish composer', it was one which
for 0 Riada was doomed to remain a mirage. The more nearly he encountered the
ethnic tradition, the more difficult it became for him to integrate that tradition
with the language of the European aesthetic. With the exception of the late mass
settings - in which composition becomes a vestigial activity - 6 Riada eschewed
precisely this combination of ethnic repertory and international vocabulary in his
original works. It is difficult not to conclude that such a combination would have
represented an act of 'colonial' misappropriation absolutely inimical to his in-
stincts as a composer. The political condition of being Irish, when added to the
unstable notion of a 'great composer' produced an aesthetic complexity which
proved untenable. To take on the loss of a unifying aesthetic in Europe and the
polarised condition of music in Ireland was simply too much for 6 Riada to bear.
Having forced the recognition of this crisis, 0 Riada took refuge instead in fertile,
culturally apposite representations of (it must be said) a very small stock of tradi-
tional melody. It was as if Bart6k had abandoned composition and instead tourned
Europe with an ensemble of Magyar musicians: 6 Riada established an ensemble
of traditional instrumentalists whose deportment and arrangement of the native
repertory was novel, and whose commitment to traditional Irish melody was ab-
solute.
These performances, together with his music for film, earned for 6 Riada a
degree of cultural recognition never afforded before or since to an Irish composer.
His influence was such that the perception of music in Ireland as an original art
form was almost wholly contained by his work with Ceolt6iri Cualann in particu-
lar. It was a perception which endured in the virtuoso finesse and bravura of The
Chieftains and in the other phenomena outlined in the introduction to this paper.
In all these cases, the concept of original Irish composition is virtually indistin-
guishable from more or less successful adaptations of the 6 Riada model, which
is to say that 'original composition' is a meaningless term, other than to decribe
the variation and novel deportment of the traditional repertory itself. Those com-
posers who engage with Irish music otherwise are remaindered, in Raymond
Deane's memorable phrase, to 'the honour of non-existence'.33
The significance of 0 Riada, then, is not that he was the 'greatest Irish com-
poser of the twentieth century' but that he silenced the claim of original art music
as a tenable voice in the Irish cultural matrix: he silenced it too in its address upon

33See Raymond DEANE, The Honour of Non-Existence: Classical Composers in Irish Society,
in: Gerard GILLEN and Harry WHITE, eds., Irish Musical Studies 3, Music and Irish Cultural His-
tory (Dublin 1995), pp. 199-211.

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H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2,123-138 137

the Irish mind. In its stead, he advanced the claim of the ethnic repertory. The
eager reception of this claim in a country dominated by verbal art forms is itself
part of the cultural history of music in Ireland. So too is the indifference to Euro-
pean art music - with certain notable exceptions - which has proved pervasive
in Ireland almost to the end of the twentieth century. It would be absurd to lay
this indifference at 0 Riada's door, but neither ought one to underestimate his
influence in the pivotal endorsement of the ethnic repertory so characteristic of
the reception of Irish music in the past twenty five years. The great difficulty
posed by this endorsement is the corresponding indifference to western art forms
which it masks. Of course there are composers in Ireland who aspire to the tradi-
tions of western art music but much of their work is conspicuously distinct from
the resources of traditional Irish music. It is as if the sheer anxiety of influence, the
cultural pressure exerted by the preservation of traditional music, usurps the pos-
sibility of a compositional voice at once European (in the sense of European
art music) and recognizably Irish. The development of the two has proved so
troublesome that Irish musicians have tended to pursue one or the other but not
both.

And yet: the influence of the collections does impinge on the pluralist revival
of Irish music, as I suggested at the outset. The precedent of arrangement which
the collections provide is one which has been so variously explored in the past ten
years that it is no longer possible to speak, with any authority, of degrees of au-
thenticity in Irish music. This is what I mean when I assert that the ethnic integ-
rity of the traditional repertory has been destroyed. The matter is ironically com-
pounded by the process of collection itself. My concerns in this paper have been
with 'The Collectors': in effect with those antiquarians of the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries who redeemed for Irish music a priceless trove of melody
(some ten thousand items, in Donal O'Sullivan's estimation). But of course the
collection of the music today has if anything far exceeded the range envisaged in
the last century, and the sheer fact of recording techniques has also altered the
transmission of the music to a degree which, even had it been available, would
have surprised Bunting and Petrie. The irony is that our exposure to authentic
forms of Irish music (an exposure unrivalled in its intensity) has tended to con-
firm the drastic difference of environment between the production of the music
and its reception. This in turn has produced an insatiable demand for arrange-
ments of Irish music. I do not refer here to the dutiful and bland encounters of
classical orchestration but rather to the dynamic modifications within the tradi-
tion itself (0 Riada's Ceolt6iri Cualann, The Chieftains), as well as to the plethora
of artists whose deliberate and skilful blend of popular and traditional elements
sustains precisely that tradition of accommodation sought by Bunting and Petrie
when they arranged the repertory for the piano. Thus the traditional repertory
has become part of the mainstream of commercial music in Ireland. The mistake
would be to regard this as somehow an undesirable or artificial development.
What of the process of collection itself? The National Archive at University
College Dublin, the resources of the Traditional Music Archive (Dublin) and the
materials in University College Cork from which Aloys Fleischmann's Index was

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138 H. WHITE, THE PRESERVATION OF MUSIC AND IRISH CULTURAL HISTORY, IRASM 27 (1996) 2,123-138

prepared are three centres of obvious importance. I am not sure to what extent (if
any) exchanges of material take place, and I often wonder at the difficulties which
the classification of such material (particularly with regard to duplication of tunes)
must embrace. The editorial divergences are also striking: it does seem as if Irish
musical scholarship has failed to develop standards of textual criticism which
might be answerable and applicable across the range of this material. There are
some, indeed, who might argue that the recording of this material occludes tran-
scription and editorial judgement, that these processes become redundant with
the availability of a clear (verbal) text and an accurate reproduction of the sound.
Carried to extremes, this argument could nullify the address which the traditional
repertory has yet to make on art music in Ireland. But the question of musical
reproduction is notoriously prone to argument among ethnomusicologists, and
the problems it raises in Irish music are part of a wider dispute.34
I would not wish to end on a despondent note: the art music crisis aside, the
condition of music in Ireland has never been healthier, and the proximity of the
traditional repertory to current musical thought is of an intensity that can scarcely
be rivalled elsewhere in Europe. I would sound a note of caution, however, inso-
far as the reception of Irish music is concerned. The well-being of art music in
Ireland may be a different matter. I began with Bart6k and the observation that
his significance as a collector partly resides in some of the greatest art music of
this century. That a similar observation cannot be made of music in Ireland -
despite the magnitude of our collected folk music - is itself an unhappy and
apparently intransingent development in Irish cultural affairs.

Sagetak

OCUVANJE GLAZBE I IRSKA KULTURNA POVIJEST

Oiuvanje tradicionalne glazbe u Irskoj isprva se moglo smatrati - s motriSta

protestantske prevlasti - izdankom ,,staretinarskog" zanimanja. Medutim, s razvitkom
nacionalistieke politiCke svijesti u 19. stoljeiu glazba je u Irskoj ubrzo poprimila
simbolieke konotacije emancipiranja i umjetniike obnove, to je - ironieno - zaprijeeilo
porast neovisne umjetnieke glazbe. Oiuvanje etniekog repertoara uevrstilo je pojam o
irskoj glazbi kao nepromjenjivoj 6njenici proSlosti koja mole nadahnuti sadaSnjost na
podrueju izvanglazbene (politiike i knjitevne) misli, ali koja je u irskim umovima stigala
zahtjeve za izvornom umjetnirkom glazbom. RazliCito od unakrsne oplodnje etniekih i
umjetnickih tradicija, 6to ih predstavlja Bart6kovo postignude u Madarskoj, polarizirano
stanje glazbe u Irskoj zna&i da otuvanje jedne tradicije - predstavljeno u prvome redu
velikim sakupljacima - nije osobito unaprijedilo njegovanje druge tradicije.

3 A fundamental distinction here may be offered between those collections (Bunting, Petrie, et.
al.) which still await reliable modern editions and the preservation of traditional music through
recordings: it is the latter which perhaps supersedes the question of any kind of 'edition'.

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