This is an indispensable volume. It is perhaps the most wide-ranging historical study yet within the field of Irish traditional music studies. This is not surprising, given that Martin Dowling is not only a fine fiddle player and a lecturer in Irish traditional music at Queen's University, Belfast, but he also has form as a social and economic historian. I first encountered Dowling's written academic work in his magisterial Tenant Right and Agrarian Society in Ulster, 1600-1870, which he himself admits having written in an obscure academic corner of social and economic history. I always harbored a wish that Dowling's fine sensitivities as an historian and scholar would be also applied in a single volume to the field of Irish traditional music.
In the introduction, Dowling draws an explicit connection between his earlier work on tenant right and the current volume, saying that:
“The story I told in my book about tenant right provided me with a framework for a narrative about the history of Irish traditional music. Originating in the wake of traumatic and unstable conditions of the seventeenth century, finding ‘new foundations’ and putting flesh on a ‘new anatomy’ in the eighteenth, intensifying with the acceleration in size and productivity of the rural economy during the ‘age of revolution,’ and entering into public discourse in an age when the individual was being refashioned as homo economicus and citizen, where kingdoms and communities were reconstituted as nations of rights-bearing individuals.” (9)
Dowling traces the gradual disintegration of elite musical culture across Ireland, the “agrarian demographic explosion” in the nineteenth century that arguably drove the development of what we now call Irish traditional music, the impact of the population decline of the Great Famine of 1845-50 on the character of rural life, the increasing influence of centralized church and state as social powers, and the flourishing of an industrializing, professionalizing, and increasingly global economy in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
The book includes a brief exploration of the continuing relevance of Daniel Corkery's “hidden Ireland” hypothesis (1924) as a way to make sense of “understandings of vernacular music in the eighteenth century that rely on the resilient idea of an Irish culture ‘hidden’ behind geographical, linguistic, and economic walls” (51). Dowling returns again and again to this notion, and supplements it with the notion of the “hiding Ireland,” maintaining a clear focus on the active agencies and subjectivities of the people involved in vernacular practice.
Used in the context of the nineteenth century, for example, the hidden or (Dowling’s preferred) hiding Ireland also draws forth a tantalizing assessment of aesthetic developments, the primary focus of Dowling's next book:
“The conservatism and heavy-handed social control of the era may strike us today as claustrophobic, suffocating, and philistine. But surely these conditions, along with increasing economic stability, contributed to the hothouse conditions for the development of traditional music.... A new type of musical expression was cultivated in these circumstances, in which the wildness of influential outdoor pipers and the fiddlers influenced by this was replaced by a more controlled and rhythmic style which is suited to a more precise dance aesthetic and increasingly discerning listeners. Many of the contemporary characteristics of Irish traditional music—its repetitive rhythmic intensity, its chromatic restraint, its tightly constrained improvisations, the disciplines of rhythmic unison playing in ensemble—developed in these contexts.” (140)
The role of the academic as a mediator between largely non-discursive practice and the written word casts a long shadow over this work. Documenting the histories of vernacular conviviality is a hard job, as much of what is being talked about remains, by the character of its practice, largely undocumented. Invoking Benedict Anderson, Dowling writes at one point that, “The problem is that while a literary ‘imagined community’ advances toward coherence, the vernacular culture below moves to its own rhythm” (14).
This primary focus on practices rather than abstract, imagined coherence allows Dowling to complicate and challenge the all-too-easy dichotomy of traditional and modern musical forms and practices. The book is an extended meditation on the modernity of traditional practices: “One of my themes will be that at crucial stages of Irish political history, Irish elites tended to view the actual contemporary practice of music, song, and dance by Irish people as all too modern, so that the tradition itself required reconstruction. A consistent attribute of the history of Irish traditional music is the concern for the speed and direction of change, combined with an ignorance or misdiagnosis of the potential of new articulations of the music” (14). For Dowling, Irish traditional music is “Modern in its origins, modern in its form, [and] also modern in the history of its aesthetic development, sharing with other art forms in the processes of rationalisation affecting both the social context and function of the music as well as its technical and expressive development” (13).
Within the context of this broader narrative it is the inclusion of a chapter on James Joyce and his musical world that draws attention. What could have been a jarring detour becomes a clever foil against which to highlight tensions between elite and “traditions and how they might be reinvigorated amidst the fixating and sterilising influences of professionalised performance and the discourse of ethnic and national essence.”
The chapter titled “Music in the Revival” is the most explicitly theoretical of the book, drawing briefly on Žižek’s articulation of the construction of desire around the Lacanian “objet petit a” to illustrate the range of contestation among discourses of music and the nation in the Revival (ca. 1890-1916), and, in particular, to trace unattainable desire for essence, authenticity, and purity in Irish musical nationalism and its accompanying identities. Focusing largely on Feis Ceoil competitions, Dowling’s work here complements countless similar studies in literary Irish Studies of the ideologies of the Irish Revival.
The revisionist historical study of Irish traditional music is still in its relatively early days as a body of work, which goes someway to explain why, in many ways, this is a book chock-full of unanswered questions, and explicitly so. There are many moments in this book when Dowling indicates yet another fascinating line of inquiry that has been under-researched. This could be frustrating for some, but, for me, this served to provide an energizing smorgasbord of possibilities for future research.
Martin Dowling joins Adrian Scahill, Tes Slominski, and many other scholars and Ph.D. students in the burgeoning and welcome wave of new Irish traditional music historical revisionism. Up for challenge are institutionally-embedded narratives of continuity, nationalism, masculinity, homogeneity, and tradition. Much like the controversial wave of Irish revisionism in Irish historiography of the 1990s, this growing school of scholarly practice promises fresh perspectives as oft-unquestioned assumptions are challenged through the collation and exposure of historical evidence born of hard work and dogged research.
Overall, Dowling does a magnificent job in marshalling a slew of historical resources to piece this detailed academic jigsaw together. In so many ways, this is a book that Irish traditional music studies has been waiting for, and it is hoped that its publication will provoke a wave of academic responses that meet the challenge of the breadth and depth of Dowling’s historical and contemporary inquiry.
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[Review length: 1198 words • Review posted on January 27, 2016]