Tes Slominski has worked with Irish traditional music for many years, as both a fiddler and a scholar. She has taught at Irish music workshops and camps, brought her real-life understanding of the music into her university classrooms, and worked with some of Ireland’s greatest musicians. She has also focused the attention of her music colleagues on Irish traditional music’s gendered status in the context of nationalism, and Ireland’s collective focus on masculinity as a defining element of Irishness. As someone with solid credibility in both academic and musical circles, Slominski’s work here is original, reflecting her many years as a performer of Irish fiddle tunes in North America and Ireland. The fact that she draws so fluently from scholars in other disciplines and from the trenches of Irish traditional sessions reveals the level of profound thinking, researching, and playing she has done over time. Only Tes Slominski could have written this book.
Trad Nation has as its focus Irish instrumental music for the most part, though song lyrics appear periodically. It is important to note that although a number of books about Irish traditional music focus on the musicians and tunes of County Clare, Trad Nation brings an important set of perspectives from the southwest of Ireland (and elsewhere). She has drawn extensively from both private and public archival materials (such as the Ward Irish Music Archives in Milwaukee and the Irish Traditional Music Archives in Dublin), bringing some works to the light of day for the first time. In the introductory chapter, Slominski’s goal is to “make the flaws in ethnic nationalism audible,” and to motivate us “to find new tools for understanding music making and identity formation outside the parameters of embodied ethnicity that enclose national and cultural belonging” (3). In the introduction, she makes clear that even though white male players have represented the public face of traditional music for over a century, women have been directly involved in the development and performance of the music for just as long.
Trad Nation has five named chapters beyond the introduction. “Mother Ireland and the Queen of Irish Fiddlers” features an explicit indictment of what the Irish nationalist project in the early twentieth century meant for female musicians who—because of the patriarchally imposed ideals of Irish womanhood—didn’t quite fit the mold of (Irish nationalist) wife or mother. The serious consequences accorded those who dared to, for example, perform in public, were severe. This thread continues in “The Not-So-Strange Disappearance of Treasa Ní Ailpín (Teresa Halpin)”—chapter 2—in which Treasa Ní Ailpín’s brilliant musical work and life are simply “disappeared” from the historical record of traditional playing, and shunted aside into the foreign, feminized, classical realm. Because so much has depended on being male in Irish musical and nationalist history, a gifted fiddler of the “wrong” sex couldn’t possibly be part of the traditional scene.
Chapter 3, “Biography, Musical Life, and Gender,” explores the life and music of the famous fiddler Julia Clifford of Sliabh Luachra. It examines the ways in which sharing her life between the southwest of Ireland and London led to different musical behavior and reception among her audiences and fellow players. In essence, Julia Clifford’s first-rate playing-while-female meant that her audiences at home had to accept that she was outside the boundaries of what was expected of women. Slominski points out the deeply gendered way that the system functions when the context, language, and tunes are perceived to be unassailably male, and notes that women are unrelentingly marked as female musicians regardless of their background, musical skills, or innovations.
The last two chapters bring us right into the present. “Subjectivity, Flow, and ‘the Music Itself’,” the fourth chapter, brings forward the central argument that Irish dance music has agency, and that the embodiment of music through playing it brings the musician into what Slominski refers to as a state of co-creation that would allow us “to imagine our way past the self-other opposition that trad requires as an instrument of ethnic nationalism, in which Irishness is experienced only in its relation to not-Irishness” (139). Even more crucial, the all-important state of flow that is so central to musical embodiment is systematically denied to those outside the narrow spectrum of white, straight, Christian, genetically Irish, and male, for a variety of reasons. In the final chapter, “Playing Right and the Right to Play,” interviews with people outside that spectrum—who are themselves outstanding musicians and dancers of the trad scene—reveal the genuine cost of othering. In a culture that encourages the enforcement of unspoken musical and behavioral rules grounded in the earliest efforts of Irish nationalists and cemented into place over time, the status of difference poses a threat to all that is held dear as “authentic” (read: Irish nationalist).
This book is a game-changing read in the fulness of its activism. It paints a picture of a rich, colorful shadow world alongside the majority-heteronormative white male players in “the scene,” and it is exciting to see such powerful women and their outstanding musicianship be celebrated so effectively. It connects ethnomusicologists, folklorists, musicians, and people interested in race, gender, sexuality, and more, with traditional Irish music in a way that no one else has done. It also challenges readers and players to acknowledge the fine masculinist/nationalist line that separates history and memory in Irish traditional music history.
As an aside, there were several places in the book that caused this reviewer to sit straight up and (literally) shout “Yes!” and “It’s about time!” Its black-and-white photographs and drawings engage elements of the historical erasure of women from the Irish traditional music scene, and its current exploration of the issues of race and sexuality, in particular, are both urgent and now made clear in spite of casual denials by those who would insist that “all are welcome, always” in the continuum of traditional Irish music performance over time.
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[Review length: 983 words • Review posted on December 18, 2020]