After Long Silence

‘After Long Silence’Author(s): Harry White
Source: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music , Vol. 50, No. 1/2
(June-December 2019), pp. 47-70
Published by: Croatian Musicological Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26844658
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H. White: ‘After Long Silence’: IRASM 50 (2019) 1-2: 47-69
Examining Paradigms for an Unwritten History
Harry White
School of Music, University
College Dublin
Belfield, DUBLIN 4
Ireland
Email: harry.white@ucd.ie
UDC: 78.03:78.067
‘After Long Silence’: Original Scholarly Paper
Izvorni znanstveni rad
Examining Paradigms Received: April 10, 2019
Primljeno: 10. travnja 2019.
for an Unwritten History Accepted: April 20, 2019
Prihvaćeno: 20. travnja 2019.
Abstract - Résumé
This essay identifies key
patterns in Irish musical
historiography from 1905 to
the present day in an attempt
In memory of Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin to explain why no history of
Irish music has appeared
since that date. It examines
older models of Irish musical
history, including those
adopted by W.H. Grattan
1. Narratives and Non-narratives of Irish Flood, Aloys Fleischmann and
Brian Boydell, which affirm an
Musical History ‘either/or’ approach to this
subject, as between traditional
music on one side and art
In a paper published in 2018, Marina Frolova- music on the other. It then
Walker sought to explain why it is that Dmitri surveys more recent readings
of Irish music (from 1998
Shostakovich, for all his lustre and circulation, onwards) which preceded the
»remains trapped in a historical and methodological publication of the Encyclopae-
dia of Music in Ireland in 2013.
ghetto, trapped within narratives of oppression and It concludes that these
resistance, collaboration and victimhood«. For readings have overwhelmingly
favoured traditional music and
Frolova-Walker, the composer’s exclusion from the proposes that a more inclusive
narrative of musical modernism is apostrophized by historiography of Irish music
would privilege the artwork as
his absence from the article on 20th-century music in a conceptual paradigm availa-
Wikipedia: ble to traditional and art music
alike.
Keywords: Historiography •
With regard to the Wikipedia entry, some sceptical historical musicology •
ethnomusicology • traditio-
readers might still suspect that the absence of Shosta- nal music • art music •
kovich is just an aberration of the rather informal cultural history • Ireland •
W. H. Grattan Flood • Aloys
collective-authorship approach of that internet Fleischmann • Brian Boydell
• Axel Klein • Gerry Smyth •
resource. Let us then survey the printed textbooks Harry White • Michael
that form the backbone of twentieth-century music Dervan • A History of Irish
Music (1905) • The Encyclo-
courses. Here we find the same behaviour. Robert paedia of Music in Ireland
Morgan’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century Music (2013) • The Invisible Art: A
Century of Music in Ireland,
doesn’t include a single example from Prokofiev or 1916-2016 (2016)
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H. White: ‘After Long Silence’:
IRASM 50 (2019) 1-2: 47-69
Shostakovich. Eric Salzman’s Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction devotes three

perfunctory pages to them (out of a total of 250 pages): the lack of interest in Soviet
music results in careless errors such as the supposition that Arvo Pärt was a ‘Latvian
composer’. This amounts to contempt: imagine such a book telling us of ‘the Berlin
composer Schoenberg’, or of ‘Bartók, the leading light of Czech music.’1
These contemptuous misprisions and exclusions may or may not amount to

a ‘lack of interest in Soviet music’ per se, but they do not signify (as Frolova-Walker
makes clear) indifference to the music itself. However inadequately (or inaccu-
rately) composers such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich are represented to the
present moment, their circulatory power remains undiminished if not unaffected
by the prestige of Anglo-American readings which ghettoize (or disregard) their
modernism. In modest support of such a claim, one could point to the vibrant after-
life of both composers far beyond the domain of Soviet Russia even when the Cold
War was at its most acute. Closer to home, it is not even mildly rhetorical to affirm
that Shostakovich’s music has been much more widely circulated in Ireland for the
past sixty years than the music of any Irish composer.2 Frolova-Walker rightly sup-
poses that a contempt for Schoenberg and Bartók on the part of Anglo-American
musicology is unimaginable (at least by comparison with mistaking an Estonian
composer for a Latvian one). The historian of Irish music, however, contends with
little else. As a European nation state, Ireland is at the present moment more in the
public eye than it has ever been, and Irish relations with the European Union have
never been more acutely affirmed and (in some quarters, at least) interrogated. But
the hybrid condition of its cultural identity – an identity which is largely deter-
mined through the medium of English – is not easily understood by an appeal to
European identity or heritage. If it remains legitimate to think of Ireland in terms of
1
See Marina FROLOVA-WALKER, An Inclusive History for a Divided World, Journal of the Royal
Musical Association, 143/1 (2018), 1-20, here at 2.
2
It is self-evidently difficult to compile evidence in support of such a claim, but the prominence
of Shostakovich in Irish concert programmes since the early 1960s is unmistakable. One exemplary
instance must suffice here. In a letter to the editor of The Irish Times published on 28 May 2015, Lindsay
Armstrong wrote as follows: »Sir, Prof Ron Hill (May 26th) refers to a concert which was given during
Dmitri Shostakovich’s visit to Dublin in 1972. This concert took place on Wednesday, July 5th, in St
Patrick’s Cathedral and was presented by the New Irish Chamber Orchestra, of which I was then
manager, and conducted by Andre Prieur. Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony was the final work on
the programme. The rest of the programme comprised Vivaldi’s Four Seasons…and Britten’s Serenade
for tenor, horn and strings…None of us knew if Shostakovich was going to attend and when he did
come through the side door of the cathedral just before 8 pm, it was a moment of unbelievable joy. As
I guided him to his seat – he was virtually blind – the audience rose to its feet and erupted into
prolonged thunderous applause, to which he responded in Russian manner, by applauding back. The
audience’s appreciation was even more sustained after the deeply moving performance of his Chamber
Symphony. Undoubtedly this was one of Dublin’s truly great musical occasions. Yours, etc, Lindsay
Armstrong«. See www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/shostakovich-in-ireland-1.2228066, accessed 5
April 2019. One is tempted to add, »those were the days«. See also my observations at the end of this
paper in relation to the silence surrounding contemporary music.
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its colonial past (and thereby its postcolonial present), it is scarcely admissible to
suggest, let alone concede, that the ‘soft power’ of American culture now deter-
mines its cultural present. When Ireland looks east, it does so through the prism of
a language it has made its own, but east or west, the linguistic forcefield of British
and American English remains formative. In this dispensation, a ‘Czech’ Bartók
scarcely seems to matter. By contrast, those ‘narratives of oppression and resistance,
collaboration and victimhood’ identified by Frolova-Walker begin to sound strange-
ly familiar. They might, for example, be summoned here in relation to narratives of
Irish music which have long since been abandoned by Irish cultural historians,
except that such musical narratives are so few and far between. The annals of Irish
musical historiography are scarcely more than two hundred years old, but the history
itself has proved either indifferent or resistant to much of the music it might have
been expected to survey.3 The purpose of this paper is to examine aspects of the
historiography arising from these annals and the conceptual paradigms by which it
has been defined, and to acknowledge fresh paradigms through which art music
can be more comprehensively assimilated into the discourse of Irish history than
has hitherto been the case. I should add that this is not a grandly prescriptive exercise
vaguely oriented towards widening the agenda for future research, but rather a
demure notice of my own immediate intentions. I reserve any further comment on
these intentions for now: the prospect of ‘paradigms for an unwritten history’ (as in
the title of this paper) sufficiently indicates the territory I would like to explore. But
those aberrations and absences identified by Frolova-Walker in relation to Anglo-
American readings of Soviet music remain germane to the related (if not correla-
tive) proposals discussed later in this paper. The ghetto of Irish musical history is
not the vacant space it once was (or was for so long), but it is useful to state at the
outset that no history of Irish music has appeared since 1905. And notwithstanding
an incomparably richer and more engaged constituency of interest for Irish music
in the past 30 years than was previously the case, it is nevertheless true that the pres-
ence of music in Irish cultural history remains a hit-and-miss affair. Recent evidence
of this is represented by the four-volume Cambridge History of Ireland, published in
2018, in which art music is notable by its complete absence, despite extensive con-
tributions on sport, popular culture, religious practice and (of course) literature.4
The Cambridge volumes are alive to new conceptions of Ireland that far transcend
3
For the purposes of this paper, these annals begin with the publication of Joseph Cooper Walk-
er’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (Dublin, 1786). See Emma COSTELLO, Walker, Joseph Cooper,
in: H. White and B. Boydell (eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013)
[hereafter, EMIR], 1038 and the same author’s Paradigms of Irish Music History (MA dissertation,
Maynooth University, 1998).
4
See Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2018). Despite the musical lacunae, this is an emphatically inclusive history, and its purview
extends to European, north-American and global narratives of Irishness and Irish identity, a feature
which demonstrably encourages the historian of Irish music to think likewise.
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IRASM 50 (2019) 1-2: 47-69
the embittered remembrance of ‘four hundred years of struggle,’ and they embody
an intellectual (indeed a historiographical) pluralism that accurately reflects an
emancipation from those tyrannies of church and state by which Ireland regulated
itself for much of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, this musical absence really
does ‘speak volumes’. There is no need to exaggerate this absence, but I identify it
here to draw attention to a general wariness with regard to music in Irish cultural
discourse which echoes a corresponding recession from European musical engage-
ment in Ireland over the past decade. The European dimension of reclaiming Irish
music is thereby of greater account than might at first appear to be the case. 5
2. ‘Irish Music’ and ‘Music in Ireland’: Conceptual Binaries and the

Sources of Irish Musical History
What are the keywords of Irish musical historiography? These certainly include
‘nation’, ‘colony’, ‘ethnicity’, ’tradition’, ‘identity’ and ‘metaphor’, at least insofar as
the historiography itself expresses a longing for musical form and the desire for a
masterwork. It is not my intention to rehearse these longings here, but the concep-
tual paradigms through which they have been expressed depend on a sequence of
binary oppositions which have attached an ‘either/or’ condition of meaning to Irish
music that has not yet been resolved. Among these oppositions I would privilege
three: (a) nation versus colony; (b) ethnicity versus artifice; (c) tradition versus inven-
tion. It is by now self-evident that these oppositions inherently address and derive
from the fundamental authority of ‘Ireland’ as an idea, as a political entity and as a
nation-state, in which respect they will scarcely surprise anyone interested in the
relationship between musical culture and national self-determination in Europe
since the French Revolution. What is less obvious is that the polarized condition of
these oppositions has inhibited an intelligible narrative of Irish musical history (at
least since 1905), despite a near-obsessive preoccupation as to how these oppositions
might be reconciled (or even understood).6 ‘Irish music’ itself is such a richly-
contested concept that one might be tempted to despair of its elusive capacity to
generate such binaries indefinitely. One consequence of this is a further binary that
absorbs the three I have privileged here within the folds of its own segregation: ‘Irish
music’ versus ‘music in Ireland’. Both terms, to be fair, have had a long and ag-
grieved innings throughout the annals of Irish periodical literature, but so much ink
5
The nature of this recession is work for another day, but it is clearly signified by the diminished
presence of European art music as a preoccupation of Irish cultural and educational infrastructures
since the collapse of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ in 2008. The consequences of this reduction in relation to musical
historiography are considered below.
6
See Ite O’DONOVAN, Music in Irish Periodical Literature, 1770-1970 (PhD dissertation, Univer-
sity College Dublin, 2013) passim for an exhaustive analysis of this recurrent theme.
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has been spilt in pursuit of ‘Irish music’ as an agent of cultural nationalism from the
late eighteenth century onwards that ‘music in Ireland’, by comparison, has rarely
functioned other than as shorthand for everything that is missing, neglected or
wrong. This is not to disavow the surge in specialized studies of Irish music (and of
Irish musical institutions) over the past thirty years, but simply to draw attention to
the conventional understanding of ‘Irish music’ as a narrow template which
strikingly excludes so much from its own purview. A whole seam of musical practice
thereby remains invisible (or inaudible) to Irish cultural history. »We must find an
explanation as to why the majority of Irish people seem to think they have no history
of classical music«, one musicologist observed as recently as 2016.7 This may well be
an urgent imperative, but the same constituency of interest (‘the majority of Irish
people’) has cultural history firmly on its side. The preoccupations of Irish musical
historiography, past and present, bear witness to this state of affairs. If ‘classical
music’ means a commitment to the infrastructures of European art music, there isn’t
much evidence to suggest that such a commitment can survive the overwhelming
indifference implicit in current Irish cultural and educational policies which (to put
the matter politely) are generally otherwise engaged. The difference between ‘Irish
music’ and ‘music in Ireland’ lies in a distinction between the current artistic
assuagements of national identity and a postcolonial impatience with the past. In
this regard, the global prestige of Irish traditional music (which for many people is
the sound of Ireland itself) requires, as I shall argue below, a conceptual paradigm
decisively beyond the timeworn remit of cultural nationalism.
It is this remit which animated W.H. Grattan Flood’s A History of Irish Music,
the first edition of which appeared in 1905.8 Barra Boydell has remarked of Grattan
Flood’s scholarship that »his information is frequently suspect, and he repeatedly
frustrates by his lack of all but the most occasional source references,« and adds that
»his patriotic desire to place Ireland at the centre of European musical history in particu-
lar led him to make unfounded and sometimes fantastic claims and assumptions«
(emphasis mine).9 But it is precisely this desire which distinguishes Grattan Flood’s
7
See Axel KLEIN, No State for Music, in: Michael Dervan (ed.), The Invisible Art: A Century of
Music in Ireland, 1916-2016 (Dublin: New Island, 2016), 47-68; here, 48.
8
See Barra BOYDELL, Flood, W[illiam] H[enry] Grattan, in: EMIR, 394-98. Grattan Flood (1859-
1928) was a musicologist, antiquarian, organist and composer. A History of Irish Music (Dublin: Browne
and Nolan, 1905) was reissued in four editions between 1905 and 1927. Boydell (395) notes that »it
became a university textbook in Ireland and France, and it was reprinted as late as 1970 (albeit with a
caution as to its reliability«). See also Harry WHITE, The Invention of Irish Music: Remembering Grat-
tan Flood, in: Vjera Katalinić and Stanislav Tuksar (eds.), Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834-1911), Glazbena
historiografiia i identitet / Musical Historiography and Identity (Zagreb: Croatian Musicological Society,
2013), 207-16.
9
B. BOYDELL, Flood, 395. Among such claims are that the Irish »were the earliest to adopt the
neums or neumatic notation for the plainchant of the Western church…they had an intimate acquain-
tance with the diatonic scale long before it was perfected by Guido of Arezzo, the were the first to
employ harmony and counterpoint… they invented the musical arrangement which developed into
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cultural nationalism from that of his predecessors, and notwithstanding his fantas-
tications about music in pre-Christian and early Christian Ireland (abetted, alas, by
his spurious readings of music in early modern Ireland), A History of Irish Music is
notable on two counts. It bravely attempts to surmount the ‘either-or’ condition of
music in Ireland by addressing indigenous music and art music with the same
forthright gusto (although from the twelfth century onwards Grattan Flood segre-
gates ‘Celtic-Irish’ music from ‘Anglo-Irish’ music), and it tacitly countenances the
absence of a ‘school of national Irish music’ by daring to hope for one. Despite the
cultural propaganda which endangers (and sometimes impugns) the reliability of
Grattan Flood’s narrative (to say little of his later claims in relation to the ‘Irish
ancestry’ of Garland, Dowland, Campion and Purcell)10, A History of Irish Music also
represents a singular if short-lived communion of interest in Irish musical historiog-
raphy which was deeply inflected by the ethos of Roman Catholicism. This ethos
would abide (even if the social impact of Catholic orthodoxy on the transmission of
European music in Ireland remains under-researched to the present day), but it was
to fade rapidly from the periodical discourse surrounding Irish music after the
Great War. A much narrower strain of cultural nationalism was to usurp the
idealism which animated Grattan Flood and the Catholic milieu to which he
belonged. Notwithstanding degrees of internecine conflict voiced by individual
members of this milieu (notably Brendan Rogers, Heinrich Bewerunge, Edward
Martyn, Robert O’Dwyer and Grattan Flood himself), there is considerable evidence
to suggest that between 1880 and 1914 the Catholic complexion of Grattan Flood’s
reading of Irish music amounted to a widely-shared principle of cultural history.11
By means of this principle, the high seriousness of European art music and the
aspirations of Gaelic musical revival might become mutually intelligible (and recip-
sonata form; they had a world-famed school of harpers, and finally, they generously diffused musical
knowledge all over Europe.« (From the close of the second chapter of A History of Irish Music [pp.19-
20], which surveys Irish music from the 6th to the 9th centuries.)
10
See W.H. GRATTAN FLOOD, Irish Ancestry of Garland, Dowland, Campion and Purcell, Mu-
sic & Letters, iii (1922), 59-65.
11
Rogers was organist in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral from 1882 until c. 1903, a committed member of
the Irish Society of St Cecilia and a frequent contributor of articles on music in Ireland to various peri-
odicals, including the Irish Theological Quarterly and the New Ireland Review. The organist and com-
poser Robert O’Dwyer (1862-1949) was Professor of Irish Music at University College Dublin from
1913 until 1939 and an active member of the Gaelic League, for which he wrote numerous arrange-
ments of traditional music. He is perhaps best known as the composer of Eithne (1909), an Irish-lan-
guage opera. O’Dwyer’s periodical writings (many of which appeared in The Leader) were not always
in sympathy with Grattan Flood’s explicitly Roman Catholic reading of Irish music. He likewise took
issue with Heinrich Bewerunge (1862-1923), Professor of Church Chant and Organ at St Patrick’s Col-
lege Maynooth and (briefly) Professor of Music at University College Dublin. Perhaps the key figure
in this Catholic communion of musical interest was Edward Martyn (1859-1923), whose repudiation of
the literary modernism he once espoused alongside Yeats, Synge and other avatars of the Irish Literary
Revival entailed a corresponding enthusiasm for Renaissance polyphony (conjoined with an avidly
spiritual regard for Wagner) which led him to found and endow the Palestrina Choir at the Pro-Cathe-
dral in Dublin in 1902. Grattan Flood dedicated A History of Irish Music to Martyn.
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rocally beneficial) under the immutable auspices of Catholicism. Religious belief

would no longer be the byword for colonial subjugation but rather the proud path-
way to Catholic Europe. Along this pathway, music would follow. It only required
a new and emancipated reading of music in early Christian Ireland to point the way
and (as it were) recover the route to a proper understanding of Ireland’s musical
significance to Europe.12 The extravagant claims of this reading, however, remain-
dered Grattan Flood’s history to the realm of wishful thinking.13 In musical terms at
least, Europe and Ireland would drift further and further apart. And those binary
oppositions which I have already identified were to deepen in the aftermath of
political revolution. By the time Ireland achieved independence (in 1922), the rift
between ‘Irish music’ and ‘music in Ireland’ could scarcely have been wider. The
former connoted a new and stringently conservative idealism, forged in the cultural
nationalism of ethnic revival; the latter connoted almost nothing at all beyond its
own impoverished estate.
It was this appalling imbalance between actuality (the recovery and institu-
tionalisation of traditional music as the principal signature of Irish cultural iden-
tity) and aspiration (the fugitive condition of art music in the aftermath of politi-
cal independence) which led Aloys Fleischmann to publish Music in Ireland: A
Symposium (Cork: Cork University Press – Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1952).14 Music
in Ireland is a survey and not a history, but Fleischmann and his contributors
sought in any case to bypass the kind of history produced by Grattan Flood in
favour of a more hard-headed disclosure of how matters stood in relation to the
cultivation of music at mid-century. The book was compiled in order to »provide
a documentary account of the present-day conditions in regard to music in
Ireland«. In his editor’s note, Fleischmann went on to remark that »materials for
historical studies dealing with music here are scanty, and the task of pin-pointing
the present seemed more useful than any incursion into the past.«15
‘Pin-pointing the present’ was an objective that had clearly been growing in
Fleischmann’s mind for decades: many of the contributors to Music in Ireland,
notably John F. Larchet, Frederick May, Eamon Ó Gallochobhair and the young
Brian Boydell had been allies in the effort to reanimate Irish musical ideas after
the foundation of the State.16 Some, including Fleischmann himself, had published
12
See I. O’DONOVAN, A School for Church Music in Ireland: The Evidence of Periodical Litera-
ture, in: Kerry Houston and Harry White (eds.), A Musical Offering. Essays in Honour of Gerard Gillen
(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018), 40-66.
13
For an elaboration and critique of Grattan Flood’s historiographical convictions see H. WHITE,
Remembering Grattan Flood, 210-16.
14
Aloys Fleischmann (1910-1992) was a composer, conductor and musicologist whose enter-
prises on behalf of music in Ireland were immense. See Michael MURPHY, Fleischmann, Aloys Georg,
in: EMIR, 389-93.
15
Music in Ireland, i.
16
John F. Larchet (1884-1967) was Director of Music at the Abbey Theatre from 1908 until 1935
and Professor of Music at University College Dublin from 1921 until 1958. Frederick May (1911-1985)
was a composer whose early promise and originality lapsed when he was in his early thirties. Eamon
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widely on the subject in a host of different periodical venues. To little avail. As far
back as 1936, Fleischmann had nailed his colours to the mast about music in Ire-
land in the following terms:
Irish folk-song and the bardic music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
seems to have fixed itself on the popular imagination, lending to this country a repu-
tation for musical culture which it does not yet possess. Nicely-turned phrases, such
as ‘our music-loving people’ and ‘our heritage of music’ have made this legend a
household word. Nobody likes to hear that this is the land without music, a land that
is literally music-starved.17
This bleak diagnosis was by no means unique to Fleischmann, or even to

other musicians likewise afflicted with a general sense of paralysis, cultural
atavism and stagnation which extended far beyond the domains of music itself.
Anyone conversant with cultural debate in Ireland through the 1930s and 40s
would find it difficult to deny the pervasive pessimism which attended almost all
consideration of the arts, to such an extent that this consideration mirrored (and
often invoked) the economic conservatism and rectitude which had retarded the
young state’s progress almost from the start. In the case of music, this gloom was
intensified by a long-standing and dreary debate about the rival claims of ethnic
culture and European art (to which Fleischmann adverts in his 1936 article) which
mired the prospects for music almost to an unbearable degree. Frederick May’s
assessment of the position of the contemporary composer in Music in Ireland apos-
trophises this problem with painful authority of feeling:
... it is doubtful if any nation with such a wonderful storehouse of traditional music
has made such a negligible contribution to art music as we have, and it is high time
we set about redressing the balance. Maudlin sentiment and barren theorising must
be eschewed: musical criticism must be creative and not destructive, and one of the
most destructive and useless types of criticism is that which starts out from an
unwarrantable premise, such as that all good music must be demonstrably national in
feeling, and then proceeds to chain down the unfortunate composer on this ready-
made bed of Procrustes. This is one likely way by which the bad may be exalted and
the good abased.18
Ó Gallochobhair (1906-1982) was a composer whose large catalogue reflects a lifelong commitment to
traditional music as the natural source for Irish art music. He was artistic director of the Abbey Theatre
from 1950 to 1952, although he continued to write music for Abbey productions until 1975. Brian Boy-
dell (1917-2000) was a composer and musicologist who held the Chair of Music at Trinity College
Dublin from 1962 until 1982.
17
See Aloys FLEISCHMANN, Ars Nova, Ireland Today, 1 (1936), 41-48; here at 41.
18
Frederick MAY, The Composer in Ireland, in: A. Fleischmann (ed.), Music in Ireland, 164-69;
here at 166.
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May’s objection to the demands of national feeling as a yardstick for art music
reflected the cultural environment in which he found himself, an environment
often hostile and generally indifferent to the kind of musical emancipation he
himself desired. In particular, what burdened May was the tyranny of folk music
as a modus vivendi (so to speak) for the composer, but he was no less oppressed
by three infrastructural deficiencies which had been identified as early as 1921 by
John Larchet in a seminal address entitled ‘A Plea for Music,’ published soon after
Larchet succeeded to the Chair of Music in University College Dublin. The de-
crepit state of music education, the lack of a national concert hall and the lack of a
national academy, nominated by Larchet, re-surface again and again in these
debates, and they are a constant feature of Fleischmann’s Music in Ireland. Stand-
ing immediately behind the book itself, indeed, was Brian Boydell’s article ‘The
Future of Music in Ireland’ published in 1951, in which the young composer
bluntly declared that »Music in Ireland…is in a shocking state.«19
As for Fleischmann, he would reach a similar conclusion and in similar terms
to those employed in his 1936 address: »…the Irish country towns and villages are
starved of music, and the inhabitants of the vast majority of them have never seen
an orchestra nor a chamber music ensemble. In some of the cities the position is
little better.«20 It is precisely in this sense that Fleischmann’s survey confirmed
‘music in Ireland’ as the signification of everything that was »missing, neglected
or wrong«. This also explains why Arnold Bax, in his preface to Music in Ireland,
could extol Irish traditional music as »the most varied and beautiful folk music«
in the world and yet long for the ‘country’s musical awakening’ without irony or
contradiction. ‘Irish music’ and ‘music in Ireland’ would continue to live separate
conceptual lives. The three binaries invoked earlier in this paper (nation versus
colony; ethnicity versus artifice; tradition versus invention) would likewise
remain in force for decades, indeed to the present day. Nevertheless, in the after-
math of Music in Ireland, the historical consciousness of Irish music was no longer
wholly defined by these binaries, if only because the deprivations identified in
Fleischmann’s survey loosened their authority. Many composers in Ireland would
fall under the wheel of social or cultural indifference (Frederick May was one of
them), but Fleischmann and Boydell did otherwise. Both recovered a past in Irish
music, not from the remote reaches of Grattan Flood’s pre-Norman fantasies, but
from the seventeenth century onwards. Their recoveries, one might say their
historical reconstructions, were very different, but they were engineered towards
the same objective. This objective was to retrieve the legitimacy of contemporary
19
Brian BOYDELL, The Future of Music in Ireland, The Bell, 16/4 (1951), 21-29; here at 21.
20
See A. FLEISCHMANN, The Organization of the Profession, Music in Ireland, 77-94; here at 84.
In the context of this stark but well-informed appraisal, ‘music-starved’ and ‘starved of music’ are
especially resonant images to use of music in a country which had endured a devastating famine just
over a century before Music in Ireland was published.
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composition as an outgrowth of Irish history, and not as an eccentric modernist

pastime. In this enterprise, the empirical heft of Irish musical sources was
substantially enlarged. The implications of this increase for Irish musical histori-
ography must (however briefly) be countenanced here.
Boydell first: although his reputation as a composer endures, both his cata-
logue of works and his list of scholarly writings confirm that Brian Boydell’s rate
of composition declined from the mid-1970s onwards in favour of research. After
1959, indeed, his catalogue recognizes a mere five orchestral works, only two of
which are substantial (the Symphonic Inscapes of 1968 and the Partita concertante of
1978); of his works for voice and orchestra only three date from 1965 onwards
(although all three are substantial compositions); his song settings for solo voice
disappear after 1966; there are four solo instrumental works after the Pack of Fancies
for a Travelling Harper of 1970, and so on.21 By contrast, Boydell’s writings on music
in eighteenth-century Ireland steadily increased during the same period: begin-
ning with essays on ‘Venues for Music in 18th-century Dublin’ and on ‘The Dub-
lin Musical Scene 1749-50 and its Background’ in 1975 and 1979 respectively,
Boydell published steadily on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music in a
host of scholarly venues, including The New Grove, The New Grove Dictionary of
Musical Instruments, A New History of Ireland and in various collected volumes.22
The culmination of this activity was two substantial monographs: A Dublin Musi-
cal Calendar 1700-1760 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1988) and Rotunda Music in
Eighteenth-Century Dublin (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1992), research for which
had occupied Boydell for three decades.
I have argued elsewhere that this research, and A Dublin Musical Calendar in
particular, afforded Boydell relief from the depleted condition of music in Ireland
for much of the twentieth century, and especially during the years of his own first
maturity as a composer.23 The ‘shocking state’ of music in Ireland which he
declared in 1951 certainly suffices to explain (by contrast) the refuge and enchant-
ment which he discovered in ascendancy musical culture and which he disclosed
in such rich empirical detail. It is impossible to escape the impression that
Boydell’s day-to-day and venue-to-venue cumulation of concert activity in 18th-
century Dublin represents a rich and busily sustained harvest of musical culture,
a metropolitan hub of engagement crowded with visiting musicians whose sus-
tained presence created a thriving professional environment for music doomed to
silence in the colder climate of the nineteenth century and the Act of Union which
followed. But whatever the cost of this research to Boydell’s own enterprises as a
composer, its consequences for Irish musical historiography were wholly benefi-
21
See the worklist of compositions in Gareth COX, Boydell, Brian, in: EMIR, 115-19.
22
See the list of writings in G. COX, Boydell, Brian, 118-19.
23
See H. WHITE, ‘Our Musical State Became Refined’: The Musicology of Brian Boydell, in: H.
WHITE, The Progress of Music in Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 151-66.
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cial, because it so exactly represented the ‘golden age’ of music in Dublin (some-
what uncritically understood as such by Boydell himself) in the intricate web and
detail of press reports, private correspondence, venues, societies, charitable
bodies, personalia, repertory and commentary amassed in evidence of this culture.
In this empirical enterprise, moreover, Boydell was not alone.24
A very similar process of reinvention and retrieval underlies Fleischmann’s
seminal contribution to musicology, Sources of Irish Traditional Music, 1600-1855
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), which was published posthumously.25
Fleischmann, like Boydell, had written on ‘music and society’ for A New History of
Ireland. Boydell’s brief had been 1700-1850; Fleischmann’s was 1850-1921. But
whereas Boydell’s survey is a largely blithe and untroubled prelude to the more
specialized retrievals of A Dublin Musical Calendar and Rotunda Music in Eight-
eenth-Century Dublin, Fleischmann’s chapter leads back to the gloomy pages of
Music in Ireland, especially in its dogged disclosure of impoverished infrastruc-
tures, dislocated musical practices and indigenous musical decline. The painstak-
ing and succinct precision of this account is impressive, but its tone is often
despondent. By the time Fleischmann reaches 1921, this chronicle of failure, with
its attendant pattern of promise, modest achievement and attenuation, confirms
the musical state of affairs with which he was to contend for most of his life. And
contend with it he did: not only as a composer, educator and conductor, but also
as a musicologist. Boydell had taken sunny refuge in ascendancy musical culture.
Fleischmann would look elsewhere.
Three aspects of Fleischmann’s Sources of Irish Traditional Music are particularly
important in assessing the significance of this work in the context of Irish musical
historiography. The first, and perhaps the most important, is that the catalogue
implicitly historicizes the music it comprehends. Fleischmann was not in any
material sense a collector (or fieldworker) and still less can he be regarded as an
ethnomusicologist or indeed as an ethnologist of any kind. His concern, quite
simply, was with the materials of music history as these had been transmitted in
printed collections from 1583 until 1855. I need hardly labour the point as to why
this was the case, but his recension of hundreds of prints from the late sixteenth
century to the middle of the nineteenth century was directed towards one end. This
was to document the provenance, morphology and literate reception-history of
traditional music. In this respect, Fleischmann allows us to see how the music was
received, transmitted, cross-fertilized and modified over a very long period.
24
The publication of Anglo-Irish Music, 1780-1830 by Ita Margaret HOGAN (Cork: Cork Univer-
sity Press, 1966) and Opera in Dublin, 1705-1797: The Social Scene, by T.J. WALSH (Dublin: Allen Figgis,
1973) represent important precedents for Boydell’s research.
25
A second edition appeared under the imprint of Routledge (Taylor and Francis) in 2016. The
assistant and associate editors of Sources of Irish Traditional Music (who saw the book into publication
following Fleischmann’s death in 1992) respectively were Micheál Ó Súilleabháin, Professor of Music at
the University of Limerick, and Dr Paul McGettrick, then Lecturer in Music at Dublin City University.
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The second aspect is related to the first: through the agency of Fleischmann’s
methodological scrutiny, the melodies themselves become not only sources of
music history, but sources of emancipation – emancipation from the constrictions
of ethnic purism, nationalist tyranny and symbolic exaggeration. It is the empiri-
cal condition of the music rather than its symbolic resonances which is privileged
in this book. Thirdly, the very precision and rigour of the catalogue redeems
traditional Irish music from its improbably static reputation and restores to it a
genetic typology by which it had been memorised, varied and organically forti-
fied in the first place.26
Fleischmann neither demeaned nor exalted the traditional repertory: he
rather countenanced its behaviour through the medium of a literate culture. This
aspect of Sources of Irish Traditional Music remains to be fully absorbed. At the
same time, the divergent paths explored by Fleischmann and Boydell, unified as
they are by a reduction of their own creative estate in favour of musicology, testify
to a fundamental longing for historical retrieval and a plausible (if partial) narra-
tology of music in Ireland that might transcend the tiresome antipathies which
they negotiated every day as scholars and composers. And yet, the prospects for
such a narratology remained divided (as ever, it seemed) in their allegiance on
one side to traditional music as the empirical corpus and meaning of ‘Irish music’,
historically verified through the agency of Fleischmann’s scrutiny of thousands of
tunes and hundreds of prints, collections and arrangements, and on the other to
Boydell’s recovery of a largely borrowed musical culture in eighteenth-century
Dublin.27 By the end of the twentieth century, ‘Irish music’ and ‘music in Ireland’
continued to resist integration as historical concepts. By then, both had been
incontestably enlarged, not least through the agency of an unprecedented degree
of economic growth which stimulated in turn a level of scholarly engagement
with Irish music that neither Boydell nor Fleischmann could have anticipated
when they began their research in earnest in the 1970s. The development of Irish
musicology which originated in Music in Ireland in 1952 accelerated rapidly
between 1988 and 2013, which is when The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, edited
by the present writer and Barra Boydell (Dublin: UCD Press) appeared, following
ten years of intensive preparation and research.28
26
Certain aspects of Fleischmann’s work would have benefited from the kind of computer analy-
sis unavailable to him over the many years during which he was preoccupied with this project. In
particular the alphabetic resolution of tune types which closes Sources of Irish Traditional Music now
appears insufficient to the body of work it seeks to comprehend.
27
Appendix A of Grattan Flood’s A History of Irish Music comprises a ‘List of the Principal Col-
lections of Irish Music (from 1725 to 1887)’ which partly anticipates Fleischmann’s Sources of Irish
Traditional Music.
28
The growth of Irish musicology since 1988 (which is when I published a survey of the disci-
pline in Acta Musicologica, 60 (1988), Fasc. III, 290-305) has been so extensive (and so unprecedented)
that it is impossible to summarize its address on Irish music and/or music in Ireland in the present
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EMIR represented itself as »the first comprehensive attempt to chart Irish

musical experience across recorded history« and documented »Ireland’s musical
relations with the world at large, notably in Britain, continental Europe and the
United States«; it also sought »to identify those agencies (personal and organiza-
tional) through which music has expressed itself as a cardinal feature of Irish
political, social, religious and cultural life.«29 It offered, in short, the most detailed
and historically-aware recuperation of music in Ireland that has ever been enter-
prised, and it took its cue not only from Fleischmann’s Music in Ireland, but from
several other germane (and more recent) precedents, notably The Encyclopedia of
Music in Canada (EMC) and the revised (2001) edition of The New Grove.30 The scale
of its retrievals was extremely ambitious: EMIR sought to comprehend early
music (to 1600); seventeenth-and eighteenth-century art music; nineteenth-
century art music; twentieth- and twenty-first-century art music; popular music;
Roman Catholic church music; Protestant church music; traditional music;
organology and iconography; musicology and ethnomusicology. Perhaps the
most important consideration in these retrievals was an editorial emancipation
from the hegemony or governance of the work-concept, which if it had prevailed
would have excluded a great deal of lived musical experience from the purview
of EMIR.31 But ‘lived musical experience’ is not history, and the empirical heft of
context. It is notable, nevertheless, that much of this research remains unpublished. Published materi-
als are substantially represented by Axel Klein in his compendious bibliography of writings on Irish
art music (‘Ireland’) for Oxford Bibliographies Online, published on 24 September 2018 (DOI: 10.1093/
obo/9780199757824-0246). The thesis register accessible through the website of the Society for Musicol-
ogy in Ireland (www. musicologyireland.com) and the articles on ‘musicology’ and ‘ethnomusicolo-
gy’ in EMIR (together with several entries on individual scholars) afford some notion of this work.
Much of it was to prove vital to the enterprise of EMIR itself.
29
See H. WHITE, Introduction, in: EMIR, xxi-xxxii; here at xxi.
30
The genesis of EMIR and the nature of its antecedents are explored in H. WHITE, Introduction,
xxi-xxv.
31
An excerpt from the introduction to EMIR clarifies, by contrast, the actual nature of its contents:
»EMIR attends to the transmission of music (in manuscripts, prints, recordings, broadcasts, recollect-
ed performances and a host of other elated media) just as attentively as it retrieves and assesses the
output of those composers whose achievements sit comfortably under the rubric of the musical art
work. It attends with particular care to the organology and instrumentation of Irish traditional music,
and it documents a once-thriving music trade, notably in Dublin, during the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries. It comprehends a vast array of church musicians whose careers materially inflected
the musical (and indeed religious) experience of hundreds of thousands of people…It also recalls….
how vigorous and vibrant Irish popular musical culture really was in the decades following the
Second World War.
Although it is the individual musician, genre, musical context, practice, instrument or
source which prevails in EMIR, there is much else here to afford a panoptic view of the behaviour of
music in Irish life. There are survey articles on music in Ireland’s principal cities, on the history of
dozens of musical societies, institutions and associations, and on the influence exerted by Irish musi-
cians in the world at large…EMIR countenances antiphoners and breviaries, poets and instrument
makers, band managers, the web and electro-acoustic music. It sets in order, often for the first time, the
legacy and worklists of composers active in Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even
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EMIR did not (and could not) amount to a historical narrative, however necessary
the information it retrieved was (and remains) to such an undertaking. EMIR also
promoted new avenues of empirical research, at least to judge by the subsequent
activities of many of its contributors.32 Its own assessments, however, were
enriched by a critical pluralism which implicitly reconsidered (and perhaps even
undermined) the tenability of historical narrative as an end in itself in relation to
Irish music.
3. The Emergence of Cultural Paradigms: from National Art History to

Global Soundscape
I have sometimes been tempted to write a history of Irish music describing the music
and nothing else, using as background the history of European classical music and
nothing else. No politics. No religion. A consciously naïve approach. It is a tempting
idea.33
EMIR did not dissolve the binaries inhibiting a coherent narrative of Irish
musical history, but it did suspend their governance through the agency of its
own panoptic address.34 It also profited from that rather astonishing seam of
critical engagement with music in Ireland which immediately preceded it, and
through which the preoccupations of Irish musical historiography were vitally
reconfigured. The impulse to retrieve music in Ireland as an intelligible field of
as it profits from the curatorial brilliance of the Contemporary Music Centre in the case of Irish com-
posers of the last fifty years.« (xxiv-xxv)
32
These include the Horizon 2020 project ‘Europe’s Reception of the Irish Airs and National
Melodies: Thomas Moore in Europe’ led by Sarah McCleave, Triona O’Hanlon and Conor Caldwell at
Queen’s University Belfast (https://pure.qub.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/thomas-moore-in-europe
(0b0effd1-7bfe-4dc9-bfaf-cb28115e50b0).html) and projects on music at the National Library of Ire-
land, music at the Abbey Theatre and music in the Royal Dublin Society (among others) hosted by the
Research Foundation for Music in Ireland, TU Dublin Conservatory of Music and Drama, led by Ker-
ry Houston ,Maria McHale and Catherine Ferris (https://www.musicresearch.ie).
33
A. KLEIN, No State for Music, 48.
34
See Mark FITZGERALD, Inventing Identities: the Case of Frederick May, in: M. Fitzgerald and
John O’Flynn (eds.), Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 83-
102, here at 85: »Whereas mainstream musicology has tended to move away from grand narrative
histories and establishment of canons as a reaction to previous generations of scholarship, in Ireland
these fundamental tasks had never actually happened.« Fitzgerald adds in a footnote: »The Encyclo-
paedia of Music in Ireland… is the first serious attempt at establishing a positivist musical landmark; a
thorough history of Irish art music has yet to be written.« Micheál Ó Súilleabháin, who reviewed
EMIR very generously in The Irish Times on 23 November 2013, added a further comment in the same
venue on 30 November 2013: »[The Encylopaedia of Music in Ireland] will become the standard way into
the labyrinth of music in Ireland for some time. Note how it neatly sidesteps ‘Irish Music’ for ‘Music
in Ireland’ in the title. And proper order too.« (See https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/
mícheál-ó-súilleabháin.
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interest (the general motivation underlying EMIR and its predecessors) was no
longer a matter of empirical recovery alone, but of theoretical critique. One might
even argue that it was the remote condition of musical historiography from the
otherwise vivid reanimation of Irish ideas throughout much of the 1980s and
1990s which ultimately prompted the stimulus necessary for this sea-change to
occur. The admissibility of Irish music as an expression of something other than
its own sounding forms had hitherto been limited to a restricted mode of
nationalist propaganda, and the rethinking (and fine-tuning) of this concept was
a vital preliminary to the process of including music within the remit of cultural
history.35 The subsequent emergence of cultural history as a discourse not only
inflected by Irish music but essential to its own extra-musical significance and
historical meaning was decisive.
This did not mean that there was a sudden consensus of readings attached to
Irish music after decades of intransigence or surly silence (on the contrary), but
the growth of cultural paradigms in relation to music in Ireland from the late
1990s onwards is nonetheless striking. Even if we restrict ourselves to mono-
graphs alone, the swift pace of publication is remarkable. The appearance of
studies including Axel Klein, Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim:
Olms Verlag, 1996), Harry White, The Keeper’s Recital. Music and Cultural History in
Ireland, 1770-1970 (Cork: Cork University Press and Indiana: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1998), Leith Davis, Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction
of Irish National Identity, 1724-1874 (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press,
2006), Helen O’Shea, The Making of Irish Traditional Music (Cork: Cork University
Press, 2008), Harry White, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Gerry Smyth, Music in Irish Cultural
History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), John O’Flynn, The Irishness of Irish
Music (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009) and David Cooper, The Musical Tradi-
tions of Northern Ireland and its Diaspora: Community and Conflict (Farnham: Ashgate
Publishing, 2009) in the years leading up to the publication of EMIR attested a
new-found surge of intellectual confidence which apprehended music as a funda-
mental, if strikingly complex, expression of Irish ideas.36
Several paradigms emerged from this seam of work through which music in
Ireland acquired cultural intelligibility far beyond the boundaries of specialised
empirical research. Other paradigms disappeared or were radically reconceived.
The principal agents of this new discourse – polarization, revival, transition and,
35
The key work in this development remains Joseph RYAN, Nationalism and Music in Ireland
(PhD dissertation, Maynooth University, 1991).
36
These titles represent a very restricted cull from a much larger pool of published work. The
select bibliography included in M. Fitzgerald and J. O’Flynn (eds.), Music and Identity in Ireland and
Beyond, 287-314, offers a comprehensive (but not complete) indication of the more general field to
which these titles belong.
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above all else, identity – disavowed narrative history and empirical retrieval
emphatically in favour of contextual readings of Irish music embedded within a
theory of cultural practice largely unconcerned with the self-standing authority of
the musical artwork. With the significant exception of Klein, whose history of twen-
tieth-century Irish music privileged little else, the other writers I have identified
here either restricted their scrutiny to traditional and popular musical practices (in
which the ‘musical work’ was at most incidental to the meaning they sought to
establish) or engaged with art music as a dislocated expression of postcolonial
identity and reception. In my own case, for example, The Keeper’s Recital sought to
understand the development of music in Irish history as an expression of sectarian
culture, colonial dislocation and the symbolic refuge of Celticism. This was so through
the agency of a verbally-dominated cultural matrix in which music could represent
every condition of meaning but its own. In this enterprise, the one mid-twentieth-
century composer whose works I countenanced in detail (and on whose career my
central argument depended) was a much fainter figure in the chronology and sinew
of Klein’s history.37 Music and the Irish Literary Imagination was even further removed
from the subdued narrative of Irish art music in its engagement with Moore, Shaw,
Synge, Joyce, Beckett, Friel and Heaney as exemplars of a literature repeatedly and
formatively imbued with a palpably musical impulse and design. To recover the
‘missing history’ of Irish music in the ‘symphonies’ and ‘operas’ of Synge and Shaw
(their words, incidentally, not mine) was not to everyone’s liking, but this, too,
meant that the musical artwork got left behind.38 In privileging music as the expres-
sion of cultural and/or literary identity in these books (and not as primary artefacts
within an imaginary museum), my own drift away (not to say disengagement)
from the governances of art history, and thereby from an older model of historical
musicology, was obvious. By the time I was working on the final proofs of EMIR,
Axel Klein’s temptation to »write a history of Irish music describing the music and
nothing else« was so remote from my own intellectual impulses that I could scarcely
have endorsed it. This does not mean that I was somehow indifferent to the limbo
in which Irish art music found itself, or indeed that I was indifferent to many of the
37
This was Seán Ó Riada (1930-1971), whose influence on silencing the claim of art music to seri-
ous attention in Ireland I characterized as a crisis of modernism. It was in this sense that I regarded Ó
Riada as the most significant figure by far in the cultural history of Irish music during the twentieth
century. I stand by that estimation here, and I see no inherent contradiction whatsoever between his
prominence in The Keeper’s Recital and his much more muted presence in Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahr-
hundert. Ó Riada’s achievement as a composer was (even by Irish standards) exceptionally modest, but
it was also preliminary to a much more original enterprise which far outlasted the auditory presence
or circulation of any other composer included in Klein’s study.
38
It still does. »The music of Jamie O’Neill’s prose creates a new Irish symphony,« Peter Ackroyd
wrote of O’Neill’s novel, At Swim, Two Boys (2001), a remark that both apostrophises the vibrant afterlife
of European musical genres in Irish fiction and testifies to a long-standing critical convention, whereby
Irish novels are much more tenable as ‘symphonies’ than their actual musical counterparts. (See https://
www.amazon.com/Swim-Two-Boys-Jamie-ONeill/dp/0743207149 , accessed 30 December 2017.)
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works which Klein had advanced in his own book, but it does mean that I regarded
the cultural isolation of this music as an indispensable condition of its reception
history. For most cultural historians of any hue, Irish art music remained distant
music, to adapt the Joycean epigraph which adorned Klein’s study.39
It certainly remained a remote consideration (if at all) in the conception of
Irish music that preoccupied Leith Davis, Helen O’Shea and Gerry Smyth, whose
monographs (nominated here) so brilliantly rehabilitated the traditional repertory
as the key interlocutor between Irish musical practice and the formation of cultural
history. In her engagement with Charlotte Brooke (1740-1793), for example, Leith
Davis compellingly reads Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) as an originary
text in its advocacy of Irish (Gaelic) lyric verse as »already music, without the aid
of a tune.«40 As soon as that insight gained general currency, the impulse to create
a new Irish literature in English, already countenanced by Brooke, drastically
overtook any prospect of new music towards the same end. The symbolic presence
of traditional music in Irish literary discourse and its primary role in the develop-
ment of identity-formation (especially given the decline of the Irish language)
remaindered the condition of art music, by comparison, as a hapless colonial
enterprise.41 If only for that reason, it languished as an agent of Irish history,
cultural or otherwise.
In contrast, new models of ethnology and cultural history usurped the older
claims of art history and historical musicology (together with the territory which
these had surveyed), and, notwithstanding this eclipse, to good purpose. I have
elsewhere appraised the radical reorientation of Irish traditional music studies by
means of an ethnomusicology which interrogates and deconstructs the romantic
authority of ‘insider’ readings that have often rebuked the very enterprise of his-
torical enquiry. Helen O’Shea’s The Making of Irish Traditional Music has been fore-
most in this process of reorientation.42 In the present context however, I would
also draw attention to Gerry Smyth’s very different encounter with traditional
music as a decisive agent in the transformation of Irish music as popular music
and as the seedbed of a reanimated ‘Celtic’ music (notwithstanding the roots of
‘Celticism’ as a cultural phenomenon in the writings of Ernst Renan and Matthew
Arnold persuasively identified and engaged by Smyth in his historical reading of
this phenomenon).43 Music in Irish Cultural History confirms (and deepens) the
39
This epigraph is ‘The distant music mournfully murmureth’ (from an early poem by Joyce).
40
Cited in Leith DAVIS, Music, Postcolonialism and Gender, 82.
41
See my review of Davis in the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 3 (2007-8), 141-43.
42
See H. WHITE, The Invention of Ethnicity: Traditional Music and the Modulations of Irish
Culture, in: M. Fitzgerald and J. O’Flynn (eds.), Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond, 273-86.
43
See in particular ‘Paddy Sad and Paddy Mad: Music and the Condition of Irishness’ and ‘Celtic
Music: From the Margins to the Centre (And Back Again?),’ in: Gerry SMITH, Music in Irish Cultural
History, 32-51; 84-101. Smyth’s engagement with the representation of Irish popular and traditional
music in film is another significant feature of this book which beckons further work, not least in the
cinematic modulations of musical Irishness. To cite three exemplary instances germane to the historiog-
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intimacy between Irish music and literature explored in my own work, but it also
brilliantly constructs archetypes of Irish musical reception in the domain of
popular culture which leave Irish musical modernism stranded on the foreshore
of its own hermetic silences. This is not at all to complain of the absence of art
music from a book nevertheless explicitly preoccupied with music as a central
(indeed a global) expression of Irish culture, but the sounding forms and arche-
types resolved by Smyth represent a mode of departure from the cultural claims
of art music, an adieu signified in particular by his incisive reading of Seán Ó
Riada.44 They also represent a music that adroitly slips its historical moorings in
the present tense of global popular culture. This is a freedom which throws the
silence surrounding art music into especially painful relief.
4. After Long Silence: Redefining Ireland Musically
Composing the Island, the September 2016 festival of twenty-seven concerts over nine-
teen days, was a pretty hefty event by any measure. And it was not even designed to
celebrate the full history of composition in Ireland, just the works of the last hundred
years…Yet the tradition of music it salutes has long had in Ireland a Cinderella-like
position, an invisibility that can sometimes seem like the airbrushing or photoshop-
ping into non-existence of a major art form.
Michael Dervan, Foreword to The Invisible Art: A Century of Music in Ireland,
1916-2016 [2016], xii.
From the ‘hidden Ireland’ of an ‘unreclaimed and fugitive’ musical tradition

as this was perceived in the early nineteenth century to the ‘invisible art’ disclosed
in a major series of concerts in 2016 suggests a dispiriting trajectory.45 To many, it
may seem that in the interim we have exchanged one ‘hidden Ireland’ for another.
This is a route-map, nevertheless, that is borne out by the historiography which
has answered music in Ireland. The emancipation of traditional music from its
furtive (and almost vanquished) condition two centuries ago to its current
ubiquity as the defining global signature of Irish musical experience is matched
by a correlative intellectual engagement which privileges this tradition far be-
yond the purview of its formerly ‘ethnic-nationalist’ complexion (to invoke a
term coined by Regina Bendix).46 As I have already indicated here, ‘Irish music’ is
raphy surveyed in this paper, the very different representations of traditional music in Stanley Kubrick’s
Barry Lyndon (1975), John Huston’s The Dead (1987) and Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) suggest a
cinematic reception history which is anything but static or conservative in its readings.
44
See G. SMYTH, Music in Irish Cultural History, 56-58.
45
Thomas Moore used these terms (‘unreclaimed and fugitive’) to describe the neglect of Irish
music in a letter to Sir John Stevenson written in 1806 and published as a preface to the first volume of
his Irish Melodies (Dublin, 1809).
46
See Regina BENDIX, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Wisconsin: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
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now located within the broader and more inclusive domains of popular music
and global music. The afterlife of Irish traditional music as a defining exemplar of
Celticism, moreover, has allowed it to cross-fertilize with a host of related musical
traditions which perpetuate its identity-formations virtually intact. Gerry Smyth
is by no means alone in responding to this afterlife, but in the meantime, virtually
the whole enterprise of Irish art music (and not only its achievement in the past
century) has passed more or less silently (or invisibly) into the archive. Much of
the music curated in Composing the Island received its first or second Irish perform-
ance ever during this concert series, a state of affairs borne out by the implacable
indifference it has otherwise endured as a matter of course. There are exceptions,
but if I add that most of Stanford’s music has never been heard in Ireland or that
Gerald Barry’s success as a composer has been largely achieved outside Ireland
(Stanford and Barry respectively occupying either end of the spectrum of music
showcased in Composing the Island), the extreme remoteness of this music from the
discourse of Irish cultural history is perhaps clearer than it otherwise would be.
(The increasing remoteness of art music of any kind from the same milieu is a
related but entirely distinct problem).47
In these dismal circumstances – which amount to a reading of Irish art music
that strains under the burden of a distended modernism following the postcolonial
disenchantments expressed, for example, by Arnold Bax when he condemned Stan-
ford, Hamilton Harty and Charles Wood as composers who »never came within a
thousand miles of the Hidden Ireland«48 – the prospects for a narrative history
which seeks to redeem at least three centuries of Irish art music from general intel-
lectual oblivion do not seem promising. But if I dare to take my cue not only from
the historiographical preoccupations examined in this essay but (once again) from
the precedent of recent Irish literary discourse, it is possible to seek ways in which
this music can be re-inscribed into the Irish story. The very idea of Ireland as a
cultural entity depends on the value we attach to identity, not as a static or uniform
index of belonging, but as a pliant and meaningful expression of historically- and
socially-nuanced ideas, including (as it turns out), musical ideas. If, by contrast, we
attach no value whatever to Ireland’s European identity (an unthinkable dere-
liction, it must be added, in the context of Irish writing and its critical expositions),
I see no reason for not leaving matters more or less as they are.
But if we assume otherwise, if we argue that the invisibility (and frankly the
inaudibility) of Irish art music is of sufficiently serious account to warrant redress,
a new kind of history for (and of) Irish music may come into play. The principal
means of this redress is to privilege the Irish musical work as a work of art. This
would be a regressive step if one were simply to construct, out of the blue, a
47
The small audiences for Composing the Island and the increasingly commercialized program-
ming at the National Concert Hall (Dublin) since the end of the recession attest this problem.
48
Arnold BAX, Foreword to Music in Ireland: A Symposium [1952], iii.
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IRASM 50 (2019) 1-2: 47-69
gallery of ‘neglected masterpieces’ of Irish art music. But a carefully-considered

chronological (and generic) representation of the kind curated in Composing the
Island in September 2016 may point in the right direction.49 If one regards »works
of art as products of their age« and views them »not in splendid isolation but in
relation to one another,« one can also »celebrate that phase in their existence when
they transcend the field of force out of which they came.«50 Declan Kiberd’s assent here
not only to the concept of ‘works of art’ in relation to Irish writing, but also to the
notion that »certain masterpieces do float free of their enabling conditions to
make their home in the world« provides, in short, a governing paradigm which
can be adapted to musical works, without falsifying the very different cultural
histories respectively attached to Irish writing and music. To restore the authority
of the Irish musical artwork is invariably to contextualize it, but it is also to qual-
ify the history of Irish ideas with which it interacts. I’m not sure that many Irish
musical masterworks ‘float free’ and ‘make their home in the world’ as easily as
do several of their literary counterparts, but I am certain that the qualifier ‘Irish’
must be emancipated from its restricted or literal application if such works are to
make their home anywhere, and principally in Ireland. This means in turn that we
require a sequence of behavioural paradigms critical to the governance of the
musical work in order to recuperate such works in the first place.
In positing this retrieval, and in restoring the legitimacy of the work of art to
Irish music, I am aware that some readers (especially those familiar with my
previous work) may justifiably jump to the wrong conclusion. But I add two
riders to this proposed restoration: the first is that the musical work is a concept that
is hospitable to traditional music as well as to art music, even if the former (and
its critical inheritances) prefers ‘music as practice’ to ‘music as art’ as a behav-
ioural or perceptual norm. I would also argue that this conceptual accommoda-
tion is in any case vital in the domain of Irish music and that it opens up a critical
space in which the ‘traditional-art’ distinction recedes in its favour. The second
rider is that, in contrast to the unbroken narrative/analytic sequences of art his-
tory (and of older models of musicology), my proposed restoration of the musical
work as a fulcrum or nexus of meaning does not depend on the authority of such
models. I can envisage a meaningful chronology of Irish musical works (and will
seek to provide one), but only in the aftermath of having established the work of
art as a stable constant in Irish music that acquires meaning through several be-
havioural paradigms which semantically interact in order to bring it into being.
These paradigms include identity, exile, genre, ascendancy, silence, subversion
and refuge as self-standing and recurring agents of discourse retrieved from the
literal history of Irish music and of music in Ireland. Some of these paradigms
49
I it is nevertheless necessary to distinguish between the objectives of an exhibition and the re-
lated but different kind of engagement proposed here.
50
Declan KIBERD, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 4 (italics mine).
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patently derive from the recent musical historiography which I have surveyed
here. Some draw music into the orbit of literary reception history, not as a
discourse which has animated the ‘symphonies’ and ‘operas’ of the Irish literary
imagination (a phenomenon which still seems to me both critically and histori-
cally licit) but as a discourse with its own unretrieved (and silenced) subscription
to the work of art. Some promise to void the general equation between Irish music
and traditional music which, as long as it obtains as a defining principle (in
cultural history and the popular imagination alike) invariably eclipses the recep-
tion which a study such as the one envisaged here seeks to provide. But all such
paradigms, and certainly these seven, can historicize the Irish musical artwork as
an end in itself.
To foreground the musical work of art in this way, to promote its textual
authority and immanence, is not to fill the void with an impromptu anthology
shorn of, or immune to history. Turning directly to Declan Kiberd’s magisterial
readings of Irish writing, deeply inflected as these are by a strong sense of politi-
cal and social history, we discover an enlightening trajectory: from Inventing
Ireland (1995) to Irish Classics (2001) to After Ireland (2017) there is a corresponding
progression from writers and their preoccupations as an expression of Irish
history in the first of these books, to self-standing works of art as the primary
focus in the second and third. I would propose a similarly strategic progression,
by means of the paradigms enlisted here, from the contextual matrices of ‘Irish
music’ as an invention of cultural history to the works themselves. To establish
these matrices as a precondition of the works themselves would entail a rigorous
overture: How does music become Irish? Why is exile an imperative precondition
for the Irish composer throughout the long nineteenth century? In what sense
does the refuge connoted by Irish traditional music in Europe (to the present day)
eclipse the currency of Irish art music? If Irish writers work in the world at large
(Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Beckett) and are yet reclaimed within a domestic canon, why
do we hesitate over a reclamation of Field, Balfe and Stanford? If Irish music is an
idea, does this idea take precedence over mere accident of birth (a rhetorical
question, but a necessary one)? Might the soundscape paradigm invoked and
explored by Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin in his recent study of music in County Clare
emancipate the European complexion of music in eighteenth-century Dublin
from the colonial constraints of a borrowed musical culture?51 Would such an
emancipation reclaim Messiah as an Irish musical work in the most comprehen-
sive sense, not least given its abiding presence in the historical soundscape of the
city for which it was written? Does the chronic alienation of genre in the reception
history of Irish music (the silently-received symphony, the obscurity or deliberate
51
See Gearóid Ó hALLMHURÁIN, Flowing Tides. History & Memory in an Irish Soundscape (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)
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IRASM 50 (2019) 1-2: 47-69
subversion of opera) entail a status quo in which Irish music is, for the most part,
understood as being ancillary or extra-territorial to very concept of generic integ-
rity? Is there any form of redress from the axiomatic perception that Irish writers
create, and Irish musicians re-create? Does the silent condition of Irish art music
(except where it subverts its generic antecedents) permanently vindicate this axi-
om? If Irish traditional music beguiles as refuge from the strident agonies of mod-
ernism (or from the world itself), is Irish art music doomed to a modernism that
no-one needs or wants?
Such questions (as ever) are more easily posed than answered, but the
‘sunlight and shadow’ in which two kinds of Irish music have lived over the past
three centuries (one receding as the other emerged) has come to represent precisely
the kind of narrative entrapment which exercises Marina Frolova-Walker’s
contemplation of Shostakovich’s reception history at the hands of Anglo-Ameri-
can musicology.52 To transcend such a tyranny of ideas is also easier said than
done, and to create a critical canon of (Irish) musical works which draws from
both traditions in that enterprise will not please everyone. Undaunted by these
challenges, I take refuge in a grander imperative than I could ever muster myself:
»After long silence«, Yeats declared in a late poem, »it is right…that we descant
and yet again descant upon the supreme theme of Art and Song.«53 That yet again
is for me a redemptive licence and encouragement. Yeats meant something else by
‘art and song’, but no matter: in my case, I mean to privilege those musical works
by which Ireland is uniquely defined and re-defined.
52
Sunlight and Shadow is an orchestral work composed by Frederick May in 1955.
53
From Yeats’s poem ‘After Long Silence’, published in the collection Words for Music, Perhaps (1932)
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Sažetak
‘Nakon duge šutnje’: ispitivanje paradigma

za jednu nepisanu povijest
Ovaj članak ide tragom razvitka irske glazbene historiografije od 1905. nadalje nasto-
jeći objasniti zašto se do tog datuma nije pojavila nijedna povijest irske glazbe. Počinjući s
djelom A History of Irish Music (Povijest irske glazbe, 1905.) W.H. Grattana Flooda u član-
ku se identificiraju tri glavne stavke u toj historiografiji koje su sprječavale narativnu povijest
ove teme. Te su stavke: 1) pokušaj Grattana Flooda s pretjerivanjem oko glazbenih posti-
gnuća galske Irske u odnosu na glazbu u Europi; 2) zahtjev irskih skladatelja sredinom 20.
stoljeća da se uspostavi razumljiva glazbena prošlost; 3) rastuća tendencija da se ‘irska
glazba’ izjednači s tradicionalnom glazbom i/ili popularnom glazbom u djelima povjesničara
kulture od 1998. do danas. Premda je irska umjetnička glazba također u prošlosti privlačila
pozornost nekih znanstvenika, njezina je opća zabačenost i kao kulturnog identiteta i kao
predmeta kritičkih komentara i analiza pojačala na način „i/ili» čitanje irske glazbe koje je
demonstrativno spriječilo narativnu povijest. S obzirom da su materijali o irskoj glazbi i
glazbi u Irskoj bili stvarno uspostavljeni (osobito objavljivanjem djela Encyclopaedia of
Music in Ireland), i dalje stoji slučaj da irska glazba ostaje uhvaćena u zamku unutar raz-
dornih narativa koji ili previđaju umjetničku glazbu ili je istražuju u rubrici ‘nevidljivog’ stanja
postojanja. Irska kulturna povijest sve više do te mjere povlašćuje praksu tradicijske glazbe
(katkada u širim društvenim i generičkim područjima, uključujući globalne kontekste ili unu-
tar koncepta popularne glazbe i/ili keltske glazbe) da se sada irska glazba i tradicijska
glazba praktički smatraju sinonimima. U napadnom kontrastu, nevidljivo stanje irske umjet-
ničke glazbe kulturno je udaljava do najvišeg stupnja. Kao posljedicu takvih čitanja, ovaj
članak iznosi prijedlog o povijesti umjetničkih djela koja su Irsku glazbeno određivala tije-
kom triju posljednjih stoljeća. Takva povijest može profitirati iz nedavno objavljenih književ-
nih studija koje uživaju povlasticu istog koncepta (tj. pristanak uz ‘umjetničko djelo’ kao
bitni uvod u legitimni i često kanonski slijed čitanja pojedinih irskih književnih djela). Ponov-
no na sličan način uspostaviti glazbeno umjetničko djelo kao kritičko gravitacijsko središte
omogućilo bi toj povijesti da se po prvi put istodobno pozabavi s objema tradicijama irske
glazbe.
69

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f:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC

After Long Silence

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‘After Long Silence’Author(s): Harry White

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26844658

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Shostakovich. Eric Salzman’s Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction devotes three

These contemptuous misprisions and exclusions may or may not amount to

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2. ‘Irish Music’ and ‘Music in Ireland’: Conceptual Binaries and the

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rocally beneficial) under the immutable auspices of Catholicism. Religious belief

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This bleak diagnosis was by no means unique to Fleischmann, or even to

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composition as an outgrowth of Irish history, and not as an eccentric modernist

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EMIR represented itself as »the first comprehensive attempt to chart Irish

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3. The Emergence of Cultural Paradigms: from National Art History to

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4. After Long Silence: Redefining Ireland Musically

From the ‘hidden Ireland’ of an ‘unreclaimed and fugitive’ musical tradition

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gallery of ‘neglected masterpieces’ of Irish art music. But a carefully-considered

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‘Nakon duge šutnje’: ispitivanje paradigma

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