Ireland and the Musical Work

SMI-ICTM Ireland Keynote Address, 27 May 2021

I should like to begin by thanking Dr Helen Lawlor, former

Chair of ICTM Ireland and Professor Lorraine Byrne Bodley,
President of the SMI for having so graciously invited me to deliver
this address. My thanks are also warmly offered to Professor
Patrick Zuk, Durham University, for chairing this keynote, and for
agreeing to respond to its arguments. I am no less grateful to
everyone who may have an interest in what I have to suggest over
the course of the next hour or so, and especially those members of
both societies, whose work has done so much to transform the
landscape of musicological and ethnomusicological studies in
Ireland. This conference is an especially significant occurrence
within that landscape, given that it represents the first joint
plenary meeting of ICTM Ireland and the SMI, an event which I
dare to hope will be repeated on many future occasions. Indeed,
given the outstanding success of several joint graduate conferences
hosted by the SMI and ICTM Ireland over the past several years
(most notably, perhaps, last January), this is a hope which seems
well-founded. And since we are gathered once again online and not
in vivo (even if a return to the joy of physical gatherings at long last
beckons), it may not be amiss to extend an especially warm
welcome to those online delegates whose presence would otherwise
be unlikely, at least to judge by the exceptionally high degree of
interest which our recent meetings have attracted from scholars all
over the world. Their participation has been an unexpected but
richly-cherished blessing during a time of extreme difficulty for us

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all. We have made new friends online. Long may this continue.
[insert here dedication to the memory of Seamus Deane]

My talk this evening, like Caesar’s Gaul, is divided into three

parts. In this respect it faithfully adumbrates work in progress,
which is to say a book entitled After Long Silence, and subtitled
Defining Ireland Musically. I hope it may prove interesting if I
occasionally refer to the trajectory of this book – at least insofar as
my current research allows – because its preoccupations closely
depend upon three aspects of the relationship between Ireland and
the musical work which I would like to explore here.1 SLIDE ONE
But before I narrow to this purpose, there are two further
preliminaries that might be usefully glossed as we get properly
underway. REMOVE SLIDE ONE
The first preliminary is admittedly personal in nature, but I
hope it won’t seem irrelevant on that account. After Long Silence is
intended to complete a trilogy of monographs that began with The
Keeper’s Recital (1998) and continued with Music and the Irish
Literary Imagination (2008). 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. It did so through the agency of a
verbally-dominated cultural matrix in which music could represent
every condition of meaning but its own. Music and the Irish
Literary Imagination was even further removed from the subdued
narrative of Irish art music in its engagement with Moore, Shaw,

1
Show first slide with title of lecture and subtitles:
1. Reclaiming the Musical Work for Irish Cultural History
2. The Imperative of Exile: Rethinking the Boundaries of Irish Music and Music in Ireland
3. Silence, Subversion and Refuge: Ireland and the Musical Work

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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. (I
might add in parenthesis that it still does. Let me offer an example:
‘The music of Jamie O’Neill’s prose creates a new Irish symphony’,
the novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd wrote of O’Neill’s novel,
At Swim, Two Boys when it appeared in 2001. This is 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 are their actual musical counterparts). In
privileging music as the expression 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 vital contrast,
After Long Silence is intended to privilege the musical work, not
only as a symbolic presence but as an indispensable and indeed
decisive means of making music intelligible to Irish cultural
history. This ambition perhaps begs the question of what I mean by
an ‘Irish musical work’; it is this question that I shall attempt to
answer here. After decades of engagement with Irish music and
music in Ireland it is high time that I did so.
The second preliminary is to explain the immediate impulse
for this paper, which I have partly addressed in my abstract. Its
first inkling originated in the appearance of two books published in

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2016, Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks, edited by Fintan O’Toole
and published in Dublin by the Royal Irish Academy, and The
Invisible Art: A Century of Music in Ireland, 1916-2016, edited by
Michael Dervan and also published in Dublin by New Island
Press.2 SLIDE TWO Both of these publications seemed to me in
an obverse relationship: one defining Ireland in terms of an art
form invisible or simply irrelevant to the other. Although Modern
Ireland in 100 Artworks countenanced literature, painting and
architecture, music was conspicuously absent from its
comprehensions, as was film. These derogations were, for the most
part, mildly protested, but they were scarcely an occasion for
surprise. (‘Not again,’ is what I said to myself when I scanned the
table of contents of Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks). The
exclusion of music from the purview of such publications almost
amounts to a commonplace or orthodoxy in Ireland. REMOVE
SLIDE TWO and go to SLIDE THREE Michael Dervan gives
several examples of this phenomenon in his rueful but deeply-
considered introduction to The Invisible Art, and my guess is that
this exclusion will continue, unthinkingly and indefinitely, for
some time yet. 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
presence of music in Irish cultural history remains a hit-and-miss
affair. REMOVE SLIDE THREE Even more recent evidence of this
is represented by the four-volume Cambridge History of Ireland,
published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press, in which art
music is notable by its complete absence, despite extensive
contributions on sport, popular culture, religious practice and (of

2
Show Slide Two (Invisible Art and Modern Ireland)

4
course) literature. The Cambridge volumes are alive to new
conceptions of Ireland that far transcend 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 under which Ireland regulated itself for much of the
twentieth century. Nevertheless, this musical absence really does
‘speak volumes’ (four volumes, to be precise). 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
engagement in Ireland over the past decade This wariness is
partly because the very concept of the musical work is eclipsed in
Irish cultural history by a preoccupation with music as social
practice or (more simply still) as entertainment. Dervan’s volume
(which incidentally is the most richly and interestingly illustrated
book about music in Ireland I have yet seen) implicitly privileges
the musical work as a norm, but its emphases lie with the
experience of composers in Ireland throughout the century, largely
through the medium of a richly-layered and multiply authored
chronological survey. As many people will know, The Invisible Art
appeared alongside an ambitious, three-week festival of Irish art
music held at the National Concert Hall in Dublin in September
2016, entitled Composing the Island. As someone who attended
many of these concerts, what struck home was the general
detachment of this series from the cultural milieu in which it took
place. Much of the music curated in Composing the Island received
its first or second Irish performance ever during this series, a state
of affairs borne out by the implacable indifference it has otherwise

5
endured as a matter of course. There are exceptions, but if I add
that most of Charles Villiers 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.
From the ‘hidden Ireland’ of an ‘unreclaimed and fugitive’
musical tradition as this was perceived by Thomas Moore in the
early nineteenth century to the ‘invisible art’ disclosed in a major
series of concerts in 2016 suggests a dispiriting progress. To many,
it may seem that in the interim we have exchanged one ‘hidden
Ireland’ for another, a point to which I shall return.
This paper seeks to propose an alternative to that
disheartening scenario. Its principal argument is that the
conceptual prowess of the musical work as a fulcrum of Irish
cultural history has been little explored, so that the sounding forms
of Irish music remain axiomatically dependent upon narrative
paradigms which either occlude their inherent presence and
agencies of meaning, or absorb these sounding forms into a
discourse that is divided against itself. By contrast, a reading of
Irish cultural history which privileges the musical work as a
pervasive conceptual entity promises to reconcile the abiding
conflict between ‘music as social practice’ and ‘music as art’ which
inhibits the reception of music in Ireland to this day. To enlist and
indeed to exemplify the musical work as an indispensable agent of
Irish cultural discourse is thereby the primary objective of this
address.

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 I. Reclaiming the Musical Work for Irish Cultural
History

‘Hurry up, please. It’s time’: T.S. Eliot’s ‘last orders’ in The
Waste Land will do well enough here to summon the urgency I feel
in contending yet again with the problem of Irish music as a failure
of cultural history and reception. And since I’ve mentioned one
poet, I may as well mention another, namely Yeats himself, whose
poem ‘After Long Silence’ (from his 1932 collection, Words for
Music Perhaps) seems irresistibly right, at least to me, for the
purposes of this enterprise. ‘The supreme theme of art and song’ is
a characteristically Yeatsian apposition, even if he didn’t care much
for music himself (to put it mildly), and for my purposes the
supreme theme of the musical work as an historical concept
naturally depends upon this conjunction. Music is art in other
words, and the musical work is a work of art. These might seem
unexceptional avowals, except, of course, in the context of Irish
cultural history, where music, to judge by that Yeatsian silence in
which it has been received, is anything but art. No history of music
in Ireland or of Irish music has appeared since 1905. To many
people, it must seem that the tide has gone out forever. I don’t
suggest that musicologists would take this bleak view: on the
contrary, the sheer heft of scholarly engagement with Irish music
over the past thirty years especially, and long before then, means
that Irish music and music in Ireland are at worst lying offshore, or

7
(to use a more current and certainly more immediate metaphor),
that they are in the waiting room of Irish cultural history, sooner or
later to be admitted to the meeting, to the artistic discourse of
Irishness itself. Were it not for this recent scholarship, the book I
propose would be impossible to achieve. ‘As things stand,
however’, Axel Klein nevertheless remarked in 2016, ‘we must find
an explanation as to why the majority of Irish people seem to think
they have no history of classical music.’
I don’t propose to attempt an answer to that question here (if
only because I’ve done so on many previous occasions), but my
own recent engagements with Irish musical historiography (which
are summarized in a long essay on the subject I published in 2019),
lead me to conclude that we have only recently begun to overcome
a recurring and very powerful set of cultural binaries in relation to
Irish music which have profoundly inhibited its wider reception. It
will scarcely surprise anyone listening to this address that the most
pervasive of these binaries exists between rival concepts of art
music and traditional music as guarantors of Irish identity. One
advantage of privileging the musical work in the face of these
binaries is that it supervenes this inherent rivalry. Another is that
the musical work (as an active agent) can dissolve the cultural
nationalism of Irish reception history and deepen the meaning of
Irishness (as a cultural phenomenon) at one and the same time. I
first made this argument in a paper given at an SMI Plenary
Conference in Belfast four years ago (a revised version of which
was published earlier this year). The published version is entitled
‘”Monuments of its own magnificence” [another Yeatsian
borrowing!]: Musicology in the Context of Irish Studies’, and it
makes the case for an admittedly vast and very ambitious historical

8
anthology of Irish musical works as a logical outgrowth of The
Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland. It seems entirely germane to
my thoughts here to add that this project has since been developed
under the title Musica Hibernica by the Research Foundation for
Music in Ireland under the leadership of Dr Maria McHale. The
Irish musical work is certainly in play. Whether it is in general
circulation as a work of art is another matter.
To press this point home, I’d like to consider two brief
statements; the first in relation to Irish music and the second in
relation to Irish literature: SLIDE FOUR

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. (Axel Klein in 2016)

We shall be hearing a good deal more from Axel Klein during

this conference, expressly in relation to this project of writing a
history of music in Ireland. My sense is that Axel’s book will
privilege the Irish musical work of art to an extraordinary degree,
and perhaps even to an extreme degree (‘No politics. No religion’.)
And I also intuit a strong sense of emancipation from those
colonial-indigenous paradigms which have so often delimited the
reception (indeed the writing) of Irish musical history. In drawing
this enterprise close to the template of European models of
classical music history, Axel’s intentions and his generic
dependencies seem to me to be admirably and characteristically

9
forthright. But these are not my intentions in writing After Long
Silence.
A passage from Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland (1995)
brings these intentions into relief:

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. (Declan
Kiberd in 1995).3 REMOVE SLIDE FOUR

Kiberd, in other words, takes the artistic status and self-

standing afterlife of the literary work for granted, even as he
distinguishes between its originary context and its subsequent
reception history. This distinction seems to me a vital precondition
of apprehending the status and meaning of literary and musical
works alike as each travels through history. Both Kiberd’s ‘field of
force’ and the afterlife of reception history are, in my view, of
comparable significance, and perhaps even greater significance in
the case of musical works.
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 I wish to
argue), musical ideas. If we attach no value to Irish music as an
incremental expression of this identity, I see no reason for not
leaving matters more or less as they are.

3
Take in both quotations into Slide 3 (?)

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 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 intelligibility for
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 gallery of ‘neglected masterpieces’ of Irish art music,
although I cannot resist the impulse to add that the prospect of
writing a book called Modern Ireland in 100 Musical Artworks
will seem like an abiding temptation to many people. In any case, a
carefully-considered chronological (and generic) representation of
the kind curated in Composing the Island in September 2016 may
point in the right direction. Declan Kiberd’s assent 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 qualify the history of Irish ideas with which it interacts. I’m not
sure that many Irish musical works ‘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.

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 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 behavioural or perceptual norm. I
would also argue that this conceptual accommodation 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 (as I
have already argued) in its favour. The second rider is that, in
contrast to the unbroken narrative/analytic sequences of art
history (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 in After Long Silence), but only in the aftermath of
having established the work of art as a stable constant in Irish
music that acquires meaning through several behavioural
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 patently derive
from the historiography of Irish musical scholarship over the past
thirty years. 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

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which still seems to me both critically and historically 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 reception 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 political
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 involve 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 certain Irish writers work in the

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world at large (Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Beckett) and are yet reclaimed
within a domestic canon, why do we hesitate over a reclamation of
composers like 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? Would such an
emancipation reclaim Messiah as an Irish musical work in the
most comprehensive sense, not least given its abiding presence in
the historical soundscape of the city for which it was written? Does
the chronic distress of genre in the reception history of Irish music
(the silently-received symphony, the obscurity or deliberate
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 integrity? 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 axiom? If Irish traditional music beguiles as refuge
from the strident agonies of modernism (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 answer them we must. 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 a complacent tyranny that must be supervened. To

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create a critical canon of Irish musical works which draws from
both traditions in the enterprise of drawing music into the orbit of
Irish cultural discourse will not please everyone. But to be
undaunted by these challenges is to privilege those musical works
by which Ireland is defined and even re-defined.

II. The Imperative of Exile: Redefining the

Boundaries of Irish Music

Identity, exile, genre, ascendancy, silence, subversion and

refuge: if, as I have suggested here, we must engage critical
paradigms such as these seven in order to situate the musical work
as a meaningful construct in relation to Irish music, this
presupposes an awareness of (or consent to) the musical work
itself as a construct. To describe a literary text as a poem is to
classify it generically; to describe it as work of art is to encounter it
aesthetically. Likewise with musical compositions versus musical
works, and indeed musical works of art. The latter terms
presuppose a critical relationship or inherence or point of view
which is extra-territorial to the generic classification of the work
concerned. To describe the Mass in B-minor by Johann Sebastian
Bach as a musical work is not the same as classifying Bach’s
composition as a setting of the Roman Catholic ordinary of the
mass. And whether or not we consent to the idea that Bach
intended this setting as a musical work, our understanding of the
work itself is dependent on a critical reception history which is
anything but constant, or even reliant upon Bach’s original

15
intentions. In the case of Bach’s mass for example, the musical
work has been both affirmed and denied as a critical agency
throughout its long reception history, a history interrupted,
incidentally, by almost eighty years of silence. Similarly, the
classification of Messiah as an English oratorio is inadequate to its
reception history as a musical work in Ireland. This is not only or
even primarily because Messiah was expressly written for Handel’s
residency in Dublin between November 1741 and July 1742, but
rather on account of its subsequent presence in Irish musical
culture long after Handel returned to London. The afterlife of
Messiah as an Irish musical work may in fact be distinguished
from its British (and indeed its global) afterlife as a Protestant
oratorio, as an affirmation of Christian theism, as a middle-class
recreation, or even as a signature of political (and later imperial)
well-being during Handel’s lifetime and throughout much of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If this is indeed the case, then
the meaning we attach to Messiah as an Irish musical work must
perforce be different. In the course of its Irish reception history,
the constituency of interest which attached to Handel’s oratorio
was in the first instance almost wholly contained by the
Ascendancy milieu which received and acclaimed it. But its cultural
meaning as a signature of Anglo-Irish identity and of religious
identity in particular was to change as the century progressed. By
the middle of the last century, Messiah had become by far the most
powerful musical agent of Irish Roman Catholic culture in
existence, and the defining artwork of Catholic-Nationalist
orthodoxy. In the most profound sense, it became what it was from
the outset: a fundamentally Irish musical work. In this process, its
original identity, its generic behaviour and its civic ascendancy

16
were transformed, if not actually subverted. Its presence in Joyce’s
Ulysses (where the work is performed by a mass choir of six
hundred conducted by Vincent O’Brien) in the meantime
functioned as sardonic signature of its inflated auditory power.
But whereas Ulysses was banned in Ireland, the sounding forms of
Messiah were more widely available than ever before.
In seeking to redefine Messiah as an Irish musical work, I am
perhaps self-evidently preferring national assimilation to national
ascription, a preference which for my part I regard as long-overdue
in the recovery of music within the fabric of Irish cultural history. I
shall take this process even further in a moment, but my emphasis
on the musical work (as against an emphasis on composers, or for
that matter, on the personalia of Irish musical engagement in the
eighteenth century) begs the question of canon formation in Irish
musical reception history, as well as ‘the desire for a masterwork’,
which Declan Kiberd identifies as a principle of literary reception
history in Inventing Ireland. Kiberd affirms that principle in Irish
Classics, insofar as the latter volume almost completely depends
on individual literary works (plays, poems, novels, letters) as
thematic exemplars and masterworks alike. Kiberd, in short,
creates a canon. Although it is an overwhelmingly English-
language canon, it does include the literature of Gaelic Ireland and
certain modern Irish-language authors within its purview. And he
extends the canonic ingatherings of Irish Classics in the final
volume of his trilogy, After Ireland, which is subtitled Writing the
Nation from Beckett to the Present. My proposed subtitle,
Defining Ireland Musically, supposes a different but not unrelated
trajectory, but a trajectory nevertheless that consents to the
legitimacy of a critical canon. It also consents to the legitimacy of

17
art music and traditional music alike in the construction of such a
canon. SLIDE FIVE
Here we are entering on difficult terrain. A table of Irish
musical works (variously construed as such) between 1742 and
1843 might help to close in upon this trajectory, at least within the
century that elapsed between the premiere of Messiah and the first
performances of Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl in London and Dublin.
[see/show attached table]. My assumption is that most of these
works will be long familiar in an Irish musicological context; my
certainty is that most of them likewise are wholly absent from the
current purview of Irish cultural history, except where they occupy
the shadowlands of Joyce’s fiction. I would also be fairly certain
that many of them, with the sovereign exception of the Walker and
Bunting collections, lie remote from the curricula of school and
university programmes, notwithstanding a greater intellectual
presence for early nineteenth century Irish music in graduate
studies during the past ten to fifteen years. Granted, the auditory
presence of this music is more available in the present moment
than was the case even a decade ago. Very recent recordings by the
Irish Baroque Orchestra, for example, have augmented our sense
of music in eighteenth-century Dublin to a degree that could
scarcely have been countenanced when Brian Boydell published his
A Dublin Musical Calendar, 1700-1760 in 1988. At the other end of
the spectrum, however, complete performances of Balfe operas (to
say little of recordings or scholarly editions), remain extremely
rare. As far as Irish cultural history is concerned, most of this
music is simply ‘not wanted on the voyage.’
After Long Silence will seek to redeem this neglect rather
than to explain it. It will also seek to increase our comprehension

18
of Irish musical works by redefining the signifier ‘Irish’ itself, as in
my reading of Messiah as an Irish musical work. The fourteen
items in my table identify five composers born in Ireland (Carolan,
Moore, Field, Stevenson and Balfe); three composers who spent
significant periods of time working in Ireland (Handel, Arne and
Geminiani), two antiquarians/collectors of Irish music (Walker
and Bunting), an Irish dramatist and opera librettist (Sheridan),
and two German composers whose presence in this table
represents a continental engagement with Ireland as a musical
idea throughout the nineteenth century. But it is the works they
produced and the reception of these works that underwrite and
deepen our understanding of Irish music as a critical canon, rather
than any other kind of resolution. It is not necessary to force the
issue of Mendelssohn’s nationality or his general significance as a
German composer in order to recognize his piano variations on
‘The Last Rose of Summer’ as a work that meditates on Ireland as
an idea, especially when this idea derives from Tom Moore’s more
general influence on the nature and currency of continental music
that imagines Ireland throughout the nineteenth century. In other
words, my argument is that Irish musical works, emphatically
including the works in this table, are more likely to resolve
themselves into a critical canon when we seek a broader
constituency of reception than the one which cultural nationalism
affords. This is precisely the kind of lateral thinking that both
enlarges and emancipates the canon of literary works surveyed in
Kiberd’s trilogy. And I would argue further that Irish music, which
is to say music that deepens our comprehension of Ireland as a
cultural and political construct, stands in more urgent need yet of
this emancipatory discourse. For my purposes, Irish music is not

19
simply music written by Irish composers. It is also music which is
about Ireland, which helps to define Ireland musically. REMOVE
SLIDE FIVE
Another way of framing this imperative is to argue that if
musical works can become Irish (as in the currency of European
generic models of musical discourse in Dublin before the Act of
Union), they can also lose their Irish bearings and significance in
the aftermath of a sufficiently stringent cultural nationalism. This
is a principle of reception history affirmed in the table I have just
presented. Another, related principle is the imperative of exile
which attached to Irish composers throughout the nineteenth
century. I’m not sure if it is remotely possible to identify a more
significant (and more productive) figure in the history of English
opera in the nineteenth century than Balfe, but I am certain that
Balfe’s achievement would have been impossible to realize had he
remained in Ireland. Furthermore, Ireland’s literary estate has
long since domesticated those writers whose work lay offshore
throughout their careers (think of Sheridan, Wilde and Shaw, to
name three obvious instances), but this is barely true of our
reception of composers whose musical works remain ‘fugitive and
unreclaimed’ in the context of Irish cultural history. And this is not
just a matter of ‘bringing it all back home’ (to summon a familiar
phrase) but of reclaiming cultural kinship with Irish music
elsewhere in the world, and most notably perhaps in Britain,
Europe, North America and Russia. I willingly concede that in my
case this act of reclamation is also inspired by the long reach of
Kiberd’s construals of Irishness (and of ‘writing the nation’, for
that matter), but even if this were not so, our complacent or even
principled reluctance to assimilate Field and Stanford (two

20
composers from either end of the nineteenth century mentioned
earlier in this address) within the canon of Irish musical works is a
detriment that can no longer plausibly be borne.
In this connection, I have no interest whatever in substituting
one act of cultural chauvinism for another. And nor would I want
to suppress the plain evidence of renewed scholarly interest in
these composers (as in Jeremy Dibble’s exemplary monographs,
papers and editions in relation to Stanford or Julian Horton’s
immensely persuasive engagement with Field’s piano concerti in
relation to the development of that genre in London during the
middle decades of the nineteenth century, or Majella Boland’s
doctoral work on the same repertory and her formidable command
of the bibliography surrounding Field). All such enterprises are
germane to the canonic ingatherings I envisage in After Long
Silence, but none of them is correlative to my pervasive ambition to
make the musical work intelligible and indispensable to Irish
cultural history. To paraphrase a revered mentor: ‘if this ambition
is embarrassed, it will most certainly be so.’

III. Silence, Subversion and Refuge: Ireland and the

Musical Work SLIDE SIX [Take down SLIDE SIX after
I have read it]

In After Ireland, Kiberd privileges no more than twenty-five

individual literary works under the following rubrics (all of which
designate ‘interchapters’ between his unfolding sequence of
exemplars: ‘After Ireland?’, ‘A Neutral Ireland?’, ‘Secularization’,
‘Emigration’, ‘Northern Troubles’, ‘Europeanization’, ‘Irish

21
Language’, ‘Women’s Movement’ and ‘Peace Comes Dropping
Slow’. Which is to say: Kiberd avoids a chronological narrative in
favour of several thematic paradigms, even if his exemplars do
follow a chronological order (from Beckett in 1955 to Kate
Thompson exactly half a century later). The structure of Inventing
Ireland and Irish Classics is almost exactly similar, except that
Kiberd’s brief is more extensive in both of these books.

In After Long Silence, I would correspondingly like to press

home the imperative of using thematic paradigms (just as Kiberd
uses them) in order to engage with Irish musical works so that they
become expressive agents of cultural meaning. In this closing
section of my address, I am nominating three such paradigms –
silence, subversion and refuge – as a means of organizing my
response to Irish music in the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. The Joycean echo which these paradigms afford
( Joyce’s paradigms are ‘silence, exile and cunning’) is not
fortuitous. If any Irish writer exemplifies the imperative of exile, it
is Joyce. And if any Irish writer confirms the status of his or her
fiction as an aspiration to the condition of music it is the same
obstinate genius. ‘Joyce loved opera more than any other art’,
Denis Donoghue once remarked. More feelingly, perhaps, Nora
Barnacle said of her husband when he was in the painful throes of
composing Finnegans Wake, ‘Jim should have stuck to the music.’
Well, he certainly stuck to Ireland, and had he done otherwise, the
history of European literary modernism would have transpired
very differently.

22
 By sorry contrast, the history of Irish musical modernism has
until recently proceeded under a rubric of silence. In many
quarters it still does, which is to say (for the last time) that the
musical work has had little or no purchase as an exemplar of Irish
cultural history. To have progressed from the fugitive and
unreclaimed condition of traditional music deplored by Moore in
1808 to the invisible (or inaudible) century of art music promoted
in 2016 in ‘Composing the Island’ does indeed suggest that in
musical terms we have in the meantime exchanged one hidden
Ireland for another. That exchange is undoubtedly germane to the
cultural history of music in this country, but it doesn’t get us much
closer to the musical work as an agent of Irishness. Except in one
decisive respect. If I were to construct another table of Irish
musical works, this time from 1941 to the present day (i.e. two
centuries after the composition of Messiah), it undoubtedly would
attest a vast corpus of music which remains beneath the radar of
Irish cultural discourse (or even Irish cultural consciousness), but
it would also confirm a sustained engagement with the generic
jurisdictions and aesthetic preoccupations of European musical
modernism and postmodernism, despite this general indifference.
A glance at the catalogue of musical works curated in ‘Composing
the Island’ would provide sufficient proof of this engagement. In
terms of cultural history, however, a glance at the works
themselves is more than most of them have received.
I do not propose that this drastic imbalance can be redeemed
within the purview of a single monograph, no matter how
generously envisaged. But I do think that the paradigms I have
nominated a moment ago (silence, subversion and refuge) can
provide a plausible metonymy through which musical works can be

23
better understood as agents of Irish experience in the long
twentieth century.
Silence first: some years ago, I acted as external examiner for
a doctoral thesis in the UK which had as its subject the life and
works of a contemporary composer hitherto unknown to me. The
state of affairs described in this dissertation was worthy of a fable
by Borges: tact compels me to give no indication of the artist’s
gender, origins, nationality or sphere of activity, but the
overwhelming silence in which this composer had amassed a
corpus of symphonic and operatic works, almost none of which
had ever been performed, was in any case the chief matter which
engaged my interest. It wasn’t simply the unnerving solitude of this
experience (I mean the composer’s own) that affected me, but the
generic distress of writing music explicitly intended for public
consumption in the face of this total eclipse. Soon afterwards,
however, it occurred to me that a related and only slightly less
extreme manifestation of the same distress could be located much
closer to home, at least to judge by the disparity between Ireland’s
prodigious engagement with European musical genres (and
especially instrumental genres) and the general silence in which
this engagement has been received. The Irish symphony, from Ina
Boyle in the 1920s to Seóirse Bodley and John Kinsella in the
present day, is a case in point. If ever there were grounds for a
canonic ingathering of Irish musical works, it now lies securely
within this genre. In the context of cultural discourse, the easiest
point of access to the Irish symphony would surely be the extent to
which it has engaged with Irish history (and to a significant extent
with Irish mythology). A catalogue of Irish symphonies, however
conscientiously achieved, or even a monograph solely devoted to

24
this genre as an Irish historical phenomenon (strongly desirable
though both enterprises appear to me), is unlikely to redeem the
critical neglect which I have sounded throughout this address. The
silence I would like to challenge lies elsewhere.
My second paradigm, subversion, can legitimately be
construed as a strategy on the part of Irish composers to transcend
the silently-received musical work, a strategy which, as I shall try
to argue, has its origins in both an Irish and British determination
to subvert the governances of Italian opera in the eighteenth
century. I’m strongly tempted to keep my powder dry in this
regard, except to add that as a critical paradigm, subversion
(unless one regards the entire project of Irish musical modernism
as inherently subversive of received generic models, an opinion
which seems to me both untenable and impractical) countenances
a much narrower domain of compositional activity. It also,
however, attracts a much greater degree of attention, especially
within the domain of Anglo-American music of the present day. If
only for this reason, the prospect of privileging one inherently
subversive musical work in After Long Silence (rather than trying
to set Irish cultural history straight on its diffident regard for
opera) is, I hope, to good purpose.
Finally, and perhaps most controversially, refuge: if silence
and subversion appear (at least to me) as functional paradigms
through which to communicate the significance and meaning of
individual musical works, refuge is a no less versatile and plausible
hermeneutic. This is on two grounds: first, a sustained continental
interest in Irish music (as I have already indicated) which
originated in the early nineteenth century has, by now, long since
departed the souvenirs d’Irlande imagined and composed by

25
French, German and other European musicians. Instead, Irish
traditional music now represents itself, with compelling success, as
a different kind of ‘other’; as a refuge, in short, from the travails of
modernism, the high seriousness of ‘classical’ music, the ubiquity
of popular musical culture, and I dare to add, the stresses of
contemporary life, above all in Germany. Second, Irish traditional
music has been reimagined and reconfigured domestically, almost
if not quite to the same ends. One vital aspect of this
reconfiguration is the legitimacy of the musical work as an
aesthetic consideration in Irish traditional practice. This
consideration needs, I think, to be distinguished from obvious
exemplars of formal composition which depend on traditional
music as signatures and indeed enablers of musical meaning.
(Shaun Davey’s The Brendan Voyage is not only a distinguished
instance of what I intend by such exemplars, but also a prime
candidate for inclusion in After Long Silence, even if there is no
time to explain why this should be the case here). But the
consideration I mean is otherwise. It, too, has its roots in the
nineteenth century, and in the classicizing impulse of that
astonishingly rich American rehabilitation of traditional music,
above all perhaps in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York
in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The New York
recordings of Michael Coleman are perhaps metonymic of this
achievement. In the present moment, however, a different kind of
virtuosity is in play. Again, I am keeping my powder dry, but there
can be no serious doubt about the precedence and virtuosity of the
Jazz standard in relation to the technical finesse and expressive
reliances of Irish traditional music when it is reimagined in the
concert hall as a collaboration between the authority of the air and

26
the inventive prowess of the artist or ensemble that engages with it.
The refuge and relief of this collaboration can be resolved, or at
least comprehended, through a new understanding of the musical
work itself.

**************************************************************

This promises to be a very long book, but not, I hope, a

laborious one, at least not in the reading. A cobbler should stick to
his last, which in my case means not writing a history of music in
Ireland (a remark which I hope will bring ease to Axel Klein,
although given Axel’s sovereign command of the materials of Irish
art music, I doubt if I could disturb his peace of mind or
seriousness of intent in any case, which brings ease to me in turn).
Instead, my intention is to countenance the musical work as a
coherent if hitherto silent fulcrum of Irish cultural history.
Jim should have stuck to the music. As I bring this overture to a
close, let me add nevertheless that this is exactly what I propose to
do in After Long Silence.

Thank you all very much.

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