Mr.Gumby wrote:
Approaching O'Neill with a bit of healthy skepticism is a good idea.
Note that when the old people often spoke of the 'flute' it could mean whistle as well as what we think of as the 'flute'. Probably going back to both of them being called feadóg in Irish. The concert flute was a term used to distinguish it. I am not quite sure when the flute came in and I wonder if it was as prevalent as O'Neill suggests. There was a fashion for fife bands too, not much talked about these days and one can wonder if they were among the flutes referred to. Most stories refer to (concert) flutes coming in later, often sent home by emigrants from England and the US, where they had gone out of fashion.
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It could be as simple as microphones making flutes more viable
No. flutes were played for volume. A good fluteplayer produces a big sound. Get two or three fluteplayers together to play for a dance and the sound has an almost physical presence.
About the technology issue: realise the first accordions were much less complex than the Paolo Sopranis that arrived later. They were sold in hardwareshops and were rought and ready. The old German concertinas ditto, plenty of stories of people chipping in to buy a concertina for a dance and it falling apart after the night. They were disposable and cheap. Again British made quality concertinas only really started arriving when emigrants picked them up cheaply (relatively anyway) in England and started sending them over.
I'll just add that the popular concept of the "traditional" ITM instruments has a lot to do with the ubiquity of the pub session and group playing, which in their current forms are relatively recent (60ish years) developments. These, combined with the rise in popularity of Irish music outside of traditional Irish areas and the constant improvements in manufacturing technology have given us a much more standardized set of instruments that would have been around "back then."
"Flutes," as Mr. Gumby mentions, could mean anything from a whistle to a fife to a "band flute" to a concert flute to a piece of cane with holes drilled into it. The concept that everyone was running around with Rudall and Roses (which I've heard from a few people) back then is not true, and many of those flutes would have been cheaper German-made ones like the Nach Meyers you see floating around eBay. "Accordions," "melodeons," and "concertinas" had a variety of layouts and tunings that go beyond the B/C, C#/D, and (for concertinas) C/G layouts most popular today. People still played together to be sure, but it was not necessarily at the standard pitches we use today.
The mouth organ/harmonica is an instrument that was supposedly much more common among Irish players, especially itinerants, than it is today. Meanwhile, the tenor banjo had yet to be invented at the turn of the century, although its forerunner the 5-string banjo shows up in O'Neill's Irish Minstrels and Musicians, in a section about piper Richard Stephenson of Cork:
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On Stephenson's return to Ireland he entered on an extensive tour of the country, particularly the province of Munster, accompanied by an excellent fiddle player, one of Bob Thompson's sons, and Johnny Dunne, a capable vocalist and banjo player. Well attuned, all three played together, and their performance was well received wherever they went.
So anyway, our standards of what is or isn't a traditional instrument has changed considerably. It's also worth noting that we lump a lot of different things under the umbrella of "traditional Irish music" in a way that is somewhat apocryphal to the 19th century. The airs played by gentlemen fluters, the jigs and reels played on cheap concertinas in local dances, the showpieces like the "Fox Hunt" played by professional travelling pipers, the Planxties of O'Carolan from the 17th century, the marches played by old fife/pipe and drum bands, and the ballads sung by Johnny Dunne and others all come from related but different cultural backgrounds. They're all under a big umbrella now, but it wasn't always that way.
A little off topic, but this lovely bit of playing on the fife came up on a Youtube rabbit hole recently:
https://youtu.be/CIuVF-UXO3c?t=359It sounds much more unique today that it would have 100 or so years ago, when the standard concert flute in D was one of many keys and types of "flutes" that Irish musicians would have played.