I’m posting a link to my biography of Francis O’Neill, which is coming out very soon from the University of Chicago Press. I got a few physical copies last Monday.
It’s as much a history of O’Neill as a human actor as it is a history of collecting, and I tried to write it in an accessible and non-academic way, but it’s the product of years of serious research and it’s been through two rounds of blind peer review to attest to accuracy and plausibility. There are some nice blurbs for the book on the press web site–I agree with them!
For the past 2 years I’ve been deep diving into American history. When I saw Face Value and read the description I felt it will be a great supplement. I am in the last half of Richard White’s “The Republic for Which it Stands”. I’ll read yours next.
That’s wonderful. I haven’t read White’s latest but I’ve taught Railroaded several times and have read his other books. He wrote a very fine book about history vs family stories called Remembering Ahanaghran . I think it’s out of print.
The Beat Cop is as much US history as it is Irish music–I got some fairly intense questions about it in Ireland which had to do the fact that I was considering him as an actor in US history rather than only as the savior of Irish music. I’d love to get your opinion on Face Value if you get to it.
the book I’m working on now is going to be largely a history of Virginia in your neck of the woods, what used to be Nansemond County. It starts from this document, my great great grandfather’s marriage certificate.
At this point I’d say SOME will be revealed. I know who made the original classification and when, but it’s also tangled up in the awful work of Walter Ashby Plecker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Plecker
Have anybody else’s “dissonances” got anything to do with the subtitle, “The creation of Irish Music”? I mean, there’s a lot to be said about O’Neill’s work in preserving, nurturing, even disseminating, Irish Music, but “creation”? Maybe I’m missing some reference …
By the way, I am not trying to be negative at all. I imagine the work you’ve put into this, PB+J, is more than I could ever dream of doing or even being capable of, and it certainly looks interesting. So, I’m just being curious, really.
Good point. Right away the semantic effect for me is one of irony: It suggests that while Irish Music actually goes back to the mists of time, the “creation” bit makes the assertion that outside of Ireland - and possibly to some extent within it - public awareness of ITM as a genre in its own right was mainly due to O’Neill’s work and, as has been pointed out before, to his curatorship which - right or wrong - in a sense did much to define it from his time forward.
I mean, there has been music in Ireland going back however long there have been people in Ireland (well, birds too I suppose), but it’s not really a stretch at all to say that “Irish Music” as we know it today is largely a product of the past 150 years or so. And that’s not just musically speaking, although even O’Neill would see some very striking differences between the music he knew and what we call ITM/“Irish Music” today. There’s a whole cultural and socio-political element to it all, not to mention the globalization of the music, that doesn’t go back any farther than the 20th century.
Indeed. In that short time span ITM has become more than “dance music for farmers”, as one box player so dryly put it in quashing a session squabble over style.
Obviously there was Irish dance music before O’Neill and it continued to be played absent his direct influence. I think O’Neill’s work was immensely valuable and its value has been demonstrated over 100+ years, but I also think it marked a kind of performance a statement of what it was and how it should be understood, buttressed by his authority as an agent of the state. A lot of his letters show his concern with respectability and with making it respectable. He has a blow-up with Edward Cronin and James O’Neill over key signatures: O’Neill wanted to impose a scheme of diatonic harmony rooted–literally, she was the authority–in his daughter’s classical piano training, and he tells them his daughter says they are wrong about keys and after that they both stop working with him. He presented Irish music as a set body of work: he forensically reconstructed tunes; he sorted out original tunes from variations; he changed titles of tunes, he alienated tunes from the personal possession of individual players.
It’s maybe similar to the way, say, “navaho culture” is created by museums that collected artifacts and displayed them: the cultural practices predated any collecting went on independent of collections, and they had variety and meaning larger than the static presentation could encompass. But the exhibit comes to define the culture.
public awareness of ITM as a genre in its own right was mainly due to O’Neill’s work and, as has been pointed out before, to his curatorship which - right or wrong - in a sense did much to define it from his time forward.
It shouldn’tbe forgotten he was a man of his time and his work was fitting in with the times as well. People were collecting tunes and putting together collections at the time. Levey’s volumes were knocking about, Roche was about and the Feis Cheoil collection of tunes not published before was being compiled by Darley and McCall at the same time O’Neill was putting together his. Sadly for them the chief got his out just before them and they had to ditch a very large part of their collection because of the overlap between the collections. So invention of Irish music was in the air, sign of the times, if you like.
Ah, yes: Cambrensis. By his description of Irish music we sense something very familiar indeed, whereby one can’t help but believe that in some way, shape or form, there’s an unbroken living vernacular in the music from then to this day. In a way, I’d be a bit surprised if there weren’t a fundamental connection to the tunes we play, and how we play them. While I also tend to agree that O’Neill would probably never have anticipated the modern developments, I suspect he’d still recognize the music for what it is, whether he approved or not.
But what Cambrensis detailed never caught interest in his own time, nor, do I think, was it meant to; why would a nation’s music matter when conquest’s the thing? It was a mere footnote, and relegated to a national idiosyncrasy at best. OTOH, now it’s a World Music in the sense that it’s become well-known enough to be sought out, imitated, and misunderstood. That, I think, is the “creation” part: For better or worse, now everyone and his dog has some idea, however distant, of what Irish trad “is”.
