Forgive me

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Re: Forgive me

Post by Nanohedron »

bigsciota wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 1:14 pm
Nanohedron wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 1:09 pm
benhall.1 wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 12:39 pm Have anybody else's "dissonances" got anything to do with the subtitle, "The creation of Irish Music"?
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 suggests 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.
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Re: Forgive me

Post by benhall.1 »

bigsciota wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 1:14 pm
Nanohedron wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 1:09 pm
benhall.1 wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 12:39 pm Have anybody else's "dissonances" got anything to do with the subtitle, "The creation of Irish Music"?
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 suggests 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.
... and yet we have this, from 1188 (famously):
Giraldus Cambrensis wrote:The only thing to which I find that this people apply a commendable industry is playing upon musical instruments; in which they are incomparably more skilful than any other nation I have ever seen. For their modulation on these instruments, unlike that of the Britons to which I am accustomed, is not slow and harsh, but lively and rapid, while the harmony is both sweet and gay. It is astonishing that in so complex and rapid a movement of the fingers, the musical proportions can be preserved, and that throughout the difficult modulations on their various instruments, the harmony is completed with such a sweet velocity, so unequal an equality, so discordant a concord, as if the chords sounded together fourths or fifths.
In some ways, it seems as if Irish music, as we know it, might stretch back, far back, into the mists of time.
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Re: Forgive me

Post by PB+J »

Nanohedron wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 1:09 pm
benhall.1 wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 12:39 pm Have anybody else's "dissonances" got anything to do with the subtitle, "The creation of Irish Music"?
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 suggests 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.
Yes that's how I see it and nicely put indeed!

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.
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Re: Forgive me

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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.

[A fair bit of cross posting while I was writing]
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Re: Forgive me

Post by Nanohedron »

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".
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Re: Forgive me

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benhall.1 wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 1:27 pm ... and yet we have this, from 1188 (famously):
Giraldus Cambrensis wrote:The only thing to which I find that this people apply a commendable industry is playing upon musical instruments; in which they are incomparably more skilful than any other nation I have ever seen. For their modulation on these instruments, unlike that of the Britons to which I am accustomed, is not slow and harsh, but lively and rapid, while the harmony is both sweet and gay. It is astonishing that in so complex and rapid a movement of the fingers, the musical proportions can be preserved, and that throughout the difficult modulations on their various instruments, the harmony is completed with such a sweet velocity, so unequal an equality, so discordant a concord, as if the chords sounded together fourths or fifths.
In some ways, it seems as if Irish music, as we know it, might stretch back, far back, into the mists of time.
There really isn't anything in that description that would suggest it was the music we know today. The descriptions of modulations and harmonies would both seemingly run against the usual common wisdom of ITM being a solo melodic endeavour played mainly in diatonic modes. And of course the musical instruments he is describing would not have included the violin, flute, uilleann pipes, banjo, concertina, accordion, whistle, or just about any other commonly-used instrument as we know it. No one today is playing the psaltery or lyre at a session (some version of those instruments likely would have shown up in medieval Ireland), and even the harp would have been a different instrument to the "Irish"/"Celtic" harps people play today.

Everywhere in the world has had some kind of music for pretty much the entirety of human history in that place. You cannot say from, say, a colonial description of the music of the indigenous peoples of Louisiana that "New Orleans Jazz has been around for 500 years." In other words "Irish Music" meaning "the music that people play in Ireland" is a very different thing than what we usually think of as "Irish Music." If you don't think so, I expect some U2 and Hozier covers at your next session.
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Re: Forgive me

Post by Flyingcursor »

This discussion makes me question a scene in the movie Titanic. In the scene where our beloved protagonists are below in steerage, a band is playing Drowsy Maggie. Would the version and style played in the film be what might actually have been played in 1912?
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Re: Forgive me

Post by Mr.Gumby »

Flyingcursor wrote: Wed Aug 03, 2022 5:58 am

Would the version and style played in the film be what might actually have been played in 1912?

Compare:
Drowsy Maggie-1920 or this probably slightly older (and scratchier) one: Drowsy Maggie Although in fairness, it wouldn't have been likely to find this in steerage. Here is another one, roughly the same period, different piper.
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Re: Forgive me

Post by bigsciota »

There was at least one piper on the Titanic, a man by the name of Eugene Daly, and IIRC his pipes (or a set of pipes anyway) was found in the wreckage. I think there was some confusion over whether he was an uilleann or highland/"warpipe" player. He survived, but unfortunately I don't think he was ever recorded.
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Re: Forgive me

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bigsciota wrote: Wed Aug 03, 2022 8:48 am There was at least one piper on the Titanic, a man by the name of Eugene Daly

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Re: Forgive me

Post by kkrell »

Mr.Gumby wrote: Wed Aug 03, 2022 8:57 am
bigsciota wrote: Wed Aug 03, 2022 8:48 am There was at least one piper on the Titanic, a man by the name of Eugene Daly

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Not as clear as some of your other photos, but I guess the equipment wasn't as good, then, either. :lol:
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