Music of the Border: The Northern Fiddler Project, Media Provenance and the Nationalizationof Irish MusicAuthor(s): Allen FeldmanSource: Radharc, Vol. 3 (2002), pp. 97-122Published by: Glucksman Ireland House, New York UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25114416Accessed: 21/09/2010 13:51

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Music of the Border: The Northern Fiddler

Project, Media Provenance and the

Nationalization of Irish Music

Allen Feldman, Institute for the Humanities Study, Ljubljana, Slovenia and New York University

We now have cultural machines so powerful that one

singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the

other singers feel inferior because they're not like him ...

Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash

and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader

from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other

human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency.

Alan Lomax

Taking Music

John Doherty was the totemic fiddler of County Donegal in the latter

half of this century, due to the influence of his fiddling repertoire, play

ing technique and oral performance skills. He was constantly relating sto

ries about tunes that derived or were produced from contact with the

other world of spirits, ghosts, fairies, and nature as in this tale concern

ing the fiddle lament "Paddy's rambles through the Park."

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The old musicians in them days they would take music

from anything. They would take it from the sound of the

sea, or they would go alongside of the river at the time of

the flood and they would take music from that. They would take music from the chase of the hound and the

hare. They would take music from several thing ...

Paddy

was a great musical man and a great singer. And he would

stroll away at night and go away to rake - to place where

they had dance parties. Well, he was strolling home as a

very late hour one night and was coming past that big

demesne at about three o'clock at night. But there inside

the fence, he hears this lovely singer ... and what was the

singer only a banshee. In those days, they wouldn't take

stones away from the park any stones they would get, they

put them in a pile, and they used to call them a cairn. Well

he heard the singer at the first cairn .. .Well he says, I'll see

if I can get in touch with that singer. He went into the first

cairn and the singer was at the second cairn and when he

was there the singer was at the third cairn that is how he

was kept rambling through the park till it was clear day

light. But he made good and sure that he would have the air

of the song with him in good style indeed - and you know

by its playing it is something unearthly. (Personal Commu

nication John "Simon" Doherty, Carrick, Donegal, 1977)

For John Doherty music making was not a psychological act of cre

ation but was generated from contact with the other, whether that other

is nature, the world of spirits or the past. It was from that contact with

non-human or absent domains that tunes were not composed but taken

across borders He was frequently seen talking to plants and trees when

he took his morning strolls, and thus John was affectionately described

by his friends in Gaelic as *oigne" literally meaning "lonely, "but not in the

sense of isolation or social lack. Rather he was "oigne"because he exist

ed on the cusp between different and divergent worlds and because

music for him was a vehicle for mediating and bridging those gulfs in

space, time and existence, for expressing that experience of borders

between life and death, the human world and its alters and doubles, and

the absence of past music and musicians.

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Feldman

This essay, occasioned by the visit of the Northern Fiddler exhibition1

to Glucksman House at New York University, will be an exploration of

multiplex cultural memory consisting of:

the primary acts of memory embedded in the performance cul

ture of the musicians featured in the exhibit

the Northern Fiddler Project's own recall of these fiddlers and of

their past the fiddlers' current positioning in contemporary Irish musical

and media culture

the cultural positioning of the Northern Fiddler project itself with

in contemporary Irish media and performance culture.

The material of this exhibit, in which John Doherty plays a leading

part, likewise partakes, in that aura of oigne, of being historically between two worlds, of capturing a border experience. The Northern

Fiddler exhibit is a cultural hybrid that attempts to communicate

between distant worlds, spaces and times like the banshee Paddy encountered. The project and journey of bringing "lonely" music to

place is not easily achieved. The materials of the Northern Fiddler

exhibit themselves document the state of rural cultural memory in

counties Donegal and Tyrone between 1977 and 1980.2 The exhibit

materials are based on the visual ethnography of Eamonn O'Doherty and my own ethnomusicological and oral history research. The three

mediums, the aural, visual and textual, were intimately entwined

throughout the collecting process. Though our fieldwork in Donegal was based on my house visits to musicians from 1974 onward, the mate

rials featured in the exhibit were basically gathered during a concen

trated period of fieldwork conducted in northwest Ireland in the

summer to fall of 1977 and the winter of 1978. We collaborated prima

rily with an older generation of fiddlers who were the last to receive

the tradition of regional dance music directly from their musical and

genealogical forbearers as eminently local knowledge and, by and large, with minimal influence from the mass media. Though they did have a

strong sense of preserving a national cultural inheritance they also took

ironic pride that in their regional musical identity, Donegal and Tyrone

respectively, they recalled and accessed different niches of the Irish cul

tural archive that had been forgotten by the rest of the country. This

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was a magnification of the virtuoso ethic in Irish traditional musical per

formance. Just as each fiddler was assessed by his ability to mark the

music with his own personality and technique, local regions were noted

for their distinctive take on Irish music, that is, for the tunes, tune vari

ants, and playing styles that could be found there and nowhere else.

The national shape of Irish music since the late nineteenth century, if

not earlier, has been the regional mutation and variation of a shared aes

thetic ground.

Music and Memory in a Private Sphere The audio and visual materials that comprise this exhibition capture

a unique historical turn in the performance culture of Irish instrumental

music. The musicians depicted in this exhibit were poised at an histor

ical precipice which most did not cross. The sound and images of this

exhibit capture a performance culture that was nurtured, from the mid

dle of this century onward, as an intensely private space of intimate craft

and in reaction to the attrition of public communal performance spaces.

Most were unable to return to public performance with the resurgence

of Irish traditional music in the 1970s. Only a few were to subsequently

bridge this chasm, in part due to the publication of the book The North

ern Fiddler and through other concerted interventions by younger local

and visiting musicians. Thus it is important to locate these fiddlers and

the Northern Fiddler Project in their respective times and spaces.

The signature of the private historical margin, inhabited by these fid

dlers with dignity and self-sufficiency, pervades Eamonn O Doherty s

photographs and more subtly inflects their field recordings. The fiddlers

are shown playing in the resonant, often half-lit, recesses of their kitchens

and living rooms; they are self-posed, house-proud, at doorway thresh

olds, standing in front of their homes, or as they depart to visit another

fiddler, thus connoting a fragile web of such private spaces in which cul

tural memory was nourished and exchanged. Two of these fiddlers,

John Doherty and his nephew Simon Doherty, who were frequently

without a roof over their heads, appear in these photographs as edifices

unto their selves and as even more isolated in the self-fashioned shelter

of their consummate music making. And in all of these photographs the

musicians are shown holding that carved dark wooden, rosin-stained arti

fact - the fiddle. The fiddle here is more than just a utensil for making

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Feldman

pleasing sounds. As they cradle their instrument it is apparent that the

fiddle harbors the layered stratigraphy of an archeological site, and each

time these men picked up the instrument to play they were excavating

hidden and personalized cultural material bringing up depth-memory into the acoustic clearing of the present.

Secreted within Eamonn O'Doherty's photographs and drawings,

lodged just behind the words and music of musicians, are a complicated set of connections between wood, earth, stone, and human memory. The

landscape is imprinted with the cultural memory of the generations who

struggled with its wildness transforming into spaces of agricultural and

cultural interiors. And if one examines the portraits of the fiddlers the

memory of that labor, of that relationship to the landscape, is imprinted on the faces, and strength and power of recall is amplified in and by the

body caught up in the intensity of bow-work, fingering and performance. Each fiddle gently held in the hands of these musicians was the key to

opening the door of cultural memory and wood here links the various

elements that appear at first glance to lie in ruins and abandonment:

houses, fields, and music. For amidst these ruins, there was always a new

tune to be brought to light, one more fiddler to be discovered around

the next turn of the road and one more cottage tended with care and

love to marvel at.

The performance settings of these images were not accidental nor

were they the result of arbitrary aesthetic choice by the photographer.

By the late 1970s the musicians depicted by the Northern Fiddler proj ect had retreated to private musical recesses due to historical forces

beyond their control. Many of these players had originated as musicians

in the first decades of this century as the direct beneficiaries of previous fiddlers whose music went back uninterrupted to at least the mid-nine

teenth century, and in some cases the eighteenth century. Most of the

fiddlers shown here were born into a world when Irish dance music was

still a public performance practice associated with house, barn, pier, and

parish hall dances.

Their music was once the highest aesthetic expression of archaic set

tlement patterns and premodern economies such as the kinship-inflect ed clachan and its land-sharing system of r?ndale. It was also a music

marked by the restless pastoral economy of transhumance in Tyrone and

Donegal -

the seasonal movement of herds of cattle and later sheep from

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lowlands or coastal margins to highland or island commons in summer

and the subsequent return to lowland household fields with the coming of winter.3 (Winter, in turn, marked another season of intensive local

music-making that served as the model for the exclusively housebound

music we encountered in the 1970s.) Fiddlers Francie and Mickey Byrne in Donegal and John Loughran and Peter Turbit in Tyrone associated fid

dling, singing and dancing with this summer movement to the upland commons and with the musical bonding that occurred between young

men from diverse townships as they herded sheep, songs and tunes in

remote mountain interiors.

But then I mind Keenan and this man Brian McAleer,

there was a big barn dance in it one night and the thing got

going that good and Brian came out of the kitchen. Och!

He was going on maybe seventy years of age at the time,

But a light, thin man, ye know, and always with good spirit.

Great singer too. And him and Keenan hit the floor for a

reel. Well, if you seen them two men dancing, boy, they were dancing from when they were young fellows you

know, in their youth, and still this was a great meeting for

them to meet again, two old men, ye know, they'd been

dancing whenever they were young fellows. I'll tell you

what they done too and they sung together, and they herd

ed (together) when there was no ditches and no fences

about and you went out and herded your cattle the whole

day and him and Brian was raised together ... and the two

men was herding on the one mountain and they sung

together the whole day and exchanged songs. And Brian

and Keenan going out that night on the floor and if you

seen them boys you would just think their legs was rubber

... Ah Jesus you'd want to seen them two men dancing,

you could have played for them for a week. (John Loughran

fiddler, Pomeroy, County Tyrone, Summer 1977)

Here is a concise, yet evocative and profound ethnographic summa

tion of an entire way of life, in which music, memory and labor on the

land were intimately entwined. Herding cattle and sheep on the moun

tain during the summer season was the traditional occupation of young

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boys, and rites of passage where they stepped outside the close-knit kin

settlement into the freedom of the upland commons. Parts of the town

land of Glencolumbkille in southwest Donegal would camp out in the

hills round Port for the two months in the summer, where the women

would spin wool as the men fished from Port harbor or herded sheep in

the mountain. This was a time of song and story swapping. Francie and

Mickey Byrne, further east in Kilcar, would herd their sheep, lilting fid

dle tunes, to the mountain slopes of Granie near the steep ridges of Glen

Gesh, meeting up with other fiddlers on the way. They associate the

famous reel "The Gravel Walks (to Granie)" with this seasonal migration. As E. P. Thompson has written in reference to the rural eighteenth cen

tury Britain, the commons, the open land of the mountain, was a space

of precapitalist and premodern resistance practices where the time

structures of labor and culture making were intermingled.4 In the com

mons, task-oriented agrarian practice was symbolically mediated by the

aesthetics of music-making, story telling, oral history, and place naming,

as forms of social exchange. These economic-symbolic practices are

indexed in the intensity of the communal fiddling-dance performance of

the barn or kitchen dance that was still extant in rural Ireland as late as

the 1940s and early 1950s, and which date back at least to the eighteenth

century. John Loughran's elegy highlights music-making and dance as

acts of memory, as performances where entire ensembles of economic

and social experience and relationship to the land, were replicated in a

heightened space of musical representation.

My uncles were traveling around at that time, the

Dohertys and the McConnells. They used to have all class

es of musical instruments on them and tools for making tin.

They would spend away for a full fortnight before they came back to where their destination was. They might

spend a week there at home and the next thing you would

find them some morning, two donkeys and two floats, and

them loaded and headed away for the mountain again ...

There was a wild lot of people living that way on the roads.

You would meet people in the morning walking along, what we'd call small peddlers, with a lot of things under

their arms stopping from house to house. My people were

tinsmiths, they manufactured their own stuff, they could

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make what suited. There were the McDonalds; they used

to play music in the streets. Lillie McEvoy and Francie Welsh

all good fiddlers. They would stand under the gas lamps and Francie Welsh, he could make that fiddle fairly talk ...

They used to walk from town to town staying at lodging houses and play that town. It would cost you at that time

four pence for your bed till morning and then they was

away as hard as they could go. (Simon Doherty, fiddler/tin

smith, Ballybofey 1977)

Thus the regional migrations of Doherty family artisans were not the

aimless roving of itinerants, but replicated and updated a centuries-old

pattern of seasonal pastoral transhumance from mountains to lowlands.

The artisanal expertise of the Dohertys and their kin was both typical and preeminent in its synthesis of musical and economic practice. The

local performance culture, in its oral, musical and choreographic form,

was the anchoring symbolization of economic infrastructure, kin and

kith reciprocities and the labor practices of an increasingly unstable

agrarian society. In southwest Donegal, music making, field cultivation,

stone walls and thatched roofs were meant to exhibit craceann, an aes

thetically pleasing "skin" or finish that was the seal of craft, pride, emo

tional investment and memory. The most profound model for this

interdependency of musical and economic aesthetics was the genealog

ical oral poetry of chanted landholding histories on Tory Island that was

still extant in the 1960s.5

The fiddle itself was introduced into Ireland as a colonial artifact, as

part of the British cultural penetration of Ireland in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, and at the very moment when rural Ireland stag

gered under the dismantling of the bardic culture, social fragmentation,

agricultural rationalization, land enclosure and linguistic stigmatization.

The fiddle appeared in rural Ireland as a foreign object, and yet in the

eighteenth century it was appropriated, rescripted and recodifed into an

eloquent conduit of social memory and cultural resistance. The Celti

cization of the Baroque violin established the fiddle as the performative

archive of older endangered musical genres such as the mouth music of

rural women, the piob mor playing of Donegal, the virtuoso ethos of

bardic harpers, and the continuum of expressive culture that linked the

north of Ireland with Scottish highlands and islands. Northern fiddling

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was ecumenical, bypassing geopolitical cultural borders and ethnic or

nationalist ideologies. The fiddle in Donegal and Tyrone became a histo

riographie instrument by which the unwritten history and experience of

the colonized was inscribed into folk consciousness, much in the same

way that landscape and place-names had been used as a repository of

historical recuperation and recollection.

By the mid-twentieth century, economic depression and cultural attri

tion took its toll on the chain of public and semipublic performance

spaces that positioned Donegal and Tyrone fiddling as a communal art.

With the loss of communal performance sites rural cultural life became

increasingly atomized. However, the fiddlers shown here were not pas

sive victims of the modernization and suburbanization of rural Irish life.

Rather they cultivated a solo art, periodically enriched by interchanges

within a tight network of other local musician-neighbors. With some

notable exceptions, such as John Doherty, John Comae and John

Loughran, they mainly remained aloof from playing in pubs, and general

ly did not gravitate to regional Fleadh Ceol that began to emerge in the

1950s.

The social transformations to which they were responding intro

duced profound ironies into the musical consciousness of these fiddlers.

For in the 1960s and 1970s, with the renaissance of indigenous Irish per

formance culture, the electronic media and nationalist cultural move

ments elevated the performance genres of Clare and Sligo into canonical

and authenticating archives of Irish musical identity. This nationalization

and commodification of particular regional genres homogenized much

of Irish music wherein the now "idiosyncratic" music played by these fid

dlers was further denuded of local cultural cachet.

In the 1970s, the performance practices of many these fiddlers stood

in a delicate balance with the more public session and fleadh scene, and

the commercial concert and recording industry. During the 1970s and

1980s, regional instrumental traditions from Donegal, the Cork-Kerry bor

der, East Clare, the Leitrim-Roscommon border, and the Glens of Antrim

and other locales provisionally served as valued cultural resources

through deliberate interventions by a generation of historically aware

urbanized musicians. The Northern Fiddler project was a contribution

to this interchange as much as it was a gesture of gratitude to the local

traditions of Donegal and Tyrone. This historically contingent balance of

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regional performance culture, the semipublic session, the fleadh ceol,

and mass-market dissemination could not last. The older generation of

musicians depicted in this exhibit passed on, creating a profound rup ture and, with few exceptions, they did not serve as an ongoing point of

aesthetic reference. Excellent session and concert music still typify the

Irish music scene. However, the recent mechanized and "digital" specta

cles of "Riverdance," with music and stage settings that literally celebrate

the erasure of cultural context, have only the most tenuous connection

to the musicians and music discussed in this essay. Thus, as in the 1970s,

the Northern Fiddler project is a message in a bottle, an evocative frag ment now thrown into the cultural currents of the Celtic Tiger. This

exhibit is a communiqu? from totemic grandfathers to their descendents

and heirs for whom they had always modestly played but would never

meet over the flash and rosined mist of the moving bow.

Performing Memory The research and various media presentations that make up the North

ern Fiddler Project emerged from a particular musical and social context

in the late 1970s, which no longer wholly pertains more than twenty

years later. Indicative of this shifting context are the various transmuta

tions of the Northern Fiddler Project. The fieldwork began as initial

impromptu and personalized visits to an elderly generation of fiddlers in

southwest Donegal by two musicians, Natalie Connolly, a Dublin-based

whistle player and singer, and myself, a New Yorker and Appalachian five

string banjo picker, from 1974 to 1980. During this period, my interest

was primarily as a musician and not overtly ethnographic.

Next was the formalization of these visits into a field research proj ect funded by poet Ciaran Carson in 1978, then directing the traditional

music unit at the Northern Ireland Arts Council. This project was then

significantly expanded in scope and methods by the crucial participa

tion of my close friend, Derryman and Dublin architect/sculptor Eamonn

O'Doherty (also a flute and whistle player), as the project's visual ethno

grapher. This phase culminated in the publication of the book Northern

Fiddler in 1980. And now the project has received a new reincarnation

as a multimedia exhibit mounted by the Irish Traditional Musical Archive

in 2000 in Dublin and the subsequent touring of the exhibit in Ireland

and the United States.

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The history of the project could be the subject of an ethnography itself: from field research sponsored by a very ecumenical arm of the

British government at the height of the Northern Irish conflict, to twen

ty years later as an exhibit sponsored by a unique public-access archive

devoted to Irish music and dance sponsored by the government of the

Irish Republic, and now coinciding with a post-conflict period known

as the "peace process ."The project cannot be disassociated form the

political context of the time of its inception. The Traditional Music sec

tion of the Northern Ireland Arts Council in the late 1970s was commit

ted to promoting special traditional music events that explored and

promoted common rural traditions bridging sectarian divides and

nation-state boundaries. Thus our choice of field research was in one

county of the Irish Republic and one or two counties in Northern Ire

land, though our funds eventually ran out before we could extend field

research beyond Donegal and Tyrone.

Further, in Tyrone, the collectors, O'Doherty and myself, were based

in Carrickmore and working around the Pomeroy region, which was

then Provisional IRA-controlled territory and was cautiously patrolled by British troops landing and taking off in helicopters, and by Ulster

Defence Force roadblocks. We spent many evenings in Carrickmore

drinking with ex-detainees from Long Kesh after completing a day's

exhausting fieldwork looking for, recording and interviewing local fid

dlers in the surrounding hill country. Thus, our encounters with the

haunted men of the wire eventually led to my next fieldwork project, an

oral history of the Troubles resulting in the monograph Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern

Ireland (University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Driving around rural Northern Ireland in 1978 in O Doherty s van,

with its Irish Republic license plates, loaded with cameras, German

recording equipment and black leather instrument cases, we were fully aware of the paranoia we could have inspired and the obvious target we

made. Fortunately, we were all too obvious and no one bothered with us.

However, during our time in Tyrone we were mindful of the British army

operative Captain Robert Nairac, who had been recently found execut

ed in Armagh; he had posed as a whistle player in search of Irish tradi

tional music in the local pubs that were Republican strongholds.6 The research process and the publication of the field materials in

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book form occurred in the midst of one of the most creative periods in

modern Irish culture. This cultural renewal was characterized by the

turning of two generations of largely urbanized Irish youth to Irish tradi

tional vocal and dance music; this was an implicit rebuke to the Anglo American mass media messages that inundated their daily lives through

government-owned radio and television. From the middle 1960s onward

young Irish people reappropriated rural musical instruments, techniques and repertoires from a preceding and often culturally neglected older

generation of musicians who served as their guides and mentors. This

resurgence process resulted in a moderately cultural separatist, highly skilled and creative urbanized performance culture rooted in rural mate

rials and transmitting rural cultural memory in both urban and rural per

formance contexts.7 This memory complex in turn found a new lease of

life in electronic media, particularly the commercially produced record

ing and the privately collected session or festival cassette tape. Cassette

culture, as in other parts of the world, mediated the emergence of alter

native musical sensibilities.8

Not coincidentally, during the mid- and late 1970s, a more overtly

politicized, working class, cultural, linguistic and musical separatism was

also being forged amongst Republican prisoners in the Maze prison com

plex under the direction of Bobby Sands.9 In contrast the current rework

ing of the Northern Fiddler field materials into a multimedia traveling

exhibition coincides with the Northern Irish peace process and the

Celtic Tiger economic phenomenon, and when the most famous expres

sion of Irish musical culture is the extravaganza Euro-export known as

"Riverdance." In these rapidly shifting and successive political, econom

ic and cultural contexts, the original significance of the fieldwork mate

rials, musical, oral, visual and textual, indeed the significance of the lives

and musical output of the featured fiddlers, both abide and take on a new

and altered currency. The exhibit remains simultaneously a memory

room, a cabinet of cultural curiosities, and a source of cultural identity.

Textualization and Nationalization

Recently it has been argued that the Northern Fiddler research made

too much of the regional difference and regional memory that we

encountered in rural collecting trips of the late 1970s.10 This position

argues that there is a national culture of Irish music that has existed at

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least since the post-Famine period, if not earlier, and which crosscuts the

various cultural ecologies that can be found in rural Ireland. This thesis

credits traveling musicians and dancing masters of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries with fashioning a unified national musical culture

and bases its material evidence on the tune transcriptions found in pub lished collections from the eighteenth century onward. The centraliza

tion of the tunes in published collections supposedly refracts a

communal canon of music and performance that had all the characteris

tics of a national culture despite British colonial repression.

Ethnomusicologists have long recognized that musical performance traditions create and sustain social borders and identities. However, the

assumption of a national culture is rarely untouched by the desire for a

nation-state and the latter provides a powerful interpretive framework

that can often skew localized musical practice. It is a framework that

identifies political borders with cultural borders and correspondingly excludes those cultural elements and practices that do not readily fit in, or comply with, political borders and nationalist ideology. Indeed, this

perspective of the isomorphic relation between culture and a nation

state can be tracked to the nineteenth century romanticism of Hegel and

Herder. In this context, stressing regional difference is vulnerable to the

accusation of being anti-nationalist and of even being overly romantic.

Though the assertion of a homogenous culture ideally in symmetry with

an imagined national community is also an equally romantic notion,

noone can deny the continuity of dance-tune and song repertoire in rural

Ireland, which, however, exists alongside significant marked regional

divergences such as between the sean nos singing of Connemara and

the Ulster ballad tradition.

Colonialism created both national cultural artifacts and superimposed new layers of cultural diversity onto the precolonial Gaelic regional con

tinuities and diversity. Certainly the eighteenth to nineteenth century

geographical dissemination of European Baroque instruments, like the

fiddle and the open system flute, and quasi-Europeanized instruments

like the uilleann pipes (related to the French Baroque-era musette)

speak a good bit to the national continuity in local music practices in Ire

land. However, it is the very origins of such instrumentation in colonial

conditions of hybridity and the particular aesthetic privilege afforded to

regional and individual stylization in Irish music that also indicate social

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frameworks for musical performance that exceed and may even contra

dict the type of homogenous uniformity that a nation-state musical cul

ture requires as it asserts canonical authority.

The ideology of the Irish nation-state was, in part, bound up in litera

cy and textuality, thus it is no coincidence that a presentation like the

Northern Fiddler project based on the performance practices of a dense

and particularist oral culture was bound to transgress certain boundaries

of the nationalist tradition in the documentation of Irish music. Here it

is important to examine some of the ways local musical performance

practice becomes an expression of nation-state ideology regardless of the

intentions of the performer. The nationalist appropriation of the local

rural cultural materials bases its canonical authority on prior published texts of Irish music. In this framework, a musical performance that has

been translated into text by transcription is compared to existing pub lished music transcriptions and assigned its relative position in the hier

archy of prior published music. Here a local Donegal tune that is

melodically similar to a previously published tune from Kerry, Clare,

Sligo,Cork and even Scotland is declared a "variant" of the published tune

simply on the authority that the latter made its first appearance in the lit

eracy circuits of Ireland and/or the British Isles. Here priority becomes a

criterion for originality and ultimately cultural authenticity. When the

name or melodic structure of the local dance tune or song is different or

under question, the published tune becomes the referenced authority and is used as a corrective to the so-called misnaming or misplaying or

deviation of the published tune text. A remote area like Donegal, which

only attracted sporadic tune collection, then has a vast musical corpus

that is reduced to being a variation of, or a deviation from, a canon of

published tunes extracted from another area that had been subjected to

collection that is more comprehensive.

Quite often, a particular performance happens to get collected or

transcribed first, possibly because the player lived in the same city as

the collector, or circulated m fleadh ceol, or because particular regions

had been declared geographical centers of cultural authenticity such as

the various Gaeltachta.u Thus, the nationalization of the musical tradi

tion is already pre-inscribed in privileged locales and designated spaces

of national representation. As a Gaeltacht region, southwest Donegal

exhibited some of these characteristics but its communication with

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Scotland complicated its nationalist credentials, while Tyrone, as part of

Northern Ireland, also held an ambiguous status. These ambiguities

positioned the musical culture of both counties as subordinate varia

tions on better-known canonical musical practices from Clare and Sligo.

Thus, the literary culture of music transcription and publication estab

lishes canonical authority of authenticated nomenclature and musical

structure over the multiplex diversity of spontaneous oral culture per

formances of an acoustic artifact. And of course, the literary medium

with its stress on centralization, indexing and classification of musical

performances serves to homogenize collected music and eventually

bring it into a national framework of uniform cultural expression.12

The literary tradition with its canons of published melodies consti

tutes a powerful form of cultural memory and one that is attuned to and

aligned with the aspirations of Irish national culture and indirectly with

the Irish nation-state. However, the cultural and historical priority of pub

lished transcriptions and collection tell us little about what was happen

ing on the ground in specific locales of music-making around Ireland. For

most of the collections, in order to nationalize the tune under the cate

gory "Irish," removed the transcribed acoustic object, not only from its

performed context, but from its local topographic context; in this way a

national tradition of music-making is forged. And, of course, the local

musicians who invested in immediacy of making music for self and com

munity were not aware that they were simply replicating a variant of a

piece of music or a tune name that led a privileged and magical existence

in a tome in Dublin, Edinburgh, or London. Local musicians could be very

well aware of other variations of the tune they played but used this

awareness to affirm the superiority and distinctiveness of the local ren

dition. In this textual framework much of the local association of place and person that a tune or song carried in its intergenerational diachron

ic and synchronie transmission is dropped by the wayside and the musi

cal transcription gets attached to a general history of the music of the

nation-state; local memory becomes supplanted by an emergent collec

tivized and textual national memory.

When recorded music began circulating widely, the same dynamic was repeated at the level of sound and commerce since recordings were

disseminated on radio and recording channels as components of the mar

ketplace. Certain styles, players and/or regional traditions like Sligo in the

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1920s and 1930s and Clare in the 1960s and 1970s were repeatedly recorded and disseminated by radio and phonograph and, through their

commercial circulation, were elevated to a national sound archive.While

the music of other regions of Ireland, which were not recorded, dissem

inated or commodified, fell out of the framework of "Irish music" and

were not registered in the public culture, and thus were accorded an

inferior or marginal status.

This commercial centralization of Irish music devolved from its tex

tual centralization and had a mixed impact on local musicians. In Done

gal and elsewhere a significant number stopped playing in local idioms

and repertoires and played the tunes and styles they repeatedly heard on

radio and records. Some musicians internalized the commercial neglect

of their regional tradition as a sign of local cultural inferiority and

stopped playing altogether or retreated into private spaces to play their

music, a process that was aggravated by the decline of rural dancing from

the 1930s onward as the latter became subject to dance hall legislation

and church oversight. These varied responses of emulation or retreat in

reference to publicly approved and commercially remunerative rural

music, disseminated by a mass culture medium, disclosed the shaping of

local musicians' own aesthetic consciousness by a national culture.

Nor was the Northern Fiddler Project insulated from the dynamics of

textual authority and centralization and commodification. In our multi

media salvage-anthropology approach, we were attempting to "tran

scribe" not only music, but also the entire performance context. Once

we translated the tunes we recorded into a transcribed text-based for

mat, we became part of the literary tradition and its canonical standards

of comparison. Eamonn O Doherty and myself were well aware that by

translating the oral and musical practices of Donegal and Tyrone per

formance culture into a commercially distributed text, we were attempt

ing to exploit the cultural capital of the text, to revalidate regional music

for both the younger generations of Donegal and Tyrone and for the

wider public sphere of Irish traditional music players and audiences.

Musical Acts of Forgetting Nationalist appropriations of rural performance practice have not

remained stable in late modernity. One could argue that the Riverdance

spectacle and related phenomena also presents a new homogenized

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representation of Irish music/dance, cleansed of its regional and histor

ical differences vis-?-vis the economically modernized Irish nation-state

and the European Union. Riverdance, despite the national pride that has

been attached to its performances and commercial success, is itself post

nationalist. Riverdance sought or created the semblance of cultural inte

gration for a certain version of "Irishoid" music and dance with modern

European media performance. The core theatre concept of Riverdance

originated in Ireland's hosting in 1993 of the Eurovision song contest,

an event where national difference is only minimally signified by the cit

izenship of the performer, costume and sometimes the language of the

song verse (though English remains hegemonic). The local idiomatic

vocal is always overlaid on a transnational pop music orchestral format.

The sexuality that has been built into the neo-stepdance performanc

es of Riverdance, the ultra-modernist stage sets that are completely

devoid of any Irish sense of place, and the fact that most of the music pre

sented in Riverdance is newly composed (although played with a com

bination of Irish, Balkan and rock instrumentation), reinforces the

Eurocentric orientation of this theatre piece. The stress on synchronized

dancing hearkens back to the Busby Berkeley synchronized dance

extravaganzas of the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. Interpreted from the vantage point of such early twentieth century popular dance

fantasias, Riverdance, far from commemorating Irish rural performance

culture, appears to be celebrating the latest globalized wave of industri

alization in rural Ireland; it expresses the country's emergence as a mod

ern economic force and the new labor discipline all this required from

rural populations as they moved from family farm or the dole, to the

microchip assembly line and the minimal-wage service economy. The

disciplining of the Irish body for the time/motion utilities of the digital

factory and the industrialization of former agrarian settings by a transna

tionalized economy is replicated in Riverdance by the lockstep display of massed bodies of young people dancing in mechanical unison against an ultra-modernist abstract stage design. The final message being broad

cast is that Irish cultural production is now synchronized with Eurocen

tric economic production paradigms.

Riverdance is a celebration of "Irish" culture that deliberately erases

and forgets the historical record ofthat culture including the current fer

tile and urbanized Irish traditional music scene of which Riverdance is a

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partial outgrowth (and from which it recruits its musicians and dancers.)

It is crucial to assess performances like Riverdance as acts of cultural

amnesia that project the contemporary transnational cultural capital of

Ireland as both the epitome of European pastoralism and postindustrial economic adaptation. Riverdance reconciles economic and cultural con

tradictions in rural and urban Ireland on the symbolic level (sexuality,

cultural memory, gender roles, leisure, labor) that are still unresolved in

everyday life. Such symbolic capital can only be fashioned through his

torical erasure.

In this context, it is important to place Riverdance in relation to Sean

O'Riada's experiments in ensemble performance, one of the first mod

ernist attempts to bring Irish music to stage-centered art performance.

O'Riada intervened in the musical memory of Ireland by fusing contem

porary rural traditional musicians, instruments and playing techniques

with eighteenth century Baroque ensemble arrangements. In this man

ner, he sought to ensure rural music's continued viability in Irish nation

al culture and in emerging mass media markets that were effectively

deluging Ireland with Anglo-American pop music products in the early

1960s. O'Riada, like the blind eighteenth-century harper Turlough

O'Carolan before him, attempted a fusion of indigenous Irish and Euro

pean musical forms.

In the early eighteenth century O'Carolan was seeking to win new

patronage from a colonizing English elite and thus presented Irish music

framed by Baroque-influenced harmonization, melody and ornamenta

tion, whereas O'Riada, an aesthetic modernist and Irish cultural nation

alist, was searching for a modernist presentation of traditional Irish music

that would capture its historical depth, its rural and oral sensibility, for

the proscenium stage and electronic recording studio. Riverdance is ulti

mately an heir to certain limited aspects of O'Riada's innovations, but in

the Riverdance, the rural musical content is kept to the bare minimum

and reduced to formula, while the production advances an abstracted,

decontextualized and eroticized modern dance theatre aesthetic, a com

bination that would have repulsed O'Riada for its erasure of the very

Irish cultural energy Riverdance purports to celebrate. In our own syn

cretistic and decidedly non-rural fusion of aural, visual and textual media,

the Northern Fiddler projects were influenced by, and shared many of

O'Riada's concern for forms of cultural salvage and staging that avoided

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the jettisoning and the "museumification" of Irish music. Like O'Riada

we appropriated the very modernism that, heretofore posed such a

threat to traditional continuity, in order to captures the dynamics of per

son, place and performance that renders rural Irish music such a unique

experience.

Performing Scripts In recent years, ethnomusicology has tended to emphasize the rela

tionship between music, social memory and place through an analytic stress on performance or enactment analysis of a musical genre. Contex

tualized performance analysis can be contrasted to the prior focus on

textual dissection and cross-cultural comparison of musical structure

derived from comparison of collected and transcribed folkloric texts. In

the latter framework, performance is seen as a reenactment or faithful

translation of a fixed prescripted collective cultural"text"to which it can

be subsequently compared in a regressive analysis. In the case of the

musical performance, the performing musician was seen as the deindi

vidualized bearer of an anonymous collective tradition; his/her perform ance was an opportunity for the collector to create a musical text that

could be compared to other canonical texts within the tradition and

across traditions. The collecting process moved from collective "text" or

"script" to instantiated oral/aural performance and then back to the col

lector's re-textualization and re-collectivization of the individual cultural

performance event.

In recent decades, there has been a shift toward the anthropology and ethnography of musical practice. This perspective views the per formance practice in terms of the mobilization of local intersubjective

meanings, and in terms of the times, agents and spaces of performances.

Performances are considered as creative enactments, reworkings of

inherited cultural "scripts" or memory in response to the contingencies

of the present, particularly the encompassing situations of performance,

some of which have an economic and political character. Frameworks of

ethnicity, nationality and political structure have been superimposed on

local conditions of performance. The gap between the textualization of

the collector and the contextualized performance practice of the inform

ant is acknowledged and deployed as a stimulus to new modes of tran

scribing culture that captures the situatedness and contingency of

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Radharc

culture making. The one-to-one relationship between an ordered set of

cultural artifacts and the collector's rules of canonical placement and

comparison no longer pertains. In turn, collecting itself is revealed as a

historical process responding to changing technological and even polit ical circumstances.

The sociolinguistic distinction between performative and perform ance has been applied to musical practice. In linguistics, a performative

is the reiteration or activation of a preexisting code, such as a grammat

ical rule, whereas a performance creates something novel through the

reworking or mutation of the residual cultural codes, as in linguistic cre

?les and dialects. However, in both speech and musical performance the

reproduction of idiomatic grammar can deviate from a fixed set of cul

tural texts or rules, which then consequently undergo constant mutation

or deformation. Musical performance is no longer solely examined in

terms of its position in a social order but how it situationally expresses

and concretizes sociohistorical experience in the immediacy of the act

and how the latter realizes new meanings, and expresses emergent soci

etal experience. In the performance-centered framework, the "folk" musi

cal performance is neither the passive replication of a preexisting

collectively sanctioned tradition nor is it the isolated psychological act

of the romanticist artistic innovator; rather it is a socially negotiated inter

vention into a given acoustic structure and resource that can both repli

cate the past or create something new.

The Northern Fiddle exhibit is also a performance, not merely a re

presentation of collective memory; it recalls the collectors' and players'

efforts to recapture the depth and historical context of their music-mak

ing, the social imaginations of Donegal and Tyrone artists, and their

respective cultural transformation over two hundred years. The recap

ture of historical memory on the part of players was not an automatic

expression of collective culture but rather a situated response to their

experience of musical and media modernity and to the contemporary

dynamics of Irish cultural erasure. Eamonn O'Doherty and I share this

sensibility with the musicians and have tried to convey it in the exhib

it along with sound, image, and text. This exhibit, like the sites where

we met, played with, and recorded the featured musicians, is a space of

memory that continues to respond to the cultural contingencies of the

present.

116

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Simon Doherty, Donegal. Picture by Eamon O'Doherty

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John Loughran, Donegal. Original drawing by Eamon O Doherty

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John Doherty, Donegal. Picture by Eamon O'Doherty

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The Collectors and the Fiddlers. Picture by Eamon O'Doherty

Feldman

Notes

1. The Northern Fiddler project was conceived in 1977, and was

realized with funds provided through the initiative of poet and

musician Ciaran Carson, Traditional Arts Officer of the Northern

Ireland Arts Council. This institutional support formalized a col

lecting process that Natalie Connolly and Allen Feldman had

embarked upon in southwest Donegal beginning in 1974.

2. Allen Feldman and Eamonn O Doherty, The Northern Fiddler:

Music and Musicians of Donegal and Tyrone (Belfast: Blackstaff

Press, 1980).

3. See P. Aalhan, and H. Brody, Gola: an Island Community (Cam

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) which cites eighteenth

century accounts of seasonal circuits of mountain, mainland, and

island transhumance in western Donegal. Before the introduction

of potato cultivation, the authors describe the local economy as

resembling a mixture of cattle herding and sub-arctic maritime

hunting and gathering economy. E. Estlyn Evans makes a similar

point about Ulster in his Personality of Ireland (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1966).

4. E. P. Thompson, 'Time,Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism" Past and Present, 38 Dec. 1967.

5. Robin Fox, Tory Islanders: a People of the Celtic Fringe (Notre

Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978 [1995]).

6. Captain Robert Nairac was a British army officer working under

cover in Armagh. In May 1977, Nairac went to the Three Steps Inn

at Drumintee, posing as a folksong collector and whistle player,

ostensibly to gather intelligence. No one knows exactly what hap

pened to Captain Nairac that night, but it is thought that he was

abducted from the bar, driven to Ravensdale forest where he was

interrogated and eventually executed. Nairac s body has never

been found.

7. The resurgence had its roots in the revival of the fleadh ceol by

regional chapters of Comhaltas Ceolt?ri Eireann and in the teach

ing activities of this organization. However, the revival was not

notable for the Catholic nationalism that characterized Comhaltas.

8. Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (London: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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9. See Allen Feldman, Formations ofViolence; The Narrative of the

Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. (Chicago: Univer

sity of Chicago Press, 1991); and Allen Feldman, "Retaliate and

Punish: Memory, Revenge and Peace-Making in Northern Ireland"

in Eire: Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies, Geimhreadh/

Earrach/Samhradh 1997/1998,Volumes XXXII-XXXIII, 195-235.

10. Sally Sommers Smith, "The Origin of Style: The Famine and Irish

Traditional Music,"Eire 32 (1): 1997 121-35.

11. Now certainly an Irish-speaking locale would be criteria for archa

ic music if one was collecting sean nos vocal music but there is

no necessary connection between Gaelic language retention and

instrumental music performance; the Connemara Gaeltacht was

largely devoid of an instrumental tradition, where the current pop

ularity of accordion music is a twentieth-century phenomenon.

12. A point of contrast here is that the Northern Fiddler Project was

funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, in an ecumenical

gesture by a British government institution that was committed to

promoting traditional Irish music as a point of cultural reference

for both Protestants and Catholics. The Northern Fiddler project was staffed by myself, an American living in the Irish Republic, and

by Eamonn O Doherty, a Derry man who had been based in

Dublin for most of his professional career. The hybrid origins of

the project could not help but mediate the reception of the proj

ect, particularly in the Republic of Ireland where the nation-state

appropriation of Irish rural music is institutionalized by various

government and government-affiliated organizations. For the most

part practicing musicians north and south of the border in Ireland

and from both sides of the Atlantic welcomed the project. It

should also be noted that there is no discernable ethnic difference

in repertoire and playing techniques of instrumental dance music

between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics.