The Soul of Ireland
The Cavalcaders by Billy Roche
Theatr Clwyd, 1997
Half industrialised, half rural, part of Europe but colonised for centuries by foreigners, Ireland has long been a land of tensions, conflict and emotion, so it is hardly surprising that these are the very themes which feature most powerfully in her ancient songs and airs. Traditional music has been called the soul of Ireland.
The Oral Tradition
It has always been about communication and the intimacy of human contact. Songs were passed on by oral means from one generation to the next, and this also explains why the style of performance – the act of music-making itself – was every bit as important as the content. Although exceptional soloists have always abounded, it is traditionally a thing for several players to perform together, and while music may, and often did, accompany dance, it could exit just as easily and significantly for any group of players alone.
The basic formula for an Irish tune is the round, a thirty-two-bar unit broken up into four sections of eight. The musician has the freedom to extemporise with this pattern to express his own personality, skill and powers of invention. While the basic melody in whatever style – jig, reel, lament, air – remains the same, it will never be played identically twice.
Unlike European music, which is based on harmony and chordal progressions, the traditional music of Ireland is monophonic, based around a single melody line with embellishments. One song can lead directly into another, using the final note of the first as the stepping-off point for the second. Simple repetition is its underlying structure, in imitation of the cycle of life itself. As the renowned Irish musicologist Seán Ó Riada put it, “Every day the sun rises, every day it sets. Every day possesses the same basic characteristics, follows the same fundamental pattern, while at the same time each day differs from the last in its ornamentation of events.”
Music of the People
The culture also had a lot of time on its hands, and that time moved slowly. This perhaps explains the enormous number of verses some songs contain, recalling in their turn even longer memories. In those adoptive countries where the style of traditional music changed, it adapted according to the usual processes of passing tine, or to fit in with the culture of the new environment. In America, for instance, the pace of change was fast, thrusting forward; elsewhere the music remained virtually the same as it had always been, forming a living bridge back to its roots and the country and culture of its birth.
Although a music of the people, traditional forms were not necessarily the same as folk, even though the two terms are frequently interchanged. Folk music itself is made up of two distinct strands, one of which was Sean Nós, unaccompanied singing, which grew out of bardic poetry, the preserve of a medieval scholarly elite. Sean Nós means ‘the old style’, a form which went into decline soon after the Battle of Kinsale in the early 17th century, marking the onset of full-scale colonisation. It was from this point, too, that the songs started to be written down, thus severing the oral tradition by which they had been handed on hitherto.
Out Into the World
“The rents were getting higher, and we could no longer stay.”
Absentee landlords who used their holdings in Ireland purely as a source of income caused the mass migration of whole communities to pastures and prospects new. In America they settled largely in the Appalachian Mountains, bringing their tools, seeds and cultural traditions with them.
For those who left their homeland, the songs in praise of a particular place were especially dear. This practice is called ‘dinnseanchas’. Poet Seamus Heaney says, “This love of place and lamentation against exile from a cherished territory is another typical strain in the Celtic sensibility.” The history of the country itself has also created the feeling in many souls that the Irishman is a stranger in his own homeland, and the longing to return is another common theme. So this is why Irish music, both at home and abroad, tends to sing so eloquently of landscape and loneliness, exile and reminiscence.
Old and New
Outside of Ireland, it is in America that the traditional musical forms have been kept most vibrantly alive. The big folk revival of the sixties, led by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, was centred on university campuses and in New York’s Greenwich Village, and brought to prominence the likes of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and The Clancy Brothers. Many of their new songs were based on traditional melodies, often with a savage twist aimed at conservative contemporary society.
Closer to home a new hybrid called Celtic rock, in the shape of the ’70s Dublin band Horslips, grew to fit contemporary tastes. Between 1972 and 1980 they recorded ten albums, in the process influencing such songwriters as Philip Chevron of The Pogues and Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, whose 1973 ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ was a radical rock treatment of a well-known Irish ballad. The biggest success of all in the rock field has been U2, formed in 1976, with Bono’s powerful vocals backed up by the guitar playing of The Edge, Dave Evans. Van Morrison, Sinéad O’Connor, and Elvis Costello have all made use of their Irish roots on their way to the top, while groups such as Planxty, The Dubliners and Clannad continue to tread a more traditional folk path. In Britain the balladist Ewan MacColl has kept the way open for the rise of such groups as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. While the forms of traditional Irish music are evolving all the time, the original bedrock on which it was based is still alive and spanning the centuries with its plangent and hardy songs based on the things which touch us all. It is a worthy and beautiful music, and therein lies its longevity.