The Flowing Tides, a review.

The Flowing Tides: History and Memory in an Irish Soundscape, by Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, Oxford University Press, 311 pp, ISBN 978-0-19-938008-4

William H. A. Williams

Here’s an item for your next pub quiz. In aid of what great cause was the following declaration made? Hint: It appeared in the Clare Champion in May 26, 1956. “Manifestly, it cannot be the lot of everyone to die on the field of battle. All of us, however, at this present moment, can play our part in undoing England’s spiritual conquest and save the soul of Ireland from eternal damnation.” Stuck? Well, the occasion for this summons to action was that year’s All-Ireland Fleadh Cheol in Ennis. And what better patriotic substitute for the banks of the Boyne, the bloody fields of Aughrim or the smoking ruins of the GPO than to set the halls, pubs and streets of Ennis awhirl with jigs, reels and sets.

Hyperbole aside, some portion of Ireland’s soul was at stake. By the end of World War II, what was left of the country’s traditional music, having been eroded by the long years of colonialism, political upheaval, poverty, emigration, and modern indifference, seemed likely to disappear in the rising tide of transatlantic popular culture. Whether they emigrated or stayed home, few among the younger generation seemed interested in music that they identified with backwardness and rural poverty. Among some, there was even hostility. Take for example the case of a post-war emigrant who had established a successful tavern in Detroit. One night a lad arrived with a button box and launched into a set of jigs. The proprietor marched up to yer man and got right in his face. “Diddly, diddly shite,” he yelled. “Get the Hell off me stage.” The proprietor hadn’t left the bogs of home and crossed the raging Atlantic for that kind of culchie carry on!

Fortunately, back home, the champions of traditional music had already set in motion a most unlikely revival. Formed in 1951, a new organization, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Érieann, began sponsoring annual music festivals held in market towns in the west of Ireland.  By the time it had reached Ennis in 1956, the Fleadh Ceol, with its combination of formal competitions and alfresco music spilling out into the streets, was attracting large crowds, and, more to the point, inspiring a new generation of musicians. At the same time, the Ennis fleadh helped put County Clare at the center of the map of traditional Irish music.

Of course, the map is never the territory. There are those who might debate Clare’s position nearest the hearth of Ireland’s musical traditions. Nevertheless, in his new book, The Flowing Tides: History and Memory in an Irish Soundscape, Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin uses Clare as an anchor for his wide-ranging account of how Ireland’s traditional songs, airs and dance music have evolved in time and space. What began centuries ago as music indigenous to specific glens and townlands is now part of a vast global soundscape.

Ó hAllmhuráin, a folklorist and musician, is the current holder of the bilingual Johnson Chair in Québec and Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He is a native of Clare, but his focus on that county’s musical soundscape goes beyond a homeboy’s pride. Drawing on his deep knowledge of Clare’s history and its people, he marshals the intricate, fascinating details that make his academic insights, drawn from various aspects of critical theory, come alive for the reader. Topic headings such as “Recentering the Musical Periphery” and “Soundscape as Cultural Community” eventually lead to descriptions of matchmaking, “hauling home” tunes, and a long, intricate tale of how the piping piece, “The Stream of the Cat,” got its name. The book, in fact, is full of the stories and reminiscences of the men and women who have embodied Clare’s music.

Flowing Tides is an apt title for this book. One of the things that Ó hAllmhuráin makes clear is the fluid, continuously evolving nature of Ireland’s traditional music. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was no cultural wall high enough to prevent outside influences from influencing Ireland’s highly localized soundscapes. There was a constant, dynamic exchange between local musicians rooted in their townlands and travelling performers, often pipers, who had replaced the harpers as Ireland’s peripatetic professionals. New dances–quadrilles, polkas, mazurkas–were introduced from abroad. These were carried from the big houses into the country side by itinerant dancing masters, who fitted them to local tunes and dance steps.

Even the sounds of military bands—migrating from the ubiquitous barracks of the British Army to support Irish causes such as Repeal, Temperance and the Land League—had an impact upon traditional music. They prepared Irish ears for the reed sounds of concertinas and accordions. The bands also spread note reading among musicians, some of whom built up manuscript collections or scoured the books of fiddle tunes that were becoming increasingly available. By the early decades of the twentieth century, audio technologies—recordings and radio—while competing with traditional entertainments, were also spreading the artistry of expert emigrant instrumentalists based in New York throughout the townlands and villages of the West.

Of course, with each wave of change there was also loss. By the 1940s Clare had lost its official designation as part of the Gaeltacht. The county’s Irish-language song tradition had died out, preserved only in the early recordings of folklorists. At the same time, the imported recordings of master fiddlers like Michael Coleman and James Morrison tended to supersede regional and individual styles, while simultaneously imposing new tune sequences on the repertories of local musicians.

Ó hAllmhuráin is at his best in analyzing the unanticipated results of the post-war musical revival’s embrace by and collision with the phenomenon of global music. The impacts by this combination of mass tourism, innovations in communications technology, and international marketing were both thrilling and devastating to traditional music. Older musicians who had spent most of their lives in relative obscurity, suddenly found themselves playing before massed video cameras and microphones. Young musicians with real roots in the tradition found that they could make their livings recording and travelling around Europe and America. Previously obscure places such as Clare’s Miltown Malbay and Doolin suddenly became destinations for young people whose cultural odysseys began in Frankfurt, New York and Tokyo.

Many feet, however, may trample delicate blooms. Sometimes shy musicians, steeped in the lore in which their tunes were imbedded, were ignored as the visitors sought more flamboyant and better-known performers. The lore itself often had no voice in crowded pubs where musicians were urged to keep pumping out “chunes.” Worst of all, global attention sometimes obliterated the very environments that had nourished the music. Ó hAllmhuráin describes how the little fishing village of Doolin, where music and lore had been bred within a tightly-knit community, has become “a tawdry, desolate, debauched cultural wasteland,” thanks the “Faustian trajectory” that launched it onto a sea of music tourism.

At the same time, something extraordinary has also happened. Within a half century, aspects of Ireland’s musical tradition, once on the brink of extinction, have not only survived; they have thrived. Witness the numbers of young Irish people playing the music. At the same time, the music has also expanded beyond Ireland’s shores. Along with the export of the fruits of dear old Ballyhoo (Riverdance and fake Irish pubs), there are circles of good musicians playing Irish music scattered throughout Europe, the Americas and even Asia. Often, they have no ethnic connection to Ireland. Yet some are master musicians who have studied in Ireland or learned from ex-pats. They have repertories and styles specific to certain Irish regions. Ó hAllmhuráin describes how soundscapes that originated in Clare have been implanted abroad in Paris, Tokyo, and America’s Pacific Northwest. Even my hometown, Cincinnati, Ohio, harbors a small musical outpost of County Clare. established by a grandson of Martin (Junior) Crehan, one of Clare’s seminal musicians and a founder of the Comhaltas.

What are we to make of this extraordinary journey that Irish traditional music has taken over the past two centuries? The road has been strewn with losses, survivals, innovations and transformations, recombining history, memory and future in new ways.  Ó hAllmhuráin refers us to Paul Valéry’s notion that “We enter the future in reverse.” We contemplate, the author suggests, “the symbiosis between moving forward in time and looking back on time past.” This is gentler than Walter Benjamin’s famous backward-facing “angel of history,” hurtling into the future while forced to watch the catastrophic piling up of the wreckage of the past caused by “progress.” Ó hAllmhuráin’s angel, looking back while moving forward, may at least have occasion to simile. All is not lost, and something is gained. But what is this “polyverse” in which the Ireland’s traditional music, transcending the island, reappears in “virtual, prosthetic and diasporic worlds”? The idea of a cultural prosthesis is intriguing but also unsettling. Happily, the author tells us that he is not finished tracing Ireland’s soundscapes as they echo around the world. We look forward to his next book.

For my interview with Gearóid see Irish Music Magazine, September, 2017, p. 50.