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By Frank Armstrong. “In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly” – Seán ó Faoláin     Donal Dineen recently described this as a “golden age” in Irish music. We might take heart when a DJ of his calibre with knowledge crossing genres and continents makes such a pronouncement. His sets and peripatetic shows reveal a remarkable and unyielding musical engagement; his vocal input merges clarity, wit and pathos even if at times he does wander. Of course it will be for posterity to judge whether such a description is warranted, or whether Dineen ‘has gone off on one’. What is this this creative outpouring in our midst?. No golden age in music can be divorced from its socio-economic and cultural context. Musicians do not float free, insulated from broader currents. We may expect the golden age to have a silver lining. On many levels we’ve ‘never had it so good’ in spite of the Celtic Tiger failing a dope test: the country has survived unbroken unlike after other historical crises, albeit with a diminished standard of living and increased emigration. But the brain drain is not all in one direction. Immigrants from all over the world continue to arrive in Ireland. In terms of music, there is sufficient wealth for patronage of concerts to continue and a comparatively generous social welfare system (for all except the under 25s) forces few musicians into serious poverty. Of course there is serious inequality, a public-health time bomb, far too great a concentration of economic activity in Dublin and an often atrocious attitude to the environment. And yet there is a spirit in Ireland that visitors and even residents remark upon. Strangers actually talk to one another. Distasteful efforts to brand and commodify the Irish welcome cannot mask genuine warmth. Importantly those who have arrived are keen to integrate and a garrulous culture is happy to accommodate outsiders. Ireland doesn’t have the exclusionary colonial baggage of some of its neighbours and there is little obvious racism. Surveying the wider culture we have long been a country on the geographic edge, but also on edge creatively. Musically, many New Irish are asserting individual creativity and drawing on international influences shaped by appreciative Irish audiences. In jazz and world music, the Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu, the Italian pianist Francesco Turrissi and half-Sierra-Leonean-half-Irish singer Loah deserve a global audience. Meanwhile traditional forms have been nourished by interactions with foreign styles. The ‘session’ which blurs the boundary between audience and performer thrives, particularly outside Dublin. Exploring the context of the Irish cultural revival that began at the end of the nineteenth century, the literary historian Joe Cleary identified “conjunctures” or intersections of socio-political and economic forces that generated impressive artistic achievements. Rather like the profusion of nature at the fault line of two clashing tectonic plates, the first, blood-curdling, adventure of the British empire, had enmeshed a peasant society with an advancing industrial society generating an embarrassment of cultural riches. The Irish had acquired the language of the coloniser but some chose to distort it and question the prevailing optimism of the epoch. In ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ the English language was subjected to an almost mocking treatment by James Joyce, and WB Yeats was inspired by peasant lore to a mysticism central to his oeuvre. Both Joyce and Yeats were also profoundly musical. Yeats in particular developed a remarkable sonorous quality to his verse, quite at odds with the Modernist rejection of form that has transformed much contemporary poetry into a largely academic pre-occupation. This loss of a wider relevance for poetry could have dangerous, dislocating consequences. In ‘Songlines’ the travel writer Bruce Chatwin recalls how the aboriginal population of Australia believe their ancestors sang their land into existence. He writes: “In aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land; since if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die”. He concludes that ‘the Songlines were not necessarily an Australian phenomenon, but universal: that they were the means by which man marked out his territory, and so organized his social life”. Or, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: Gesang ist Dasein meaning “song is existence”. Songs are of course both music and words, but their inspiration comes from different parts of the brain. Fascinatingly, some stroke victims who lose the use of their brain’s left hemisphere can no longer speak, but retain a capacity to sing. The right hemisphere is associated with nuance and metaphor which are the life-blood of poetry. But when a musician plays her instrument she is largely working from the left hemisphere. This is not surprising considering the mathematical basis of chord progressions and rhythm. To some extent the playing of an instrument is the operation of a noise-making machine which is the responsibility of the practical, left hemisphere. But when composing the musician enters the domain of the right, as symbolic meaning interacts with the relative order of a musical key. A sensitive instrumentalist can also recognise the sentiments expressed in lyrics, indeed echo and embellish them. This co-ordination of hemispheres helps explain the power of music, especially that of song raised on instruments, to lift us out of our seats. The psychiatrist and literary scholar Iain MacGilchrist explains that: “both hemispheres are importantly involved. Creativity depends on the union of things that that are also maintained separately”. Religions have long understood the power of songs. Hymns have always occupied an important place in Catholicism and Martin Luther said: “Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world”. John Lennon’s claim in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus was not as naïve as it may seem. Their success arrived at a time when organised religions were in decline and the enduring connection between spiritual devotion and song music gave Beatlemania characteristics of a religious revival, although any movement was forestalled by the egos in the band. Religious songs take a meditative