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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
56May 2015
“In the presence of great music we have
no alternative but to live nobly”
– Seán Ó Faoláin
D
ONAL 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 war-
ranted, or whether Dineen ‘has gone off
on one’. What is this this creative out-
pouring 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 stand-
ard 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 con-
tinue and a comparatively generous
social welfare system (for all except the
under s) 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 actu-
ally talk to one another. Distasteful
efforts to brand and commodify the
We should marshal
Ireland’s musical genius
for political not
economic ends.
By Frank Armstrong
Also in this section:
‘Counter Culture’ review 59
Big Food and Big Pharma 62
CULTURE
Song is
existence
May 2015 57
Irish welcome cannot mask genuine
warmth. Importantly those who have
arrived are keen to integrate and a gar-
rulous culture is happy to accommodate
outsiders. Ireland doesn’t have the
exclusionary colonial baggage of some
of its neighbours and there is little obvi-
ous racism. Surveying the wider culture
we have long been a country on the geo-
graphic edge, but also on edge
creatively.
Musically, many New Irish are assert-
ing 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-Leo-
nean-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 “conjunc-
tures” 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, adven-
ture 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 mysti-
cism central to his oeuvre.
Both Joyce and Yeats were also pro-
foundly musical. Yeats in particular
developed a remarkable sonorous qual-
ity to his verse, quite at odds with the
Modernist rejection of form that has
transformed much contemporary
poetry into a largely academic pre-oc-
cupation. This loss of a wider relevance
for poetry could have dangerous, dislo-
cating consequences.
In ‘Songlines’ the travel writer Bruce
Chatwin recalls how the aboriginal pop-
ulation of Australia believe their
ancestors sang their land into exist-
ence. 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 Son-
glines were not necessarily an
Australian phenomenon, but universal:
that they were the means by which man
marked out his territory, and so organ-
ized 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. Fascinat-
ingly, 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 hemi-
sphere. This is not surprising
considering the mathematical basis of
chord progressions and rhythm. To
some extent the playing of an instru-
ment 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 sym-
bolic meaning interacts with the
relative order of a musical key. A sensi-
tive 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 Catholi-
cism 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 that the
Beatles were more popular than Jesus
was not as naïve as it may seem. Their
success arrived at a time when organ-
ised religions were in decline and the
enduring connection between spiritual
devotion and song music gave Beatle-
mania characteristics of a religious
revival, although any movement was
Distasteful
efforts to
brand and
commodify the
Irish welcome
cannot mask
genuine
warmth
“
is
existence
58May 2015
shore / That enigmatic gentleman who
lives beyond his name”. Casement was
one of the conspirators and was
executed after landing in Kerry in a
failed mission to join the Rising. Case-
ment had a genuinely global sensibility
exposing the horrific crimes of Leopold
in the Congo for which he was knighted.
But he was a convinced Irish nationalist
and situated that struggle within the
wider constellation of his opposition to
colonialism.
We find a subtle reference to Yeats’
poetic homage to Casement in Ryan’s
lines: “There’s a ghost knocking / there’s
a ghost beating down my door”. Thus
the spirits from another age inform our
present relationship with what it means
to be Irish: the songlines of the ances-
tors, or as Ryan puts it in another track,
‘Into the Nothing’: “Walk along the son-
glines and into the heart / Dream the
dreamtime and bring us back to the
star t”.
A golden age of music in Ireland could
become a golden age for poetry too.
There are great exponents working in
Ireland today, many with a playful,
irreverent approach to language, but
their work tends not to enter the main-
stream. If poetry and music draw closer
rather than seeing one another as sepa-
rate domains we might find a more
powerful drawing from our songlines,
and a balance of the hemispheres.
The nuanced communication of ideas
through wider poetic appreciation
might help us contend with the serious
challenges of our time. A golden age in
both music and poetry could inculcate
greater sensitivity to nature and empa-
thy with human suffering and
inequality. Our great music can make
words dance. •
forestalled by the egos in the band.
Religious songs take a meditative
form quite removed from the exoteric
tendency in religions towards legalistic
control. It seems that if a religion
rejects song that oppressive tendencies
become manifest: this is apparent in the
austere form of Islam expressed by
Wahhabism which forbids the use of
musical instruments. The only verse
permitted to be sung has traditionally
been the Qu’ran which was learnt by
heart. Exponents chant programmati-
cally with little scope for revealing their
emotions. Wahhabism informs the ide-
ology of Islamic State and other
conservative variants of political Islam.
In contrast Sufism, another branch of
Islam, embraces song and poetic
expression. Without the symbolic
insights of song, religions can become
judgmental and absolutist. Irish
Catholicism also took an oppressive
turn in the twentieth century. Its music
was perfunctory and removed from the
common people: the Church enjoying an
uneasy relationship with traditional
music which tended to be associated
with pagan superstitions, including the
idea that tunes derived from the faeries.
Fortunately, unlike in England, tradi-
tional Irish music survived as a
signature of Irishness, and perhaps
some of the vitality and warmth appar-
ent in Ireland is drawn from a resilient
musical tradition. MacGilchrist writes
that music “has a vital way of binding
people together, helping them to be
aware of a shared humanity, shared
feelings and experiences, and actively
drawing them together”.
Of course many forms of music have
been popular since independence, from
the Show Bands to Rock and Roll and
even House and Hip Hop today, but the
important thing is that music remains
in the blood; the songlines enduring in
shifting genres.
Pace Cleary, the decline of the Tiger
might be identified as the ‘conjuncture’
out of which emerged the rich stream of
musical creativity that Dineen observes.
The shock of a renewed acquaintance
with poverty after years of mindless
consumerism has seen many shuffle
back to the creative musical well.
But arguably this golden age comes
with a significant caveat as much con-
temporary Irish music is removed from
the deep insights of poetry. This might
owe something to an enduring
discomfort with the English language as
a foreign imposition, but also to the
excesses of modernism in poetry. This
lacuna creates an imbalance.
Mike Scott of the Waterboys lives in
Dublin. He recently claimed that Ire-
land is a great place to write songs.
Though not Irish by birth he has tapped
into the songlines.
A recent album ‘An Interview with Mr
Yeats’ () is a homage to the poet. It
transposes a number of the master
poet’s works into song, but the result is
perhaps too reverential as the poems
are retained in their entirety and not
subjected to Scott’s own poetic inspira-
tion. Poetry should be recast each
generation otherwise it atrophies and a
distance emerges between it and ever-
evolving language.
One band that does display a balance
between the poetic and the musical is
The Loafing Heroes, led by an Irish
singer-songwriter named Bartholomew
Ryan. His words are joined by musical
virtuosity from an unusual instrumen-
tal array that intensifies the experience
of the lyrics. The creativity of the right
hemisphere and order of the left are
harnessed to powerful effect.
Like many who have drawn from Irish
songlines, Ryan has spent much of his
adult life beyond his native shores.
Often the greatest insights accumulate
from a distance. We just have to observe
the legacy of Joyce, Wilde, Beckett and
Yeats all of whom did not live in Ireland
for much of their lives yet played a huge
role in forging what we perceive as
Irishness.
One song ‘Dream of the Celt’ from
Ryan’s recent album ‘Crossing the
Threshold’ concerns Roger Casement:
“A seeker and a poet who sailed from
CULTURE Irish Music
A golden age
in both music
and poetry
could inculcate
greater
sensitivity
to nature
and empathy
with human
suffering and
inequality
“
loang heroes
