Irish Traditional Music on Audio Recordings

The TraditionRecordings the genres of traditional as they are understood the twenty-first century, may be grouped according to several complementary taxonomies: stylistic, geographic, functional, and chronological. Like jazz, the music has been issued various audio formats, essentially since the invention of sound recording, including wax cylinder, shellac disc, long-playing record, compact disc, and now digital sound file form. With the exception of several relatively brief periods of commercial popularity-the Golden Age of the 1920s, the Ballad Boom of the 1960s, the Folk Revival of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the post-Riverdance (1994) and Titanic (1997) periods-the music has generally been recorded by and for aficionados interested particular repertoires, stylists, dance functions, or nationalist imperatives.1 As a result, recordings of Irish traditional music are comparatively well documented and annotated, have often been compiled for comparatively disparate motives, and typically represent an unusually diverse and even conventionally non-commercial spectrum of styles.Publication of dance music and songs the pre-recording era focused upon collecting and preservation the popular antiquities philological mode of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The great print and manuscript collections- Bunting ([1840] 2000), Goodman (1998), Joyce ([1909] 1965), and pre-eminently O'Neill ([1903] 1996, [1910] 1973, [1913] 1987, [1922] 1980)-were animated both by love for the music and by the desire to preserve it the face of colonialism, famine, Anglicization, and exile. In the era immediately following Edison's popularization of the phonograph (approximately 1890), not only collectors, but also musicians, cultural activists, and corporations (especially phonograph manufacturers) began to explore the creative, cultural, nationalist, and commercial possibilities of the new medium. From its first 1926 broadcasts over 2RN, the Irish national radio service, supervised by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, was very active recording music, both the studio and, eventually, in the field, to generate broadcast material-and as a tool for building a collective, Independent Irish national identity. Similar motives of education, preservation, scholarship, and cultural advocacy continued to play a role the activities of the Irish Folklore Commission the 1930s and 1940s.2In the pre-recording era, the traditions of vocal and instrumental music the island had taken on regional accents and vocabularies just as had the dialects of the Four Provinces (Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connacht). Traditional music, song, dance, storytelling, and the Irish language itself tended to survive those regions of the West and South that, because less desirable as farmland, were reserved for the native Irish who had been pushed out of the more lushly arable, lucrative, or urbanized regions of the East (Dublin and Wexford) and Northeast (Ulster). Much collecting from the eighteenth century onward thus centered upon the Gaeltachtai (Irish-speaking regions) of Munster (Clare, Cork, Kerry, Limerick) and Connacht (Galway, Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon, Sligo) and isolated pockets of Ulster (especially Antrim, Fermanagh, Tyrone, and Donegal).Musical approaches all varied widely from region to region and rural locality to locality. In the pre-industrial era-and all the way to World War II-most rural people's range of travel and contact was limited to a day's walk or bicycle ride; fact, 1930s clergy had opposed the distribution of bicycles to the rural population, alleging that such access to easier transport might bring undesirable elements- that is, unmarried young men-into contact with local girls. The film This Is My Father (1998), though a fictionalized narrative of a family story, captures very well the feel of rural Ireland the 1930s, and of the central role that both dancing and bicycles played the courting rituals of the period

Art · Dance · Irish · Jazz · Linguistics · Literature · Phonograph · Popular music · Visual arts · Diverse Musicological Studies · History · Music History and Culture · Theater, Performance, and Music History

• Innovation, data colonialism and ethics

  Open Access•Elin Kanhov, Anna-Kaisa Kaila et al.•Journal of New Music Research•2024

  Add to list

• The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin

  Tom Munnelly, Daibhi O Croinin•Béaloideas•2000

  Add to list

• The Piping of Patsy Touhey

  Nicholas Carolan, Pat Mitchell et al.•Béaloideas•1988

  Add to list

• The Ancient Music of Ireland

  Peter Crossley-Holland, Edward Bunting•Ethnomusicology•1973

  Add to list