Collecting Music in the Aran Islands

People who engage in fieldwork through the perspectives of folklore, ethnomusicology, or anthropology bring their own lived experience with them: the repercussions of their families of origin, personal histories, political interests, and points to prove. Whether we are fully cognizant of that fact, we all have something driving us to do this work. For those who undertook “collecting trips” outside of academia, such concerns may have seemed irrelevant, yet they color their perceptions (and actions) regardless. Collecting Music in the Aran Islands: A Century of History and Practice examines the collectors themselves, with a deeply informed critical eye toward the ways in which collectors can and should be contextualized. In addition, the author notes that music has repeatedly been mentioned only in passing by other collectors, which has led to its marginalization; this book is a smart, thorough effort to redress this long-time omission.The Aran Islands—Árainn (also known as Inis Mór), Inis Meáin, and Inis Oírr, along with several unpopulated islands—are located off the south coast of County Galway in Ireland and are currently home to just over 1,200 residents. People have lived there for several millennia, and the extensive archaeological ruins have drawn visitors for centuries. What also has drawn visitors, however, is the notion that the Aran Islands are an untouched trove of authenticity—a centrally authentic Other. Because the islands have drawn so much scholarly attention for so long, the source materials are extensive and varied. In fact, the inherent messiness of collections form a central locus of the book; by examining the collectors as humans working in a climate of urgent concern about the potential disappearance of the musical culture, insider-author Deirdre Ní Chonghaile foregrounds the ephemerality of the collecting experience. Again and again, readers are reminded of the powerful impact that collecting has had both within Ireland and in its diaspora.The chapters focus on each collector and their collection(s): Eugene O'Curry and George Petrie; Séamus Ennis; Sidney Robertson Cowell; and (local collector) Bairbre Quinn. After exploring the circumstances that led each collector to conduct their work on the islands, each chapter then features a substantial analysis of the collection itself. More than that, however, is the in-depth contextualization of each person and how and why they chose their work and their subjects—whether of Séamus Ennis’ influential work at the Irish Folklore Commission and beyond, or Sidney Robertson Cowell's experiences of island funerals and of women keening in the 1950s.One of the revelations of this book is the chapter on the author's aunt, Bairbre Quinn. As an islander herself, Quinn had decades to think about what material to collect, how to go about collecting, and how to work with her own status as an insider in a rapidly changing mid-century community. Even as the population dropped by half and the local infrastructure shifted substantially to include piped water, bottled gas, telephones, and eventually television and island-wide electricity in the 1970s, Quinn witnessed all of it. In addition, her biography reveals some of the best local practices of being warm and welcoming, to the point that everyone who knew her valued her contributions to the community. She shared the same concerns as the other collectors—that the music might be lost to history—but there was more to her work. The fact that Quinn's motives for collecting included offering people the chance to hear their own sounds, as well as expanding the audience for local music, meant that she was able to fully participate in the musical community without being a singer or musician herself.The four appendices and lengthy notes at the end of the volume offer not only transcriptions of the notes, verses, and images of the handwritten transcriptions, but also rich and diverse commentaries on the body of the text. Their location at the end of the book does not detract from the heart of the stories about the collectors; it serves only to more effectively locate the stories in the collectors’ own works. The notes, in particular, offer revealing insights about particular people and individual recordings, valuable ideas about what the islanders were thinking and discussing, and the contents of both letters and conversations. Readers are urged to peruse both the appendices and notes for this reason.As a measured, critical, and deep historiography of collecting in the region, this work has no equal. For musicians and scholars of the materials being examined, it is normal to look through the lens of the collector rather than squarely at the collector. Collecting Music in the Aran Islands offers a valuable and necessary corrective to us all; it reinforces the importance of understanding who is doing the collecting, transcribing, translating, and notating, so that the materials can be most usefully contextualized. It is highly recommended not only for those of us who deal with oral traditional materials in transcription and translation, but also for those who are ready to reconsider the role that archival works continue to play in reinforcing issues of identity, nationalism, and the importance of the local

Archaeology · Art · Ethnomusicology · Folklore · Literature · Media studies · Musical · Political science · Politics · Redress · Sociology · Visual arts · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law