Читать книгу Trad Nation - Tes Slominski - Страница 8
ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
Origins
We all have our origin stories, mythologized in countless retellings. Telling these stories can be an opportunity, an obligation, a burden. We tell our origin stories for a host of reasons in Irish traditional music, but the main one is to situate ourselves in “the tradition”: to connect our lives and music making with the people and places who have most influenced us. Our origin stories account for our presence in the Irish traditional music scene and often tell of fathers, teachers, homes, heritages, and obsessions. For some of us, these stories are also an attempt to establish our right to musical space—a space that has not always been readily granted to Irish women instrumentalists and that remains a complicated place for queer and / or ethnically non-Irish musicians. As in nationalism, space, place, and territory remain enduring metaphors in Irish traditional music despite sound’s way of reminding us that spatial, temporal, political, and intersubjective borders are permeable and dynamic.
Here is the version of my “trad origin story” that is most legible to the people who hear my American accent and last name and ask how I started playing Irish fiddle. “Your mother’s Irish, right?” they suggest hopefully, looking for an easy way to place me. They seek family lines traceable like tidy ink on paper rather than the meandering dirt tracks of lived experience, muddy and sometimes hard to locate if you don’t know exactly where to look—like the path down through the woods to the graves of my ancestors who fought in the War of 1812. My unmarked whiteness and visible traces of Scots-Irish heritage from my mother’s side provide a fairly easy answer, enhanced by the legend that the family patriarch who came to Virginia from Scotland in the late eighteenth century paid his passage as the ship’s fiddler. When necessary, I can augment this story by offering that my grandfather played old-time banjo and fiddle, even though I never heard him play because he had arthritis and hearing problems by the time I came along. I generally do not mention that although he seemed to enjoy hearing “Devil’s Dream” and “Turkey in the Straw,” he always asked me to play a particular Mozart minuet for him—that detail complicates the essentialized story of rural Southerners that most people seem to want to hear. After having established this vaguely Celtic lineage for myself, I mention that hearing Liz Carroll, Eileen Ivers, and Martin Hayes playing the reel “The Humours of Lissadell” on the National Public Radio radio show Thistle and Shamrock when I was seventeen set me off on the path of an obsession that has now lasted nearly three decades. I also make sure that people know I spent a great deal of time in Ireland during the late 1990s and lived there for a while in the early 2000s. In true genealogical fashion, I name my Irish musical mentors and compatriots—and since Irish traditional musicians (fondly, “traddies”) are rarely separated by more than two degrees, this is usually an effective way to locate myself.
That is the easy story. Other stories are harder to tell. Do we ever really understand our own desire paths as we create them? Or are we like the man in the tale by the Danish writer Karen Blixen who is unaware that his nighttime footprints to and from a pond trace the figure of a stork?1 Do our stories make sense only after the fact—or perhaps never?
FARMAGEDDON: A CHILDHOOD IN ARTIFACTS
Some stories gain coherence in hindsight. Others become more strange over time, fragmenting and losing coherence as they gain meaning. This story is the latter kind. If one place brought me to the fiddle, to history and ethnography, to myself, it was this place. And if one place complicates everything, it is this same place:
We are in the den of my grandparents’ house. Let’s say I am ten years old.
One bookcase with glass doors. Inside, the set of Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1959, complete with pages of color pictures of flags of the world. The Cokesbury hymnal and the red hymnal we never use except to find the “right” version of “He Lives.” A veterinary manual from 1903, a book of Scottish tartans, Christy, and Granny’s favorite cookbook with the writing on the spine worn off. These are the only books in the bookcase that matter to me at this age.
Pa’s cabinet. Paper clips and rubber bands sorted by size and color. Fading letters from the Civil War whose words he is in the process of painstakingly tracing over with ballpoint pen to render more visible. A Bible. Hard candy. On top of the cabinet, the old manual typewriter, a wooden bowl of pecans and a nutcracker (the plain kind), and the pad of paper we use to communicate with him as his hearing deteriorates. The top page contains two lines so far: “two in the trap and one in the box” and “she died on Thursday.”2
In the homemade pine chest (which is in the hall just outside the den): Pa’s old homemade fiddle with banjo machine heads as tuning pegs, the bow convex and its hair held on (not very well) with some sort of brown putty. It’s barely playable, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.
The mantle: Masonic and Eastern Star plaques, outgoing mail, long-necked gourds hanging down. Above it, a Confederate cavalry sword looking down from its prideful place.
WHY THIS? WHY NOW?
What does this Southern Gothic cabinet of curiosities have to do with Irish traditional music, other than as an exercise in autobiographical archaeology? The rituals of customary genealogy do not yield the answers I seek, and others have done (or are doing) the work of tracing connections among American musics and their Irish, Scottish, and African roots.3 Instead, I intend this book to look forward by looking back to the past and around at the present. I hope that my story-through-artifacts began to lead you to imagine the olio of pride, nostalgia, faith, love, communitas, yearning for connection with the past, and fear of decay and disappearance these items represent. Such feelings also suffuse my account of these objects, along with an overlay of shame. Like many Virginians, I come from a family that included slaveholders and Confederate soldiers, and I live in a society that does not yet collectively understand the need for reparations to the descendants of those whose lands it took and the people it once enslaved. My argument against ethnic nationalism comes in part from this perspective and in part from the study of Irish history, which exposes the illogic of a popular postcolonialism that has built for itself a house using the master’s flawed tools of ethnic nationalism even as it has been quick to recount the wrongs of the colonizer. By presenting the stories of women; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) musicians; and musicians of color in Irish traditional music, I hope to make the flaws in ethnic nationalism audible—with the goal of motivating us to find new tools for understanding music making and identity formation outside the parameters of embodied ethnicity that enclose national and cultural belonging.
Pride, nostalgia, faith, love, communitas, yearning for connection with the past, and fear of decay and disappearance—if I had begun with this litany of feelings and told you it was about rural Ireland, you would readily have believed me. Likewise, if I’d said it referred to Irish traditional music, it would have made immediate sense as a description of musicians’ feelings toward “the music itself” and each other.4 After all, the Irish trad scene hinges on community, from the aural transmission of instrumental dance tunes (mostly anonymous) to sessions (gatherings where musicians meet to play and socialize). Although professionalization has been part of Irish traditional music for centuries, most musicians play for the feelings of connection that participation in trad brings: connections with the past, the music, and each other. This is not the stereotypically Irish music of “Whiskey in the Jar” or “Danny Boy.” Instead, this genre operates on a more subcultural level: “civilians” might occasionally encounter this music in pubs or tucked away in certain places on the airwaves or Internet, but trad is not about mass appeal—it is about relationships enacted through musicking.5 In this book, I focus on instrumental music and point out that while many of the same questions about gender, sexuality, and race / ethnicity also apply to Ireland’s singing traditions (which overlap with its instrumental traditions), the demographics and operation of the sean-nós (old-style) singing scene present other questions.6
Pride, nostalgia, faith, love, communitas, yearning for connection with the past, and fear of decay and disappearance—all of these things are true, and many of them are good. But feelings called by these same names also drive ethnic nationalism, whether the Irish nationalism of the early twentieth century that bought some kinds of freedom at the expense of others, or the white nationalism of the United States in the early twenty-first century that threatens the well-being and lives of people who do not match its limited ideal of heterosexual white masculinity. These Irish and American nationalisms consume the same fuel, and I hope that drawing this comparison will motivate readers to work actively to dismantle systems of ethnic nationalism that have upheld norms of Irishness based on race, class, gender, and sexuality since at least the late nineteenth century. This book seeks to discover these norms and how they have influenced history, historiography, and lived experience in Irish traditional music and among its musicians. Like the authors of “‘Vote Yes for Common Sense Citizenship’: Immigration and the Paradoxes at the Heart of Ireland’s ‘Céad Míle Fáilte,’” I call for “seeing Irishness as something constructed or performed; diverse, contingent, relation[al] and constantly in the process of formation.”7
This book has two primary aims. First, I introduce musicians and topics that have not been discussed widely—or at all—in the existing literature on Irish traditional music. Second, I argue for the separation of Irish traditional music from Irish ethnic nationalism. As an American writing during an era of destructive nationalism, I believe that many of today’s problems come from outdated investments in identity as an essential, inherent characteristic rather than as a construction that changes in response to encounters with other people, musics, and contexts. Such investments are not just American problems, and although the adjective “Irish” is attached to the material I introduce in this book, my argument for the separation of sounds and social practices from ethnicity applies well beyond Ireland and its diaspora.
This book is partially autoethnographic and is grounded in my own experience both as fiddler in the Irish vernacular music tradition and as a queer white woman brought up in the rural South of the United States. As I embarked on ethnographic research to better understand the experiences of today’s women, queer musicians, and musicians of color in Irish traditional music, their stories resonated strikingly with those of Irish women musicians in the early twentieth century whose careers were driven by ideas about nationalism and ethnicity. A century later, similar ideas about nationalism and ethnicity continue to shape Irish traditional music and its reception, as well as the reception of musicians who differ from the white, ethnically Irish men who have historically constituted the most visible population of trad musicians. Extensive discussions of gender, sexuality, and race in Irish traditional music scholarship have been few and recent, and substantial public conversations within the scene about racism and (hetero)sexism are only slowly emerging.8 This book arrives at a moment when frank conversations about inclusion and discrimination in many music communities mirror similar social and political conversations on local, state, and international levels. The stakes of these conversations are extremely high: maintaining the status quo of (hetero)sexism and racism within individual music scenes in the name of genetic heritage is no longer excusable in an era defined by the global threat of fascism founded on white ethnic nationalism. Thus, this work is unapologetically activist in its claim that ethnic nationalism is at the root of sexism, heterosexism, and racism in Irish traditional music performance and its reception.
Despite offering this critique of the foundational identity of Irish traditional music as “Irish,” I have also attempted to translate the pleasures of playing trad into verbal language and to introduce readers to some of the affective aspects of participating in the Irish traditional music scene. Accounts of warmth and welcome, community, and belonging grace these pages, as well as the passion that traddies have for “the music itself.” Indeed, I have chosen to use the more informal word “traddie” sometimes to remind readers of this sense of community even as I recount the hardships and violences that nonnormative musicians face. I pay special attention to subjectivity and the ways that playing trad “brings people to their senses,” as the accordion player Joe Cooley so memorably said.9 My motivation (like that of countless others) in writing this book is to ensure the continuity of the tradition—but instead of maintaining a conservative, preservationist mind-set, I argue that the best way to care for Irish traditional music is to call for its transformation. Instead of acting through the fear of change implicit in the concept of safeguarding that drove the tradition-innovation debates in trad scholarship in the 1990s and early 2000s, I suggest that attending to the experiences of women, queer, and nonwhite musicians issues an imperative to rethink the restrictions of a genre defined by ethnic nationalism and offers a way to amplify the qualities that draw musicians and listeners to trad.
Considering questions of ethnicity in the Irish traditional music scene illuminates the hypervigilant policing of whiteness in the United States and other socalled multicultural societies, where the “empty container” of diversity discourse works to protect white ethnic musics as “diversity.”10 Framing white ethnicities as diverse in relation to fantasies of unmarked Americanness (usually understood as white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant) allows these scenes to sidestep questions about whether ethnic heritage is the most important factor in who can (or should) play a genre. Using this logic, white supremacist / nationalist groups can then appropriate these genres to cloak their violent agendas and argue that white diversity is also at risk. Such arguments obscure other threats to vernacular genres (including neoliberal capitalism and conservative preservationism), as well as the overwhelming power differentials that diversity work seeks to address. Moreover, reinscribing genre boundaries based on ethnicity erases the complexities of musical and social practice and erases musicians who seem not to belong—and this kind of erasure has long troubled many genres, including American old-time music and Western art music.11 This book provides a model for beginning to think through these issues.
Therefore, I begin with the assertion that it is not possible to fully understand Ireland or its traditional music without paying close attention to gender, sexuality, and race in connection with each other and with larger social, political, and intellectual currents in the places where Irish traditional music scenes exist. Three broad and widely applicable questions shape this work: First, what (and whom) do dominant systems of sex, gender, and ethnicity exclude? Second, how do societies rely on these systems and exclusions to reproduce national identity? And finally, how might we celebrate cultural traditions currently understood as national while dismantling the racisms and (hetero)sexisms that fuel ethnic nationalism? These questions are urgent for the overlapping audiences of this book, which include traditional musicians based in Ireland and those from outside Ireland, as well academics and cultural politicians based in North America, Ireland, and elsewhere.
This book begins to fill in some of the gaps in scholarship about women musicians of the past and, in doing so, introduces the cultural, magical, reproductive, and ethnic nationalisms that continue to shape the practice, discourse, and historiography of Irish traditional music. After tracing the reasons historians have withheld recognition from women musicians of the early twentieth century, I turn to subjectivity—of women musicians like Julia Clifford (1914–97); of present-day women, queer, and nonwhite musicians; and of “the music itself,” which I use as a foil for understanding who counts as human in Irish traditional music. Finally, I discuss the epistemic and ontological violences toward women, queer musicians, and especially musicians of color that can emerge through musical aesthetics, social practices, and speech acts, and I investigate strategies nonnormative musicians use to make sense of their participation in the genre.
THE GENDERED, SEXED, AND RACED OPPRESSIONS OF ETHNIC NATIONALISM IN TWO FOUND OBJECTS
In Irish traditional music (and elsewhere), all forms of identity-based discrimination have roots in nationalist ideologies: which actions, sounds, and bodies produce the ideal nation, and thus count as “Irish”? As Kimberle Crenshaw articulated in her work on intersectionality, oppressions do not happen independently but overlap, and so gender, sexuality, and race are inextricable in determining who counts as a good [Irish or “Irish”] subject or an “authentic” traditional musician.12 The connections among these categories were not invented in the early twenty-first century but emerged in the popular Irish press in the early twentieth century in both local and internationally syndicated material. In the following section, I use two items from 1913 issues of the Kerryman to provide historical background for some of the questions this book addresses. Though these items situate nationalist ideals and anxieties in the context of County Kerry, similar items were common in newspapers throughout Ireland:
Ballylongford Echoes. By Clan-na-Gael. On Sunday night, November 9th, 1913, the Rev. M. O’Brien, CC [Catholic curate], Ballylongford, will deliver a lecture in aid of the Ballylongford Town Hall. A grand concert will follow. Anglo and Anglo-Irish songs, recitations and dialogues, Irish dancing, including four- and eight-hand reels, single reels and jigs, step dancing exhibitions by some of the foremost Feis prize winners in Munster, together with gramaphone [sic] selections conducted by the Rev. M. O’Brien. These are some of the night’s attractions. Everything up-to-date National and attractive. No West British mongrel airs or Rag-time selections to be allowed on the stage. Something breathing the native airs of Kerry’s mountains and valleys to be the principal features. It is to be hoped that the exponents of the “Turkey Trot” and other abuses will be conspicuous by their absence. Let the atmosphere be clear, clean, and healthy. The promoters are satisfied to do all in their power to please everybody, but under no circumstances will they allow any favouritism to interfere with their programme or alter it one iota. We want no songs from Dixie Land or the gutter productions of London back lanes or elsewhere. Let this be a timely warning.13
“Everything up-to-date National”—the vigorous energies of cultural nationalism in dancers’ feet, musicians’ hands, and from the pens of commentators like Clan-na-Gael. A “clear, clean, and healthy” atmosphere from the “native airs of Kerry’s mountains and valleys,” free from the moral dangers of immediately audible or visible foreign influence. If you wanted to make a case for the vitality and even the inevitability of an Irish nation in 1913, you would have emphasized the strength and right(eous)ness of your homeland and its music, dance, sport, and oratory. In working toward a culturally distinct “Irish Ireland,” you would have eschewed foreign popular entertainments like the Turkey Trot and other “animal dances” that scandalized the United States, Britain, and Ireland in 1913. These dances would incite the censure of the Vatican in 1914 and presented a problem for a nationalist movement in the later stages of transformation from a nonsectarian movement into a Catholic one.14 Moreover, “foreign” music and dance popularized through minstrelsy, variety, and vaudeville brought associations with blackness and the working classes—and along with them, notions of sexual license, weakened morals, and the woes of poverty Ireland’s middle class was working so hard to escape. Irish cultural nationalism thus reinforced ethnic nationalism by using performance styles as shorthand for perceptions of ethnic and racial difference.
Ethnicity (and, by extension, race) is central to any discussion of Irish nationalism: by positioning the Irish in a subordinate position in an imagined hierarchy of races, the British justified their exploitation of Ireland’s human and agricultural resources. This rationale for imperialism—which played out even more dramatically in other areas of the British Empire—was then available to Irish nationalists seeking independence. Like other European nations, Ireland mobilized the idea of ethnic difference (already embedded in British policies) in arguing for its right to independence. And as it has done for other white European immigrants, skin color eventually provided a ticket for Irish assimilation into the diaspora and, in the case of the United States, a way for the Irish to distinguish themselves from society’s most disempowered members, black slaves. The Irish—initially cast as apes by the British—worked very hard to “become white” (and thus fully human) at home and in the diaspora, sometimes at the expense of people of color.15
In response to popular perceptions of large numbers of nonwhite immigrants to Ireland more recently, the 2004 “commonsense citizenship” referendum and subsequent amendment to the Irish Constitution changed the law from granting birthright citizenship to requiring that children claiming Irish citizenship have at least one Irish citizen parent. Framed as achieving compliance with European Union laws, the referendum responded to the popular perception that a growing number of “birth tourists” were exploiting Irish immigration law.16 Despite a much higher number of white immigrants to Ireland, immigrants as a group are racialized as black and presumed to be refugees and asylum seekers.17 Ireland, known as the “land of a hundred thousand welcomes,” voted overwhelmingly in support of the referendum, which Una Crowley, Mary Gilmartin, and Rob Kitchin argue was “employed in such a way as to fix and essentialise Irishness, thus highlighting the threatening other, and to construct immigrants as suspect, untrustworthy, and deserving of Ireland’s ‘hospitality’ only in limited, prescribed ways or not at all.”18 Consider this excerpt:
That boy will do to depend on,
I know that this is true—
From lads in love with their mothers
Our bravest heroes grew.
Earth’s grandest hearts have been loving ones,
Since time and earth began;
And the boy who kisses his mother
Is every inch a man.19
Whether Irish or American, good nationalist sons love their mothers and nations with “grand hearts” and grow up to express their manliness through the protection of both. In turn, loving mothers teach their sons the songs and stories of “our bravest heroes.” In the fight for an independent Irish nation, everyone had to do his or her part, and these parts were strictly gendered “his” and “hers.” In a bid to ensure social welfare, the 1937 constitution established that women’s primary duties were in the home and “acknowledge[d] that the primary and natural educator of the child is the Family,” which should provide for “the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children.”20
Reproductive heterosexuality—the production of ethnically Irish children—is at the center of these constitutional articles and the additional laws and social practices they have reinforced, such as the 2004 “commonsense citizenship” referendum and the 1932 marriage bar, which required women to resign from jobs in the civil service (including teaching posts) upon marriage. This set of laws was only fully repealed in 1973, while divorce would not become legal until 1995.21 The fact that both sides of the 2015 Irish marriage equality referendum appealed to family shows just how embedded reproductive family structures are in Irish society, from the predictable “two men can’t replace a mother’s love” and “equality for children first” placards opposing same-sex marriage to the effective and heartfelt “Ring Your Granny” campaign in favor of marriage equality launched by students at Trinity College Dublin.22
ETHNIC NATIONALISM AND THE CONTROL OF BODIES AND DISCOURSES IN IRELAND (AND BEYOND)
These two tidbits from over a century ago demonstrate just how entangled gender, sexuality, and race / ethnicity are in Irish ethnic and cultural nationalism, which has at its heart the reproduction of bodies and practices understood as “Irish,” whether at home or in the diaspora. Irish traditional music has long played a role in both delimiting and expanding who and what counts as “Irish” through its production of sound, discourse, and sociability. Trad is in constant dialogue with governmental, legal, and educational systems anywhere there are communities of players—it is both subject to and a component of the instruments of biopower, to use Michel Foucault’s term for the forces that regulate the lives of populations on behalf of the state.23 As the musicians’ stories in these pages illustrate, nationalist and sonic subjectivities are inseparable, whether a musician hails from Dublin, Texas, or Tokyo, and the accumulation of ideas about gender, sexuality, and race / ethnicity from multiple sites shapes the experiences and reception of traddies of all kinds. Although this book does not discuss them extensively, issues of identity also concern ethnically Irish men: for example, while they enjoy the power that accrues to white masculinity, their sometimes uneasy positioning within ideas of modernity derives from Ireland’s postcolonial relationship with Britain as well as with US cultural imperialism. Such relationships often play out in traditional music settings.
I begin from the premise that discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexuality, or other identity characteristics is unacceptable in a scene that describes itself as open and welcoming—and that often lives up to that description. This ideal of openness does not always match the experiences of nonnormative musicians, however, and this book charts the racism, sexism, and heterosexism in the Irish trad scene that often goes undetected by those who are not subject to its aggressions and exclusions. I also begin with the claim that instrumental Irish traditional music has had an ambivalent relationship with ethnic nationalism since at least the late nineteenth century, and that the social and musical workings of this now-global scene already reflect more diverse outlooks, practices, and participants than trad’s historic, discursive, and institutional relationships with ethnic nationalism might suggest. Connections with ethnic nationalism endure, however, and drive racism, sexism, and heterosexism within the scene. Perhaps more important, I assert that such seemingly innocuous manifestations of ethnic nationalism (like defining certain genres as “ethnic”) normalize white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in an era when such doctrines threaten global human rights and social, political, and environmental integrity around the world.
Irish traditional music is not the only genre I could use to make this argument, and the work of Matthew Gelbart and Benjamin Teitelbaum informs my thinking, as do increasing reports of white nationalists’ appropriation of Scottish, generic “Celtic,” and—to a lesser extent—Irish sounds and symbolism in the United States.24 From my perspective as an American who loves Irish traditional music and identifies as a traddie, this severing of trad and ethnic nationalism is urgent, both to protect the genre from being co-opted by right-wing extremists outside Ireland and to provide a model for redefining “ethnic” musics based on qualities other than genetic heritage, with its imperatives around so-called purity (often framed as “authenticity”) and reproductive sexuality. This is not a decolonization project, exactly, but it is a reminder that decolonization is not possible without uncovering links among gender, sexuality, race / ethnicity, social class, and ability and redressing the power imbalances that are embedded in colonial and nationalist structures.
I have come to this argument for a postnationalist approach to Irish traditional music through nearly three decades of being besotted with trad and devoted to the chosen family I have met through my participation in it in the United States and Ireland. Like many of my interlocutors, I have often found the musicians in the Irish trad scene to be inclusive and community-minded, and as chapter 4 relates, the pleasures of playing trad can be exquisite. Thus, this book does not come from a feeling of rancor—quite the opposite. But most of my women, queer, and / or nonwhite interlocutors and I have chosen to participate in this realm of musicking despite recurrent negative experiences related to gender, sexuality, and / or race / ethnicity, and a few have distanced themselves from the scene because of such experiences. I tell these less happy stories at a moment of increased attention to the inequities that women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color worldwide face. With that increased attention comes backlash, including physical violence, and this book would be very different had I finished it before the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements emerged; before events in Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, Maryland, and Charlottesville, Virginia; and before right-wing nationalist politicians gained widespread public acceptance in Europe and the United States. At the time of this writing in 2018, traddies in the United States look wistfully to Ireland for its live-and-let-live mentality, but racism, sexism, and homophobia remain problems there as well, and immigrants—especially nonwhite newcomers—face significant barriers to employment (except in low-wage jobs) and discrimination inside and outside the workplace.25 And while traddies from outside Ireland (especially white ones) may not always be targeted by Irish immigration and citizenship laws in the same ways as would-be residents, they are still vulnerable to social attitudes about gender, sexuality, and race in Ireland, as chapters below describe.
Taking the experiences of marginalized traddies seriously requires both a reassessment of current practice and a call for transformation. The Irish traditional music scene already has a significant number of women, queer, and nonwhite members, although scholarship, recordings, concert bookings, and forms of recognition such as TG4’s Gradam Ceoil awards do not accurately reflect the scene’s demographics even among ethnically Irish musicians. Within Ireland, more women and queer trad musicians are making their voices heard through the FairPlé initiative for gender equality in trad begun in 2018 and events like géilís (“gay” plus céilí [dance]) at Dublin Pride and other festivals, but the public face and “masters” of “the tradition” remain largely male, straight (or closeted), and white. At the time of this writing, no one has attempted to conduct a census of Irish traditional musicians, so we have no exact information about the demographics of the scene in Ireland or worldwide—although participants tend to perceive the overall scene as dominated by heterosexual white men.
Outside Ireland, the demographics of trad scenes depend on local population and include a significant and growing number of ethnically non-Irish players, especially in places without large numbers of Irish immigrants such as Japan, France, and Germany. Previous work, including accounts of non-Irish traditional musicians, assumes that ethnicity is central to the practice of Irish traditional music.26 Helen O’Shea offers a necessary critique to the tethering of ethnicity to musicianship and approaches identity as “fluid and opportunistic, rather than unified and self-determined.”27 But in general, not being Irish implies a lack that must be accounted for—a lack that non-Irish musicians sometimes feel quite keenly. Mick Moloney describes how some traddies in the United States address this disjuncture between ethnicity and musical participation: “The discovery of Irish forbears may serve to rubber stamp a legitimate claim to participation in the culture or, for particular individuals, it may turn into a type of cultural crusade which can involve immersion in Irish history, language and literature and repeated visits to the home country to establish links with the ‘real’ Ireland.”28
While genealogical research might allow some traddies born outside Irish or Irish diasporic communities to sidestep the “But are you IRISH?” question, many musicians do not have recourse to the validation of genetic heritage or the white skin that allows them to elude such interrogation, which can be intrusive and aggressive. My concern here is not with how individual traddies make sense of their ethnic backgrounds, but with the imperative that they must address them to explain their participation—especially in the diaspora, where being perceived to not “belong” in Irish music settings can lead to xenophobic commentary of the “go back to [Africa, China, and so on]” variety. Here, I remind white readers that as in Ireland, full cultural and sometimes political citizenship remains provisional for nonwhite members of society in Britain, Australia, and the United States in the 2010s.
The imperative to account for one’s non-Irish (and especially nonwhite) ethnicity in trad contexts is problematic first because it implies that “Irishness” can only be jus sanguinis—and, as with the rhetoric in the 2004 Irish citizenship referendum, that it is simple “common sense” to base Irish citizenship or participation in Irish cultural forms on ethnicity (such arguments always require us to ask whose common sense is involved).29 However prevalent it is worldwide, this method of determining citizenship denies the reality of an increasingly multicultural Ireland and ensures that trad as “Irish” will remain a closed system from which some of Ireland’s residents will be metaphorically excluded, even if they participate: bodies excluded from citizenship have no logical place in a genre discursively defined by ethnic nationalism. This problem will be especially acute for ethnically non-Irish people residing in Ireland, who might reasonably expect to have a greater share in the culture of the nation. As chapter 5 discusses, many traddies from outside Ireland also endure constant questioning at home and sometimes in Ireland about their “right” to play Irish traditional music.
“THAT THE AGE OF NATIONALITY IS GONE”: TRAD AS POSTNATIONALIST LIBERATION?
“That the Age of Nationality Is Gone” was the subject of a debate between members of the various Irish Universities at a largely attended meeting in University College, Dublin, last Saturday evening. The proceedings were conducted in the Irish language…. The debate was opened by Mr C. O’Brobeain, U.C. Dublin, who contended that with a better understanding between the nations of the world nationality would die, and would be replaced by internationalism. Miss Mary Kelly, U.C. Cork, held that the universal use of the cinema would assist materially in establishing internationalism, which she said would end all wars. Mr McCarthy Willis, Trinity College, expressed the view that the increase of education would end nationality. Mr T. Guilfoyle, U.C. Galway, argued that some nations would completely die out, and that there would be one universal language and similar customs among all countries. Against the motion Mr M. O’Uardail, U.C. Galway, referred to Egypt and India as examples to show that nationality would always survive, and nationality could not die so long as the native music lived.30
Speaking in Irish, already an endangered language in 1925, university students heralded the end of the age of nationalism three years after the formation of the Irish Free State, although one Herderian holdout, Mr. O’Uardail, used the survival of “native music” to argue for the inevitability of nationalism. His argument that “native” culture sustains the nation echoed the rhetoric of the Gaelic League, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, the Gaelic Athletic Association, and other institutions dedicated to preserving Irish culture. Proponents of this brand of cultural nationalism also sometimes fear that the “native music” will die if the nation perishes. In this book I disagree with both and instead argue that examining gender, sexuality, and race / ethnicity in Irish traditional music provides a powerful critique of ethnic nationalism and, in doing so, protects rather than endangers the genre. Furthermore, I suggest that in seeking ways to maintain its positive social and musical aspects while addressing sexism, heterosexism, and racism, the Irish trad scene can pilot alternatives to ethnic nationalism as a form of social organization. This argument is utopian in its call for transformation, and I hope that the trad scene will view its transnational present as an opportunity to rethink its nationalist past. Instead of reinscribing ethnicity or nationality as the normative container of Irish traditional music—or calling for the kind of uniform internationalism that some of the 1925 university students supported—I extend O’Shea’s critique of static ethnicity-based musical identity to argue that ethnic nationalism has served its purpose for both Ireland and Irish traditional music, and that timeworn and damaging ideas about gender, sexuality, and race must not endure in the name of “tradition.”31
Moreover, the Irish trad scene has the potential to model a postnationalist approach that is simultaneously local and transnational—cosmopolitan, even—without serving to justify the existence of the nation by restricting who can belong to it.32 Here, recent developments in the United States provide a powerful negative example of a system that disregards the well-being of the majority of its citizens for the benefit of a small elite group and that blames its nonwhite, non-male, non-Christian, disabled, and nonheteronormative populations for a host of economic, social, and moral evils. With the diminution of local and regional identities (a capitalist problem), white Americans depend on national identity and patterns of consumption (including corporatized team sports) as a way to understand who we are. American cultural and political nationalism instills economic, terror-based, and demographic fears of the foreign and the nonwhite and uses reproductive sexuality, domestic femininity, and the inseparability of national identity and whiteness to shore up colonialist and imperialist logics of domination. While the motivations of Irish nationalism in the early twentieth century and American nationalism a hundred years later differ, they share some of the same instruments. Irish traditional music must not ignore these larger social and political currents.
Such currents emerge in recent Irish approaches to immigration. The authors of “‘Vote Yes for Common Sense Citizenship’” identify the disjuncture between Ireland’s self-image as progressive, tolerant, and open and its retention of antithetical attitudes like intolerance and provinciality in the name of “tradition.”33 Here, I read slightly against these authors’ assertion to argue that Irish society and the transnational trad scene already contain the seeds of postnationalist transformation: while narrow definitions of “tradition” can occlude and exclude, “tradition” as a set of practices does not need to be confined or confining. Indeed, Irish traditional music has demonstrated its expansiveness for centuries, from the incorporation of musical elements from art and popular musics to its ever-widening reach worldwide. In 1992, Mick Moloney wrote, “For musicians with absolutely no Irish ancestry whatever, long term involvement in the music and culture is extremely rare.”34 In the past several decades, hundreds of musicians have demonstrated that this claim is outdated through their continuing participation in the scene, and for some, “Irish traditional musician” is a major part of their self-identification—more important, some say, than nationality, gender, or sexuality. This phenomenon challenges mainstream ideas about identity, ethnicity, and artistic affinity: when musicians with no Irish ethnic heritage refer to themselves as “Irish traditional musicians,” does “Irish” apply to the music or the person? This slippage provides an excellent opportunity to question the relevance of ethnic nationalism to musicking and, by extension, to individual and group identity formation. It will take more minds than mine to fully think through removing ethnic nationalism from Irish traditional music, but I see several places where the trad scene has already laid the groundwork.
I argue that attention to connections—on transnational or global rather than national levels—should be central to institutional, scholarly, and community-based understandings of Irish traditional music. Some work, including Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin’s rich account of music making in County Clare, Flowing Tides, has acknowledged these connections, but inevitably our ears and minds are drawn back to the national as regularly as the tide comes in.35 But I suggest that while the nation has been vital in the development of Irish traditional music, it is less important today in defining or directing the network of scenes worldwide. Instead, the genre has already organized itself around regional and local styles and scenes, and this transnational network of local, face-to-face scenes is multiply reinforced: players within a local scene often share connections with people in other scenes, and social media platforms afford individuals additional opportunities to get to know fellow traddies virtually. Shared repertoires and mutual friends smooth social interactions when traddies meet in person, and musicians frequently use the trad network to find housing, jobs, and friends in new locations. This kind of networking through music represents a form of chain migration that does not depend on ethnicity.36 Compared with the organic and unrestricted flow of musicians, tunes, recordings, instruments, and news among trad scenes worldwide, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann’s nationalist branch-county-province-nation organization seems artificial and has led to the strange practice of delineating “provinces” in Britain and North America.37 At this point, no Japanese “province” exists, though musicians can qualify to compete in the All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann through the Comhaltas branch in Tokyo. Time will tell whether Comhaltas—a notoriously conservative organization—will fully annex Japan into its expansionist concept of the nation in the same way it has enveloped areas of the Irish diaspora, or whether it will stop short of embracing Japan as “Irish.”
In a genre where styles and repertoires remain firmly connected with particular places, the roots of musicians matter tremendously. A particular challenge in achieving a fully postnationalist manifestation of trad will be maintaining this foundational sense of people and place while expanding it beyond the restrictive frameworks of ethnic nationalism. Again, practice and discourse diverge: individual relationships among musicians often do operate “postnationally,” but always with the looming reality of institutionally and discursively embedded ethnic nationalism. Legacies of colonialism and ambivalence about capitalism in the context of trad also generate anxieties around the presence of outsiders and what some perceive as an appropriation of local tunes and styles.38 Appropriation as it relates to Irish traditional music is peripheral to my arguments, but the question of ownership of tunes and techniques becomes more complex in a postcolonial and postnationalist context and is perhaps the most tenacious barrier to the excision of ethnic nationalism from trad. As Anthony McCann argues, conventional capitalist definitions of intellectual property fail to adequately describe or prescribe the treatment of a repertoire of mostly anonymous tunes, and many traddies find the idea of “owning” a tune strange in such a collective, transhistorical practice.39 With roots in Enlightenment Britain, copyright laws are the tools of the colonizer imposed on the colonized, and tunes (and the teaching of tunes) have become commodities to be traded, bought, and sold. Higher market values accrue to performances deemed more “authentic,” where criteria include extramusical qualifications like the provenance of tunes and players. As long as trad musicians (rightly) seek compensation for their work in a capitalist system that treats ethnicity as added value, calling for the dissolution of ethnic nationalism will be fraught for economic reasons. A shorter-term tactic for moving away from ethnic nationalism might be to focus attention on the noncommercial aspects of the scene, such as amplifying practices of inclusion that already exist in trad as a way to identify so-called difference as value rather than threat. Ultimately, though, if the trad scene hopes to dismantle structures of discrimination, it will need to move beyond inclusion and toward transformation.
Some members of the Irish traditional music scene attempt to signal inclusion by claiming to focus on “the music itself” rather than on the identity of players—but the statement that nothing matters but the music has the opposite effect when used to silence conversations about discrimination in the trad scene, as I discuss in chapter 5. For nonnormative musicians, not talking about negative experiences around identity in the scene may ease assimilation, but my call for relinquishing ethnic nationalism as a way of organizing the trad scene is a call for transformation rather than assimilation. This call echoes that of black and indigenous scholars like Angela Davis, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye, and Vanessa Watts in asserting that nationalism, like liberal humanism, is racialized (and gendered and sexed).40 Hierarchies are built into both national and humanist systems, in which some people are human and others are not quite human. Like other cultural forms of the white West, Irish traditional music is the inheritor of these systems and their ways of understanding the world.
As a genre that also emerged from a history of colonial domination (including the imposition of settler colonialism) and discrimination based on hierarchies of human, not-quite-human, and nonhuman, ethnically Irish traditional musicians have a special obligation to rethink the genre’s relationships with ethnic nationalism and liberal humanism. I believe that trad has a head start in this process of transformation: in addition to the power of its diverse relationships built through collective music making, the idea of “the music itself” as a participant in musicking gestures toward a posthumanism in which humanness ceases to be the only way we can imagine organizing ourselves. If we can admit nonhuman actors like “the music itself” into the field of music-making, then discrimination against humans based on ethnicity / race, gender, sexuality, or other forms of difference becomes harder to rationalize—as indeed does discrimination of any sort. This idea of “the music itself” liberating humans from our fear of difference is admittedly optimistic in the extreme and puts a tremendous burden on the endeavor of musicking, but I suggest this possibility to jar readers from the complacency and hubris of thinking that humanism (much less nationalism) is the only framework through which we can consider music making or engage in meaningful action.
A CABINET OF METHODOLOGIES, OR THE FREEDOM OF REPURPOSED PARCHMENT 41
In its dialogues between past and present and among musicians within and outside Ireland, this book represents a conversation among methodologies and disciplines. A catholic approach to archival research, ethnography, and critical theory seemed the best—and indeed the only ethical—way to ask and begin to answer the questions I wanted to ask. In some cases, new ideas emerged from seemingly disparate sources of information, theoretical frameworks, and lines of thinking. For example, I began the present-day portion of this research by interviewing musicians who live in the United States because as an American, I already knew where to start finding nonnormative traddies in that country. Although I was not initially planning to address ethnicity or race, it came up in almost every interview I conducted as inextricable from my interlocutors’ other identities. In working to make sense of how the experiences of present-day, mostly American musicians might relate to those of Irish women musicians in the early twentieth century, ethnicity, nation, and belonging became central organizing tropes to consider how the ideologies of nationalism use gender, sexuality, and race / ethnicity to allocate labor, control bodies, and lend legitimacy to the state. Thus, my opportunistic ethnographic focus on musicians in the United States refocused my work on Irish women in the early twentieth century by enticing me to trace their common thread of ethnic nationalism.
In its earliest stages, this project was going to be an ethnographic account of the experiences of women traditional musicians in Ireland today. As I began research for an initial chapter on historical context, I discovered material on past women musicians that had languished unconsidered in archives—including information that corrects erroneous assumptions about women’s public music making in the early twentieth century and establishes their influence on traditional music performance more generally, including on renowned male musicians like Michael Coleman. Suddenly, historiography and history became as urgent as ethnography: in the absence of published work on women’s musical participation in the Irish nationalist movement of the early twentieth century, a less historicized work on gender in trad would risk inadvertently contributing to the fallacy of linear history that presumes that women’s participation has increased steadily over time. A similar fallacy may operate for queer musicians and musicians of color—a line of inquiry worth pursuing in the future.
Historiography also provides an avenue for simultaneously reveling in and questioning the genealogical mind-set of Irish traditional music that, like the fantasy of a benevolent patriarchy, confines as much as it might comfort. Narratives of family connections among musicians and tunes trace out a world along heteropatriarchal lines: parents pass tunes down to children, and masters share their trade with students whose respect is filial. In most cases, the roots and branches of these musical family trees are male, as are most of the leaves. Because one’s place as a “traditional” musician is predicated upon respect for the forefathers (and the few foremothers) of “the tradition,” attempts to envision or validate alternative modes of transmission in Irish traditional music have been confounded in some of the ways that the literature scholar Janet Beizer identifies for feminist biography, in which the narrative tools of patriarchal genealogy are endlessly implicated in work that traces lineages of foremothers both metaphoric and biologic.42 Trad discourse depends on wholesale subscription to the model of transmission as reproduction, wherein the genetic material of tunes and styles has a traceable lineage unless it is presented as magical or attributed to the genius of an inevitably male musician. Although lateral peer-to-peer transmission of tunes is the way most musicians learn repertoire, trad discourse privileges the metaphor of father / master-to-son / student transmission. Woman-to-woman transmission of tunes has been unacknowledged throughout most of trad’s history, and the influence of foremothers is hidden compared with the eminently traceable lines and lessons of fathers and male teachers.
Uncomplicated genealogic thinking comforts us by suggesting that the past is always present yet unchanging, like the trunk of a family tree. Cultural politicians and Irish traditional musicians nurture this tree with metaphors of water or whiskey that reinforce the idea of reproduction and the (usually imaginary) purity of a family line. Musicians become human vessels, “tradition bearers” who carry cultural material unchanged, and “the pure drop” suggests that the music of the past is clear and untainted as long as it is protected from the contaminations of the present or the foreign.43 Purity, of course, implies whiteness—especially in the context of a genre that has long defined itself in opposition to jazz, as I discuss in chapter 5. But the perceived constancy of the past masks the distillation processes that have refined the “pure drop” for today’s delectation. Tracing each of these breweries and stills of tradition is work for another day, but the study of forgotten musicians, repertoires, and practices, however “traditional” they may have been, is effectively the study of what has not come down to us as the “pure drop.” So, too, is attention to living musicians who exist outside the genre’s norms of gender, sexuality, and / or race / ethnicity.
This book is an intervention in disciplinary conversations in music as well as an intervention in Irish traditional music history. Like some other work on vernacular and popular musics of the West, this project has always been “queer”—always a little off-kilter from the preoccupations and predilections of both musicology and ethnomusicology. This text challenges the unsustainable and unethical disciplinary “purities” historically associated with each field: musicology’s uneasiness with performance rather than text and its focus on the “great works” of “great (white) men,” and ethnomusicology’s colonialist obsession with the non-Western subaltern. But luckily, reality is much more deliciously complex than such purities suggest, and therefore, instead of seeking disciplinary legibility in one field or the other, this text exercises the freedom of drawing from the perspectives, texts, and methodologies of both.44
Similarly, I imagine that the readers of this book will come from a variety of backgrounds, including traditional musicians and scholars inside and outside Ireland. I include details and sources that will speak to my fellow trad musicians, as well as discussions about disciplinarity directed toward my colleagues in academic music studies. Readers with a musicological bent will recognize this volume’s obligatory yet useful musical analysis (albeit queered and trad-ified), while ethnomusicologists will identify the vignettes of encounter that characterize many ethnographies. I have tried to put the nuances of Irish traditional music performance into language that will resonate with readers unfamiliar with the genre, and I have glossed the ideas from critical theory I cite to render them intelligible to all readers. Though this book found its home in an academic press based in the United States, I hope that it will also reach readers and effect change beyond the rarified worlds of music’s -ologies.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT WORDS
In choosing terminology, I have attempted to balance meaning and the flow of prose—and in some cases, to demonstrate the power dynamics I seek to elucidate. My choice to sometimes shorten “Irish traditional music” to “trad” is one example: in addition to its widespread use in the genre, “trad” reminds us that in Ireland, marking the music as “Irish” is unnecessary. Only outside Ireland is the adjective “Irish” useful to mark ethnicity, although “trad” often suffices within Irish traditional music subcultures outside Ireland, too. In the global trad scene, “non-Irish” becomes the marked term, since the stereotypical trad musician is Irish. Combined, “Irish” and “non-Irish” invoke one instability that characterizes post-Riverdance Irish culture: the historical view of the Irish as disempowered in contrast with the intense visibility and audibility of Celtic Tiger Ireland since the 1990s. Again following colloquial usage among some (but not all) musicians, I sometimes refer to those who play Irish traditional musicians today as “trad musicians” or “traddies” to declutter my prose and remove the ethnic adjective “Irish.” (I generally do not refer to historical musicians with these colloquial terms, which are relatively recent additions as far as I have been able to determine.) I have used pseudonyms for all my interlocutors to protect those who wished to be anonymous. This choice was at odds with some of my interlocutors’ wishes to escape the closet of anonymity, but safety concerns outweighed the benefits of full openness.
At times, I use “nonnormative” as shorthand for musicians who do not fit the dominant demographic of white, ethnically Irish, heterosexual men. I aggregate women, LGBTQ+ musicians, and musicians of color when it makes sense to do so, and I trust that readers will understand identity as intersectional—that a person might be a queer woman of color or a white gay Irish man, and oppressions and privileges will operate differently based on one’s subject position and geographical location. Nomenclature for musicians of color and LGBTQ+ musicians has presented particular challenges, and again I have tried to balance meaning and readability. In general, I have preferred “musician of color” because it reinforces the subject position of “musician” and avoids centering whiteness, but in some contexts, I have used “nonwhite” to emphasize the effects of racism. Occasionally, “musician of color” proved too unwieldy, and I chose to prioritize the accessibility of prose. In most cases, I have chosen the problematic but less identifying term “Asian American” rather than identifying individual musicians by ethnicity to protect their anonymity. Despite critiques of the term “queer” for its associations with middle-class whiteness and its tendencies to obscure the differences among those named “queer,” I have generally chosen to use it because it makes space for nonnormative sexualities not included in the “alphabet soup” of LGBTQ+ and because it is more accessible for reading out loud than a lengthy acronym.45 Finally, in a move toward nonbinary use of language, I have chosen to use the “singular they” throughout this work whenever possible.
CHAPTER SYNOPSES
The chapters in this book focus on the effects of ethnic nationalism as they relate to gender, sexuality, and race in different eras and in the transnational circulation of Irish traditional music and musicians, especially between Ireland and the United States. In telling larger stories about how trad musicians have navigated questions of identity since the early twentieth century—and how traditional music scholars have often sidestepped these same questions—I also tell stories about how musicians and listeners interact with sound. In the case of the flute player Mary Kilcar (chapter 1), producing overheard sounds led to an interaction that provides what may be the only trace of her existence as a musician, while the timbre of vibrato contributed to the erasure of the fiddler Treasa Ní Ailpín from the historical record of Irish traditional music. My present-day interlocutors discuss the epistemological and social ruptures that can occur when “Irish” sounds emerge from bodies that do not fit stereotypes of normative Irishness, as well as the joys of sounding together. Such experiences both separate and connect musicians, and I maintain that attention to these separations and disjunctures has the potential to lead us to even more satisfying connections.
Chapter 1 begins with an explication of the relationships between gender and nationalism—and, by extension, sexuality and race—in the Irish nationalist movement of the early twentieth century. By exploring personifications of the nation as mother or maiden as a way to create space for publicly active women traditional musicians, I illuminate the role of gender and reproductive sexuality in producing and enculturating a properly “Irish” citizenry. I argue that women musicians’ legibility as mothers or maidens enabled them to perform publicly in an era that asserted women’s domesticity, and I provide previously forgotten historical information on several of these musicians, including Bridget Kenny, May McCarthy, Mollie Morrissey, and Mary Kilcar.
Chapter 2 discusses the Limerick fiddler Treasa Ní Ailpín’s early life and music to make audible the connections among gender, class, national identity, and “authentic” performance practice that have led to her disappearance from oral and written histories of Irish traditional music. These connections are based on nationalist ideals of Irish traditional music as masculine, organic, and untaught, in opposition to the feminized refinements of “foreign” classical music education. By examining elements of performance practice and style, I pose larger questions about how determinations of authenticity change over time—how they become attached to certain techniques, and how those techniques carry the residue of gendered and racialized associations. I demonstrate that “authenticity” is a dynamic, slippery attribute and that, like “Irishness,” it is a construction closely linked with discursive power.
Through a retelling of the Sliabh Luachra fiddler Julia Clifford’s life, chapter 3 considers the role of biography in telling the lives of nonnormative musicians. It explores questions of subjectivity through tracing Clifford’s navigation of gender norms as a woman economic migrant in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. In this chapter, I investigate the circumstances that led to Clifford’s inclusion in the canon of Irish traditional music and contemplate what it might mean to put gender and musicianship on equal footing to claim an identity as a woman traditional musician.
Chapter 4 begins by connecting magical nationalism (mobilizing the supernatural to demonstrate Irish exceptionalism) with musicians’ reverence for “the music itself.” This reverence, I argue, comes in part from the joys of reaching trad flow during performance. Through ethnographic accounts, I demonstrate that (hetero)sexism and racism disproportionately prevent women, queer musicians, and musicians of color from entering flow states. I then take a playful approach to the term “the music itself”: instead of arguing for or against the primacy of text (or performance-as-text), I ask how treating “the music itself” as an actor might shift how we interact with fellow musicians within the trad scene.
In chapter 5, I investigate the role of aesthetics, including understatement and silence, in shaping behaviors and discourse around gender, sexuality, and race / ethnicity. Through the words of my interlocutors, I relate some of the challenges that musicians of color and queer musicians face, as well as their tactics for dealing with state-induced and quotidian racisms and (hetero)sexisms born of ethnic nationalist mind-sets and policies. I address the problems of attrition and the limits of assimilation, and I close with a discussion of the transformations that nonnormative musicians wish to see in the transnational Irish traditional music scene.
