First Field Notes - Irish Seisiun at Irish Cultural Center of New England

Location: Irish Cultural Centre of New England Bar
Date: February 16, 2008

Arrived at the bar at 7:45, show scheduled to start at 8:00. Younger man (early twenties or so) was standing by door smoking a cigarette, greeted us in an Irish accent. Bar was fairly empty, no musicians in sight. Around 8:00, young man comes in with a middle-aged man. They start moving chairs and tables away from one corner of the room. Middle-aged man leaves bar and returns with a guitar, amplifier, and microphone. Younger man brings a fiddle to the remaining table in the corner of the room, sits and starts playing softly. By 8:30, there are about 20 people in the bar and a four musicians sitting around the table: the middle-aged man on guitar, the younger man on fiddle, another middle-aged man with a mandolin, a bouzouki, and a fife, and an older woman with a bodhrán (a hand-held drum). The performers sit around the table facing each other, a microphone suspended above the table connected to an amp off to the side which faces the greater area of the room. Musicians start to play an up-tempo Irish instrumental at 8:35, do not address audience. When the song ends, all the musicians give a hearty shout and the crowd claps enthusiastically. The musicians look around amongst themselves, chat a bit with each other, laugh, and start another song.

Middle-aged man with guitar seemed to be the one who other musicians deferred to: the session leader.

Middle-aged man with guitar would sing, but it was hard to hear him because the microphone was picking up all the musicians. When I could hear him, he was singing with an Irish accent, though I had heard him talking with some of the patrons before he had finished setting up the performance space in an local accent.

Throughout night, more and more people started to show up. Social atmosphere, lots of talking over the music. Yet audience seemed conscious of the songs, singing along sometimes to the songs with vocals and always stopping to clap and cheer at the end of every song, even if they were engaged in conversation.

As show went on, more musicians showed up: two more bodhrán players, another fiddle player (female with a young son who was constantly trying to get into her lap while she played), a older-male harp player (whose playing was inaudible in the loud room), and another older-male who sang a song that the bar patrons seemed to be familiar with (they sang along).

Mix of instrumentals and vocal based songs.

Fiddles/mandolin would almost always play the same melody lines in unison.

Lots of patrons appeared to be families, ate together while music played.

Seemed as though the music provided an atmosphere for people to socialize to, few patrons actually seemed to be attentively listening to the music. All patrons seemed to appreciate the music, though; musicians and patrons seemed comfortable, as though the music wasn’t an exhibition but auxiliary to the social gathering.

Throughout show, patrons would come up and converse with performers. Long, leisurely pauses between songs to accommodate conversation. Musicians seemed very approachable.

Heard patron ask the younger man if he and the female fiddle player ever had a “fiddle duel”. Younger man said he didn’t believe in such practices.

Throughout show, musicians would come in and out of performances to get beer, would sit out songs, would join in whenever they seemed to feel like it.

Critical Review - Shelemay

In the Shelemay reading, it is argued that music and memory work together in powerful ways to establish a sense of community in diasporas and to maintain traditions. This is managed via explicit memories (intentional memory) and implicit memories (non-conscious memory), as individuals and as a group. Shelemay primarily discusses pizmonim, a type of Syrian-Jewish song that uses established Arabic melodies as vessels for sung Jewish prayer (in Hebrew). The words to these songs, often prayer based, usually recall specific persons in their lyrics (often the songs are written in dedicated) and certain times and places in their melodies (as the melodies are taken from established Arabic songs), constantly forging a connection between those who participate in singing/listening to the pizmonim and the past that is catalogued within. Though many of the songs are transmitted from generation to generation orally, written texts have also been used to record pizmonim as well as cassette tapes. Often times, the writer of the song's words will insert their name into the opening verse as an acrosstic so that they will be forever affiliated with the song. Pizmonim sung in different Syrian-Jewish communites can vary due to the propensity to adopt songs penned by community members into local repertories, but there are still many pizmonim that are sung throughout the diaspora. For the most part, member of Syrian-Jewish communites will sing the pizmonim they become familiar with growing up, though sometimes the youth of the community will introduce older members to new pizmonim. Ultimately, pizmonim reinforce collective memory while simultaneously uniting Syrian-Jewish communities in song.

Question: would a pizmon be accepted if the words and melody had been authored simultaneously or do pizmonim require that the melody be derived from a preestablished source?

Initial Topic Post

Growing up in New England, I've come to be fairly familiar with people who would describe themselves as being of Irish lineage (including myself). Yet besides a rudimentary knowledge of the patatoe famine and mass immigration in the mid-1800s to early 1900s, I feel as though I and many of those who I've met who identify themselves as "Irish" know very little about the Irish diaspora in America, particularly how in manifests itself today. For this reason, I've decided to do a small-scale ethnographic study at the Irish Cultural Centre in Canton, Massachusetts, to see how readily people consider themselves part of a contemporary Irish diaspora.
Let me back up for a moment and briefly explain how I, at an early age, came to identify myself with the Irish. I have red hair and extremely fair skin, which almost immediately has caused others to assume that I'm of Irish or Scottish descent, a recurring influence that had me seeing myself as "Irish" by the fourth grade (a belief that was partially responsible for my outstanding childhood consumption of Lucky Charms). I had a pet bloodhound named "McDoogle", a reworking of a Scottish clan's name, but a name that I thoroughly believed to be Irish when I was 10. And before I was old enough to dominate the car CD player, my mom would regularly play Chieftains records, Enya, and the soundtracks to Riverdance and Braveheart (not necessarily "authentic" Irish music, or Scottish in the case of Braveheart, but indebted to more traditional musics none-the-less). When I think about my current association with the concept of "Irish", it revolves almost entirely around all those songs I still hear in my head so many years after I've last heard them.
Every Friday and Saturday night at the Irish Cultural Centre, traditional Irish "seisiuns" (sessions) are hosted where traditional Irish music is played. I plan to attend a couple of seisiuns on back-to-back nights, the first simply to absorb the music and the crowd and the second to talk to people (inobstrusively) about why they're attending seisiun. I hope to get an idea of how people see themselves in relation to what is posed as "traditional Irish music". Is there a sense of diaspora community amongst the concert-goers? Do they feel a romanticized connection to the music of their "motherland", or do they just like the music, regardless of how they identify themselves with it? Do see themselves as Irish? Overall, I would like to come to a better understanding of how Irish music is established and viewed in New England and, though I know Canton is not in representative of New England in general, I want to see if their is a diaspora consciousness at a place where one might expect to find one: the Irish Cultural Centre.

Critical Review - Titon and Slobin

In the first chapter of the Titon and Slobin reading, it is argued that "although music is universal, its meaning is not"; different cultural groups have differing ideas as to what constitutes music and what is valuable in music, ideas that are "learned and transmitted from one generation to the next" within a culture and fortified by a lifetime of exposure to the music of that culture. Whether it be birdsongs of the noise of letters being rhythmically cancelled in Ghana, music is whatever the music-culture in question believes music to be. Traditionally, Western (but not only Western) music is marked by familiar terms: rhythm and meter (the "time-relation between sounds" and how quickly patterns are repeated), melody ("the part [of a song] that most people hear and sing along with), harmony (the formation of chords), and form (the "structural arrangement" of a musical composition). Titon and Slobin also suggest that a music-culture model be used when thinking about how people interact with music: the affective experience (the music), which is created by the performance (which adheres to "agreed-on rules and procedures" dictated by the music-culture), which is heard by the community (the audience that "supports" and "influences" the music), which ultimately develops a collective memory and history of the music (a process that becomes more and more ambiguous with globalization that can delocalize music from the culture that is creating it). At the end of the chapter, ideas about music and its uses are detailed, including how music interacts with belief systems (the Navajo use music to aid in the cure of diseases), aesthetics of music ("when is a song beautiful?), contexts for music (face-to-face performance vs. mp3s and the impact that the different contexts have on our interaction with music), and history of music (what does music do to reflect a culture's history and how has music changed over time?).

Question: is music a more effective cross-cultural communicator than spoken language?