Ethnography Essay: Saturday-Night Seisiuns

The bartender seemed a bit nonplussed when I told her that I was working on a paper for school. She asked me if I was old enough to drink and I told her I wasn’t.
“Too bad,” she said shrugging, “it’s kind of part of the experience.”
I looked around a few times at the decorative shamrocks hanging cheerfully from the rafters and the television set and realized that there had been something odd about the way the bartender had spoken. She had said “the experience” with a gravity that’s often reserved for proper nouns, as though she were speaking of a time-honored holiday. Eager to find out more before the room filled up with thirsty patrons, I turned my attention back to the bartender and asked what she thought of the place. She explained that she’d been running the bar on Saturdays at the Irish Cultural Centre of New England for the last two months and that it looked like it was going to be another gem of a night. She also told me that the bar is technically only supposed to be open until midnight but that she usually has to kick the musicians out by 12:30 in the morning.
“You have to kick them out?” I asked across the counter from my barstool perch.
“They’d never stop playing if I didn’t.”
For the first time that night, I started to understand that the little bar meant more to its denizens than four walls and full glasses. There seemed to be a feeling of tradition associated with the place, a sense of a fondly remembered past and a promising future. I was about to continue my inquiry when a chorus of fiddles, mandolin, banjo, lute, and tin whistle sprang from the shuffling stillness of the back corner and embarked on a triplet-feel melody in unison. It was 8:00 in Canton, Massachusetts and the Saturday-night seisiun had begun.
Seisiun is pronounced “session” and has just about the same meaning; according to the Irish Cultural Centre’s website, it’s the “gathering of singers and musicians to sing and play [Irish] songs”. The seisiun refers particularly to the playing of “traditional” Irish music in a community setting, an event held frequently and open to any and all within the community. During seisiuns, songs are shared amongst several generations of musicians and listeners, the youngest learning the songs from repeated exposure to the performances of their elders (http://www.irishculture.org).
As the music greeted my ears, the communal nature of the seisiun quickly became evident to me. The musicians, as opposed to being sequestered to a stage, sat around a collection of small tables in the back corner of the room, facing not the “audience” but each other. Those in the ever growing “audience”, if it could be called that, didn’t sit morosely in their seats waiting to politely applaud at song’s end; they leaned in close to one another and spoke animatedly over their beers; they called out encouragements to the musicians, who they seemed to know by name; they listened attentively to the soft strains of soloists and singers and sang along when the songs called for a chorus; and when a song was finally over, they didn’t offer their approval so much as they imposed it across the room with hoots and handclaps. They did all these things with a comfortable confidence that suggested that they’d been there before and with a collectivity that suggested that they knew not only the place, but each other.
When one of the musicians got up to fetch a drink, I introduced myself and asked her if seisiuns were usually so social. She told she’d been playing the bodhrán, a type of Irish drum played with piece of wood called a “tipper”, at seisiuns for only a little over a year and already she’d met over two-hundred people, musicians and listeners, who had come through the bar, just as she was meeting me. She continued to say that when she’s played at seisiuns, she’s never felt that she’s been playing to the people around her, but rather with them, as though when she “enters the room, the music comes out of the walls and moves through [her]”. It’s this feeling that keeps her coming back to the Saturday-night seisiuns, as well as the opportunity to have a “front row seat to watch musicians with talent” play.
The talent she was speaking of was abundant. In instrumental Irish folk music, the melody reigns supreme over all else, often inviting as many as a dozen instruments to play in unison with as little as a single guitar providing chordal accompaniment. The melodic instruments included a banjo, a mandolin, an accordion, a tin whistle, uilleann pipes, and two fiddles. The bodhrán player told me that one of the fiddle players, an Irish citizen in his early twenties who had “come to America to visit family, met a girl, and has been here ever since”, exhibited so much passion in his playing that the Irish Cultural Centre added him to their payroll to encourage him to stay.
Sean, as I learned he was named, bowed his head and stared intensely at the ground while he played, stomping his foot to the beat as his fingers flew up and down the neck of his fiddle. When he didn’t know a song, by mandate of seisiun tradition, he would lay down his fiddle and head to the bar. When he passed me on one of his trips, he patted me on the back and asked how I was doing in a thick Irish accent, grabbing two frothing glasses of beer that the bartender had knowingly prepared for him and returning to his fiddle before I could respond. Even as a newcomer, I already felt as though I was being recognized and accepted amongst those who I assumed to be regulars at the bar. I was, after all, brandishing a head of thick red hair.
As I had this very thought, I started to wonder if the majority of the patrons saw themselves as being “Irish”. I know that to a limited extent, I’ve always viewed myself as “Irish”, even though I have very little idea of what it might mean to actually be Irish. An elderly man who had been helping out behind the bar all night was standing nearby. I’d seen him speaking to many of the patrons as they’d circulated past the bar and I figured he’d be able to offer some insight as to how people who come to the Saturday-night seisiuns view themselves. I said hello and told him about the paper I was writing, realizing quickly that he was quite hard of hearing and elevating my voice to a near shout by the end of my explanation. He told me that he was born in Ireland and had lived there for over twenty years before immigrating to America, where he’s been for the last forty. I asked how he felt about the music they played at Canton seisiuns.
“It’s all right,” he replied after a brief moment of contemplation, “but it’s not the same as what they play in Ireland.”
I pressed him a bit further as to what he meant and he told me that most of the people who come to the seisiuns identify themselves as Irish, but they are fundamentally American. Even though the music and atmosphere aren’t incredibly divergent from those he remembers from Ireland, he often gets the distinct impression that when he attends the seisiuns, he’s not just listening to Irish music, but Irish music in America.
I thanked the man for his words and turned back to the music, trying to discern the implications of the old man’s thoughts. As I pondered, the musicians were discussing how they were going to play the next “set”, an instrumental derived from the combination of three shorter tunes that are performed by moving seamlessly from one to the next. The man I assumed to be the group leader (a guitarist and vocalist who everyone deferred to on song selections) named the three tunes that would comprise the next set. Sean, the young fiddle player, laid his fiddle on the table in front of him and, half jokingly, said he wouldn’t play this particular set because one of the three tunes was not traditionally played with the other two.
“Everywhere else in the world, they play it the right way,” Sean hollered teasingly from the bar.
“Well,” the group leader replied with a patronizing smile as he began strumming his guitar, “here we don’t.”
It was after witnessing this exchange that it dawned on me why the Saturday-night seisiuns were so important to people. “Perfect” emulation of what is considered to be traditional makes music into an exhibition, a fascinating experience but one that can ultimately leave its listeners with the impression of having heard what can be called musical acting: music that posits itself as being “authentic” when there is, in reality, an ever-present, conscious detachment from the time and place of the music’s origins. At the same time, there is something inherently powerful about listening to music that one feels is unique to them and their community, music that has a history of affiliation with what one perceives to be their culture. With the Saturday-night seisiuns, people have found a way to both celebrate their shared heritage and participate in a dynamic social experience with a fitting soundtrack.
The seisiuns in Canton are valuable because they are filled not just with familiar songs and endless drinks, but because they are also filled with familiar faces and memories of Saturday-nights-past. That they are not the same as the seisiuns one would find in Ireland and they don’t aspire to be; they are a local tradition all their own. The musicians and patrons make no attempt to transport themselves to a mythical, utopian homeland through an artificial recreation of ancient music, rather they take pride in being a part of music in Canton, Massachusetts. In this way, the music is a tradition, but not in the traditional sense of the word; Canton’s tradition isn’t one that’s stagnated in its own historicity, but one that is fortified and amended every Saturday night.
I left the Irish Cultural Centre with a sense of having been a part of something transcendent, yet humble. With a slight smile lighting my lips, I crossed the green-painted wooden bridge to the parking lot, familiarizing myself with its features in anticipation of my return on some Saturday night in the future. When I return, I anticipate the bartender might have to kick me out along with the musicians as Sunday’s early hours press on.
Websites Used:
http://www.irishculture.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_traditional_music_session