Saturday Night Sessions: A New Tradition

(Sean and Me)

My Experience with Irish music and Irishness

Growing up, I recall thinking I was “Irish”. This wasn’t because I was born in Ireland or had Irish relatives, because I wasn’t and I didn’t. In retrospect, I think there were two primary reasons for my thoughts: I had red hair and my mom used to play traditional Irish music on our Dodge Caravan’s stereo system. That is, until I entered adolescence and became the family’s domineering road DJ, forcing my family to listen to the Offspring and late-nineties Chili Peppers at unhealthy volumes. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that the depths of my “Irishness” are shallow, but the concept has always been there.

When I was assigned this ethnomusicological blog project, some part of me felt compelled to reexamine the Irish music I’d spent my childhood with. I figured that because I’d gotten on in years, I’d started to develop nostalgia for better times; whenever I’ve heard the strains of traditional Irish music, I’ve found myself experiencing a sort of sincere homeliness. But at the outset of the project, it had been years since I’d actually listened to Irish music, and then it was always something that belonged to my mom. I wanted to see if I could find something new in the music, something that would explain why the word “Irish” had followed me around for twenty years of my American life. As I set out on my assignment, I hoped that I hadn’t become so detached from my limited Irish “roots” that I’d be unable to reenter the realm of Irish music.

A Little Historical Background

I won’t delve too deeply into the history of Ireland or Irish music, but I feel there are a few things that should be mentioned.

The middle of the nineteenth century saw millions of Irish immigrants come to America as they fled Ireland to escape famine. Some of these immigrants journeyed west, but a great many stayed in the New England area, particularly in states like New Hampshire (where I’m from) and Massachusetts (where I did my research). On the 2000 US census, 10.8% of Americans claimed Irish ancestry while states like New Hampshire and Massachusetts yielded rates of 19.4% and 22.5% respectively. Suffice to say, there is a certain pride that Americans of Irish ancestry reserve for their roots, particularly in the New England area. Some call these prideful people part of the Irish diaspora, people whose families were at one point displaced from Ireland, because they exhibit what William Safran calls a “diaspora consciousness”, an awareness that one has of their belonging to a diaspora group (Safran 1991:84).

Musically, there are several instruments that are considered to be historically traditional in Irish music. These include the fiddle, harp, flute, and tin whistle. It’s been said that these instruments "represent the Irish nostalgic and sometimes tragic past" and are symbols of Irish identity (Johnson 1995: 58). It should be noted that instruments like guitars, banjos, mandolins, and bass guitars are not seen as traditional instruments (Foy 1999: 18-20).

Canton, MA

After perusing the Internet, I found a place in Canton, Massachusetts that seemed as though it would be perfect for my study of Irish music in America: the Irish Cultural Centre of New England. Not only was the ICC a mere commuter-rail trip away from Providence, it also hosted a “traditional Irish session” every Saturday night at its bar.

This is the bar as seen from the eyes of a late-night session spectator:

I had never been to an Irish session before my first visit to the ICC and had little idea what this somewhat underwhelming little building contained.

But let me back up for a moment and tell you about sessions.

Sessions

To cite an essay I wrote about one of my experiences in Canton, a session is the gathering of musicians that “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 sessions, songs are shared amongst several generations of musicians and listeners, the youngest learning the songs from repeated exposure to the performances of their elders.”

For those of you whose familiarity with Irish music comes from Lord of the Dance, take note that sessions aren’t Irish music being “performed” on a stage. For example, this is not a session:

This is an example of what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett calls “heritage music”, or music that has been singled out for preservation and exhibition, or performance (Kirshenblatt Gimblett 2002: 134).

Sessions are not “contrived performance” designed to fill theatres, but integral parts of “communities where the music has been getting along 'on its own,' patronized by local people and performed by local musicians, for generations (Hast and Scott 2004: 1).”

Sessions have their own logic. They usually occur in bars amidst socialization with the musicians facing each other as if to suggest that there is no “audience” that they are “performing” for. Dorothea Hast and Stanley Scott write in "Music in Ireland" that the music is "neither a performance... nor background music", rather it is part and parcel to the entire Irish pub experience, serving to create a communal space for those who frequent the pub (Hast and Scott 2004: 5). Sessions usually look something like this:

or, in the case of the ICC in Canton, something like this:

In his somewhat satirical book on Irish sessions, Barry Foy writes:

"The session is the wellspring of Irish music, its beating heart. Its importance to the tradition must never be forgotten. The sometimes tricky, over-rehearsed material that finds its way onto recordings and the stage may maintain a higher profile, but it owes its vitality to the decades of sessions that preceded it and gave shape to the music (Foy 1999: 65)."

This is all to say that are session are a highly traditional practice indicative of an advanced state of Irishness… unless something different is happening.

What I found in Canton suggests that sessions may serve a different purpose.

Canton, MA (again)

I ended up making my way to Canton four times during my study. With the reading I’d done about sessions beforehand, I had expected the experience to be somewhat alienating due to my lack of Irishness. ‘At least I have red hair,’ I told myself in preparation for the odd, disapproving looks I was sure I’d encounter. Yet in the ICC’s little pub, a place well off of the main road and somewhat hidden amongst the trees, I found an immediate feeling of acceptance. As I went again and again, I realized that many of the same people frequented the sessions from week to week, establishing a sort of Saturday night community of bar patrons with a penchant for Irish tunes. The more I attended the sessions, the more I knew what to expect from each of the musicians who presided over the bar’s back corner. I began to get excited when I recognized a song, singing along quietly when I could remember the words. I even came to know some of the musicians.

Remember that picture at the beginning of the blog? In case you were wondering who Sean was, he’s the guy who runs the Saturday night sessions. Sean Kane plays guitar and sings at the Canton sessions, writes his own material, and is all around very knowledgeable about being Irish-American: he grew up in Brockton, MA with his Irish mother and used to spend his summers in Westmeath, Ireland. In an interview I did with Sean before a session, I expressed to Sean that even though I’m not particularly “Irish”, I never got the impression that I was unwelcome at the Canton sessions, or that they were something exclusively “Irish” reserved only for those who exude “Irishness”. Without missing a beat, Sean detailed his ideas of what “tradition” and “authenticity” really mean (and are worth) in Irish session music.

Tradition and Authenticity

In Handler and Linnekin’s article “Tradition: Genuine or Spurious”, they suggest that there is a “common sense” definition of tradition that “refers to an inherited body of customs and beliefs (Handler and Linnekin 1984: 1).” Using the common sense definition of tradition, anything that falls outside of the boundaries of tradition in an attempt to practice that tradition is somehow less genuine, less authentic, than those attempts that adhere strictly to the traditional. For example, most sessions are primarily instrumental with very little singing. Because of this, “traditional” Irish sessions feature very few “songs” and are composed primarily of “jigs” and “reels”.

During our interview, Sean indicated that the Canton sessions were not overly concerned with being traditional:

“We’re pretty egalitarian here because a lot of seisiuns… have that almost “jazz-like” mentality, that the musicians are playing for the musicians and aren’t you lucky that you might be sitting there hearing it. There won’t be any singing and they’re going to do whatever they want to do and that’s the way it is. And even singing… in a really traditional setting there’s… a bias against it… We just don’t do that… because it’s about building up the night and not just about the music… If you play three hours of jig and reels… I don’t find that to be the most attractive thing for a night out (excerpt from interview).”

So what value can a session, the “wellspring of Irish music”, claim to have when it defies the tradition it’s supposed to be grounded in?

Handler and Linnekin find the common sense definition of tradition to be faulty because it implies a permanence that doesn’t exist. They write that “there is no essential, bounded tradition; tradition is a model of the past that is inseparable from the interpretation of tradition in the present (Handler and Linnekin 1984:4)." In other words, tradition is an ever changing, interpretive practice, not a stagnant one.

When it started to seem that the Canton sessions weren’t overly concerned with being “traditional”, I asked Sean whether or not authenticity was a big deal. Here’s what he had to say (the Sean Connor he refers to in this clip is a young Irish fiddle player at the sessions):



“You can only be authentic to your own experience.”

With those words, I felt like Sean got to the heart of what makes Canton’s sessions so special.

Conclusions

Anthony McCann writes that the seisiun is culturally important not because it's a "colonial relic" but rather because it’s a "response" to current circumstances. Sessions are part of what McCann calls the “gift economy”: session music is available to us not because we have wallets, but because we have ears (McCann 2001: 92).

The true tradition of the session is that it’s a gift to its community. It’s in this way that the Canton sessions, as with other sessions, are not part of some universal, permanent Irish tradition, but a traditional all their own; the music is played by those in the local session community for those in the local session community.

Because the musicians like to sing and the audience likes to hear them sing, there is a lot of singing at the Saturday night sessions. Because the musicians have all kinds of different backgrounds, they will play songs that come from bluegrass and country “tradition” at the Saturday night sessions. And even though it will never be a traditional Irish instrument, you might see the upright bass at a Saturday night session because it sounds good.

“Irishness” is quite simply not an issue in Canton. It’s not what’s at stake. Canton’s Saturday night sessions are valuable because they serve people, not romanticized ideas of ineffable authenticity. The bottom line is the sessions are not trying to be anything that they aren’t. For someone like me who isn’t Irish but has always been aware of Irish music, the sessions create a space where I can feel included. I don’t need to be Irish, I just need to love the music.

A new tradition is being established in Canton, a tradition of community and family and music. What will become of this tradition in the future I can’t say, but I hope that it will remain as dynamic as the people who show up every weekend to share music and conversation and, of course, beer. A tradition that grows and changes is powerful and, if I’ve learned anything from my time in Canton, far more valuable than clinging to antiquated concepts of “authenticity”.

See you some Saturday night,

Ben Nicholson

Works Cited:

Foy, Barry. Field Guide to the Irish Music Session: An Authoritative Guide to Enjoying Irish Traditional Music in its Natural Habitat. Roberts Rinehart Publishers Lanham, MD. 1999

Handler, Richard and Jocelyn Linnekin. “Tradition, Genuine or Spurious”. The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 97, No. 385, University of Illinois Press, 1984. 273-290.

Hast, Dorothea and Stanley Scott. Music in Ireland: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. Oxford University Press, USA, 2004.

Johnson , Thomas F. “The Social Context of Irish Folk Instruments”. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 26, No. 1, Croatian Musicological Society, 1995. 35-59.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Sounds of Sensibility”. 2002.

McCann , Anthony. “All That Is Not Given Is Lost: Irish Traditional Music, Copyright, and Common Property”. Ethnomusicology, Vol. 45, No. 1, University of Illinois Press, 2001. 89-106.

Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return”. 1991

Websites:

“The Great Hunger”. Wikipedia Foundation Inc. 2008. Accessed May 8, 2008.

“The Irish in America”. EuroAmericans.net. Accessed May 8, 2008.

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

Response to Comments #2

Hey Abigail,

I agree with you that having some other perspectives included would be a good idea for making generalizations about Irish traditional music. I'm going to be very careful when framing my final blog post to make sure it doesn't sound as though I believe that the Irish Cultural Centre is representative of Irish music everywhere, rather my concern with this project is my analysis of what's going on in Canton (which, of course, could be extended to studies of Irish diaspora music in other places in the future). Talking to Sheila was really helpful and the books she gave me have been great. Let me know if you'd like to look at any of them. For my blog post, I'm definitely going to include an excerpt from the interview because Sean is an extremely eloquent speaker and his voice communicate more than a transcript of his voice. As of right now, I feel really good heading into the project and have a large body of text/media/experience to draw from. Can't wait to see what you come up with!

-Ben

Critical Review - Dorothea Hast and Stanley Scott's "Music in Ireland", Chapter 1: Invitation to a Session

In the first chapter of their book, Hast and Scott recount a trip they, as Americans, made to Ireland in 1997 in which they were invited to a small pub named Gleesons to attend a traditional Irish session. They differentiate sessions from other "contrived" presentations of Irish traditional music, such as festivales, schools, clubs, and competitions, in that with the pub session "the life of the music [is] in a community where the music has been getting along 'on its own,' patronized by local people and performed by local musicians, for generations (1)." They describe Gleesons as "a single, spacious room" with a fireplace and a small area in one corner reserved for the musicians. Junior Crehan, the 89-year-old fiddler and long-time leader of the Sunday night session, begins the session with a jig he wrote himself and has been playing for years. Between sets of jigs and reels, the musicians take breaks to talk and drink, alternating casually between playing and relaxing. The music is loud enough to be heard by all those in attendence at the pub, but not so loud as to prevent conversation because, as pub owner Jimmy Gleeson states: "people want to come in and converse... It's a farming community. So it's very important that you can hold a conversation... If someone is singing, that's the one time, the only thing I want to hear when someone is singing is the big clock ticking. And you know when you can hear the clock ticking that you have silence (4-5)." Hast and Scott write that the music is "neither a performance... nor background music", rather it is part and parcel to the entire Irish pub experience, serving to create a communal space for those who frequent the pub (5). In this spirit, specific tunes and players become part of the unique fabric of a given session, varying from one session to the next (10). Sometimes, "tunes have... been regarded as the personal property of the musicans who played them", though not necessarily those who wrote them. This is due to oral transmission being the "primary" form of continuity with Irish traditional music: those who preserve a tune by repeatedly playing it are in many ways given credit for the tune (12). The session is a place where specific players and community members are highly valued. Overall, the impression Gleesons left on the authors was one that "evoke[d] nostalgia for a simpler, less commercial way of life (15)."

Question: does practicing "tradition" involve adhering to ideas of what is "authentic" or is it more about establishing a local routine unique to a specific community? Or maybe more importantly, how do those who feel they are participating in tradition concern themselves with authenticity?

Critical Review - Barry Foy's "Field Guide to the Irish Music Session"

Written in a somewhat satirical style, Barry Foy's book addresses the subtle social etiquette and contemporary environment of the traditional Irish session. Foy describes a session as being a "gathering of Irish musicians for the purpose of celebrating their common interest... in a relaxed, informal setting" where the musicians simultaneously work to keep alive the "tradition" of the session and to share an evening of drinking with friends at the same time (12). He describes the music as being anything but a "jam", rather Irish traditional music consists of: "specific tunes in specific rhythms, played in specific ways in specific keys of specific instruments (13)." This requires that those who participate in sessions be extremely knowledgeable about the material being played, lest they not play at all. Because Irish traditional music is, stylistically, "unisonal" (all melodic instruments play in unison), chordal accompaniment is not required and, in fact, not necessary (53). Foy lists the fiddle, tin whistle, uilleann pipes, flute, concertina, accordion as being instruments that would be welcome at almost all sessions while guitars, mandolins, bodhrans, and banjos should never number more than one, if at all (18). The majority of tunes (not songs, which are sung, which are played far less frequently than tunes) can be classified as "reels", typified by fast tempo and a lively sound (23). Reels are strung together to form larger pieces, what Foy jokingly calls "BTSTs", or "Buncha-Tunes-Strung-Together", which usually consists of three tunes (30). Though there are no "rules" for how many times a single tune in a BTST should be played before moving to the next, the standard number is three, unless the tune is unusually long or short, in which case the number of repetitions is adjusted accordingly (25). Foy claims that BTSTs are determined in three ways: the tunes are classically played in a certain series that is generally known to everyone who plays Irish traditional music ("Tarlbolton"/"The Longford Collector"/"The Sailor's Bonnet"), a musician shouts out the name of the new tune while the one currently being played is ending, or someone just starts playing a new tune once the one has ended and hopes that enough other musicians know it to join in (31). Alternatively, some sessions set up their BTSTs beforehand, which Foy argues goes against the traditional aesthetic of Irish music. During sessions, long pauses between BTSTs are common in that the session is more of a social construction than a truly performative one (45). The prevalent use of electronic media has caused regional styles that were once transmitted orally to recede from the session in favor or versions of tunes found on mass-produced compact discs. This can cause clashes at sessions as tunes played in specific keys (so as to accommodate instruments like the flute that cannot really be tuned) are altered on recordings and musicians who aren't familiar with the "traditional" key may alienate those instruments which the tune was initially written for (81-82). In the end, Foy argues that the session, which is quite unlike a "normal concert" or recording by its highly interactive nature, still provides the basis for almost all contemporary recordings and concerts: "The session is the wellspring of Irish music, its beating heart. Its importance to the tradition must never be forgotten. The sometimes tricky, overrehearsed material that finds its way onto recordings and the stage may maintain a higher profile, but it owes its vitiality to the decades of sessions that preceded it and gave shape to the music (65)."

Question: exactly what are the social/temporal roots of the contemporary session? How far back does this "tradition" reach?

Critical Review - Anthony McCann's "All That Is Not Given Is Lost: Irish Traditional Music, Copyright, and Common Property"

Anthony McCann opens his article by stating that Irish traditional music finds itself in "the best of times and the worst of times". In many ways, the music is more popular globally than it's ever been and interest is at an all time high. On the other hand, the streamlining of a music that was once a "traditional" cultural practice has commodified the music in ways that are problematic. McCann argues that transmission of Irish traditional music depends/has depended on the music being a "gift" (a "system of sharing" that is "as-yet-unarticulated") as opposed to a commodity (89). Groups like the Irish Music Rights Organization (IMRO) work to protect Irish traditional music as a commodity, that is to say, removing some pieces of music from the "public domain" so as to assign ownership of the song (who has written it/who has the right to use it). After this point, McCann reiterates that "the noncommodity aspect of Irish musical practice... [is] the "cultural glue" that holds the whole system together (91)." He brings up the Irish seisiun as the major platform on which the Irish musical "gift economy" takes place: the seisiun is culturally important not because it's a "colonial relic" but rather because it is a "response" to current economic circumstances: it allows for the free exchange of music in a society which values and supports artistic "ownership" of music (92). McCann makes the case for Irish traditional music as being a Common Property Resource (CPR) due to its "non-excludability" and its tendency to develop "rivalrous consumption", or a situation where "each user [of the music] is capable of subtracting from the welfare of other users" based on the context in which a given person uses the music (whether in a consumer market or a gift economy) (94-5). There is a constant struggle between those who want to perform the music outside of the commercial spehere and those who wish to "cordon of those aspects of the [musical] environment that seem 'useful'" and make music a "product" and musicians "producers" (95). "Tragedy" can strike with common property when "self-interest and social interest diverge". Irish traditional music is, by and large, open to being used by anyone who wants to use it. Yet, McCann argues, the social and cultural significance of Irish traditional music relies on its transmission and presentation as being a gift, not a product. When those acting in self-interest attempt to turn a profit on the music, they work against the very nature of the music that makes it special in the first place (96). Commodification "dimishes to humanizing domain of the gift" (97). The "negative reciprocity" of capitalism, the turning of "one man's gift to another man's capital", promotes "individualism and clannishness" at the expense of communal social practice (98). Ultimately, McCann makes a plea for a legal system which "recognizes the wealth, the breadth, and, most importantly, the social nature of traditional musics and [their] transmission".

Question: if what's traditional is a "contemporary response to contemporary conditions", the meaning of what is traditional in Irish music must be dynamic. Not to argue for commodification of music, I wonder: do sales and the copyrighting of music that is played in the "traditional" Irish style diminish the one's enjoyment of the music? Can commodified music bring just as much pleasure as music that is transmitted as "gift" if such a system is socially desirable? Essentially, is there a certain "sanctity" that capitalism defiles?

Critical Review - Thomas F. Johnson's "The Social Context of Irish Folk Instruments"

In his article, T.F Johnson details the history and modern application of those instruments that are considered "traditional" in Ireland: the tin whistle, the harp, the fiddle, the Uillean pipes, the accordion, and the bodhran.

The usage of the tin whistle (or instruments similar to the tin whistle) dates back as far as the 13th century, when archaeologists have determined bone whistles called feadans were played in Ireland. Today, the most popular form of tin whistle consists of a cylinder of tin with a plastic mouthpiece. The length of the tin whistle is indicative of the set of pitches it is capable of playing, with longer tin whistles being in the keys of C or D and shorter whistles in F. They consist of six holes which are capable of playing the entire series of chromatic semitones, but are usually used in a diatonic fashion due the rapidity of melody playing that prevents key transpositions that require careful "forking" and "half-holing". In the commonly used Sligo style of flute/tin whistle playing, "rolls" are often performed, which consists of using neighbor tones to embellish the main tones of a melody.

The Irish harp, a "major national emblem" of Ireland (47), dates back to the 9th century and are used frequently by contemporary/recent folk-rock bands such as the Chieftains and Clannad. The use of the harp is highly symbolic in that it represents a "traditional", ancient Ireland and attempts at retention and revitalization of such an Ireland.

The Uillean pipes, or bagpipes, date as far back as the 11th century. The pipes utilize a continuous "drone" that underlies the melody of the pipes and serves as accompaniment. Competitive pipe bands flourish in six of Ireland's northern counties as they battle to express "tribal identity" (49); the pipes are associated with Irish national identity. Pipes are not consistenly used in Irish seisiuns due to their expense, finicky tuning, difficulty of playing.

The fiddle (violin) arrived in Ireland sometime after the 16th century. Irish fiddle, though often times the same actual instrument as the orchestral violin, is played very differently from the violin: it is "not held under the chin but drops at a distinct slope from and below the shoulder of the player... the neck is supported in the ball of the left hand... the bow is held rigidly over the nut, and its use is restricted mainly to the upper third of its length (51)." Though there are many regional styles of fiddle playing, all involve "rolls, slurs, glissandi, and other embellishments" that differentiate fiddle playing from violin playing (51). Double-stops, or the playing of two strings simultaneously, are common in Irish instrumental music. The fiddle, because it is fairly affordable, rich in sound, and reasonably loud, is often a prominent lead instrument at Irish seisiuns.

The accordion is generally pitched in C and is capable of spanning over two octaves. The accordion is played by expanding and compressing its bellows, which allows for two methods of playing: altering the direction of expansion/compression with the introduction of a new note, or the continued expansion/compression while many notes are played (which is particularly helpful in faced paced Irish instrumental music).

The bodhran is a type of drum that dates back to the 13th century. The bodhran is "a shallow wooden hoop at the rear of which are two crossbars at right angles. Over this frame is stretch a tough but elastic goatskin" (57). The bodhran is played with a stick in one hand while the other hand moves up and down on the back side to the drum to alter the drum's pitch. The bodhran is one of the most common accompanying instruments in Irish folk music.

In a brief discussion of seisiuns, Johnson notes that instruments are not usually sectioned off instrument type, but rather an intermingling of melody players occurs (who play in unison). Accompanying instruments are grouped together slightly separate from the melody players.

These instruments "represent the Irish nostalgic and sometimes tragic past" and often seen as symbols of Irish identity (58).

Question: instruments like the guitar, mandolin, banjo, and bass are not considered traditional in Irish music but are often utilized in "traditional" seisiuns. What does this suggest about tradition? Are those who value tradition open to changes and alterations? Can something be traditional and new/progressive at the same time?

Interview Excerpt - Sean Kane

These are excerpts of the interview I did with musician/seisiun leader Sean Kane at the Irish Cultural Center in Canton, MA, on March 29th, 2008:

Ben Nicholson: So I guess my first question is a very general question: what is your experience with Irish music, how’d you get into it, why do you still do it?

Sean Kane: Sure… my mother is Irish, she’s from Westmeath. My father was American but he was also Irish, his family came over about 100 years ago, 160 years ago maybe… I grew up in the US in Brockton, spent my time between there and Westmeath most of the Summer every year until I was 18… The funny thing is the Midlands are not rich in Irish culture… The Midlands would have been part of the “pale”… the ring of safety that had been Anglicized around Dublin once the British rule took over… culture had pretty much been squelched out of that area... The Midlands are rich for cows, cattle, farming, but not really rich in culture so when I went over there all the years I spent in the summers it had nothing to do with… music.

I had no background, or so I thought, in Irish music. When I turned 21, there used to be a phenomenal Irish-American bar in Easton… called the Irish Embassy… I used to go in there four nights a week… There was a song they were playing one night, “Seven Drunken Nights”,… I realized I knew all the words and I didn’t know why… It slowly dawned on me that growing up… I used to spend hours and hours listening to my mother’s LPs…

[The Irish Cultural Center] wanted to turn this place from just a function facility into a place that is actually open and people will come to eat dinner and hear music… Last January we started [seisiuns]… It’s not even a restaurant that people are aware of, it’s set back off against the road, there’s no history of it being open, and we just figured we’d just go for it… It’s been pretty good… a little more than a year into it it’s starting to take off.

They’re trying to build it up and make it a well known destination for music and culture.

BN: Having lived in Ireland, even if it wasn’t necessarily the cultural center of music… what would you say are the differences between the music [in Ireland and America]?

SK: As far as the music itself… we’re pretty egalitarian here because a lot of seisiuns…anywhere really can have that almost “jazz-like” mentality, that the musicians are playing for the musicians and aren’t you lucky that you might be sitting there hearing it. There won’t be any singing and they’re going to do whatever they want to do and that’s the way it is. And even singing… in a really traditional setting there’s probably a bias against it… We just don’t do that… because it’s about building up the night and not just about the music… If you play three hours of jig and reels… I don’t find that to be the most attractive thing for a night out… We’re definitely open, some places call themselves a seisiun but aren’t really a seisiun because a seisiun implies that any musician who can play is invited to play, and that’s just clearly not true in a lot of places.

If you sit in on a very traditional Irish seisiun, especially with Irish people, you would sit there keep your mouth shut and not even attempt to play until you get the look from the person saying, “Yeah, it’s okay, why don’t you join in on this one?” We don’t really do that here, but on the other side of the coin, some people come in and have no concept of good manners.

There is always, not just in music, that conflict of identity between that you’re either Irish and born in Ireland or you’re not. And if you’re not, at some level that’s important…

In terms of the music… there would be … [regional] style[s] of music, but all of that is actually going away because in the modern age, you have the Internet and you have CDs, and so now everybody sounds like Altan instead of everybody sounding like the people that they organically learned from in the oral tradition… It’s not the oral tradition any more, it’s the electronic tradition… The modern era is squelching the playing styles… making it all generic.

BN: In terms of playing here specifically… we talk a lot in the class about what is “traditional” and about “authenticity”… about whether or not authenticity is important…

SK: Yeah, authenticity… I think every seisiun might have its own tradition of what tunes in what order it might play… I don’t think we are necessarily that authentic in that there’s so much of our choices that have come in… I kind of think that authenticity has more to do with identity issue than it does with the music ultimately… it’s like another battle line of whose more Irish… as much as it is about whatever the traditional order of a set is.

BN: So do you feel like here that authenticity isn’t necessarily as big of a deal as it might be…?

SK: I don’t think we worry about it… Sean Connor [fiddle player] is Irish, he’s lived a long time in London. There’s some players that aren’t Irish at all… All of that stuff can be interpreted negatively by… certain Irish people. I’m not going to be Irish enough for someone else, I might pass muster with some people but… you’ve got all of that nonsense going on. So I don’t worry about it, I can’t worry about that kind of thing.
You can only be authentic to your own experience.

If we tried to pretend to be Irish, that’s not being very authentic… I think that identity and what it means to be this, that, or the other thing and what badge will prove that is something that I think the Irish have been experiencing for several hundred years, but is also more and more being experienced… people everywhere in the in the world… Travel, displacement, migration, immigration, all of that stuff is becoming more of a norm than the exception and all of that identity politics, first generation and second generation issues, is a very relevant issue in the world. I think the Irish are way out in front with it because they’ve been doing it certainly since the huge emigration in 19th century.

Third culture people have to make choices about who they are and where they come from and you either get empowered by that and you synthesize it… pick and choose what works for you from the places that you’re from, or you become kind of encapsulated, which is you can’t synthesize that stuff and you’re always pining for some other place and you don’t become empowered by it. And I think all of that is incredibly true, historically, about the Irish.

Guitar is not even a traditional instrument in Irish music… The whole notion of a seisiun is a modern creation, that’s what makes me laugh. The bottom line joke is that seisiuns are not traditional at all. The only reason that music existed was that dancers could dance. The idea that musicians would just play the music without anyone dancing didn’t exist… That’s like a 20th century phenomenon. So then when they try to hit you with what you can and can’t do… it’s not like it’s going back 400 years, it’s going back 40 years. We’re not talking about generations of tradition. So we’ve got a stand up bass player tonight. That’s not traditional at all, but it’s pretty cool.

Critical Review - Handler and Linnekin's "Tradition: Genuine or Spurious"

Handler and Linnekin state that tradition is often constructed as having a "commonsense" meaning in which it "refers to an inherited body of customs and beliefs"(1). This commonsense understanding of tradition is faulty because it implies a permanence that does not exist. Handler and Linnekin argue that tradition is a "wholly symbolic construction" that is always determined by interpretations in the present. Those who view tradition as completely naturalistic believe that there are essential characteristics of a culture that determine tradition as opposed to the culture's conscious decisions as to what is to be considered "traditional". They use naturalistic metaphors to establish boundedness: the collective culture as an entity, the collectivity as a collection of individuals, and the individuals who share fundamental attributes that allow them to carry on traditions. H and L oppose this approach because they believe that "there is no essential, bounded tradition; tradition is a model of the past as is inseparable from the interpretation of tradition in the present (4)." Traditions are fabricated because they are "necessarily reconstructed in the present (7)": elements selected for preservation are displayed in an entirely new context, elements mean new things to those who are viewing them as a sort of audience (by viewing the elements as being "traditional"), and elements included in "tradition" are deliberately chosen and consciously assigned a culturally-representative value. Unselfconscious tradition is actually paradoxical, for tradition requires a present-day "reinterpretation" that, due to temporal discrepancies, can't help but change the tradition in its contemporary context. Ultimately, "tradition is never wholly unselfconscious, nor is it ever wholly unrelated to the past (13)." Tradition is a "process of interpretation, attributing meaning in the present though making reference to the past (15)." Therefore, terms like "genuine" and "spurious" cannot apply to the idea of tradition because tradition is constantly being interpreted in the present and has no more validity at one instance than at another: if it is viewed as traditional within a culture at a given time, then it is traditional to that culture.

Question: what are the benefits of being "traditional"? In what way does being traditional enhance meaning or importance?

Response to Blog Posts

For those who commented on my posts, thank you very much for all the great suggestions. I think whenever some form of music is labeled as "traditional", it opens up a lot of questions as to what traditional means and to whom. Keeping these themes of "authenticity" in mind, I had many discussions with various patrons at the bar on my second visit and found a range of conflicting ideas regarding the music, some saying that it is "as it would be played in Ireland" while others saying that it sound like "Irish music being played in America". Though I had a lot of details from my first visit, the comments made on my blog got me thinking about why the idea of a traditional Irish seisiun would be important to people in Massachusetts. I asked around on my second visit and found that almost everyone I talked to was either originally from Ireland or believed that they were of Irish lineage. Though there was no consensus on the "authenticity" of the music being played, it seemed to me that those present at the seisiun found something important in the experience, as if the Saturday-night seisiun didn't need to emulate Irish tradition precisely to be a local tradition of their own. It was almost as if the "myth of return" could be accomplished by attending the seisiun, that it was as real to the people there as any mythicological Ireland could ever be. I also tried to pay more attention to the structural elements of the performance, such as how songs were selected, who was deferred to, and how the performers interacted with the audience. With all these helpful things to think about, I noticed a great deal more on my second visit than on my first, which I will detail in my paper and on my blog in the future.

Thanks!

Field Notes 2

Irish Cultural Centre of New England in Canton, MA (3/8/08)

Several more musicians than last time, though many of the same ones.
Lots of mics, recording equipment, realized fairly quickly that parts of the performance were being recorded.
Photographer showed up at about 9:00 (during the playing), seemed as though performers were really excited about being recorded/photographed.
Lots of musicians’ friends were there, taking pictures and cheering for their musician friends at the ends of songs.
Noticed the way instrumental songs were structure: songs were played in sets of three shorter that blended seamlessly from one to the other, the repetition of each shorter song determined before beginning to play. At one point, the younger fiddle player got wouldn’t play one of the sets of three because he said (jokingly, it seemed) that one of the three songs didn’t go with the other two and that “everywhere else in the world” they played a different third song. The band leader smartly replied “here we do it this way”.
When songs were being recorded, band leader would told people only to play the songs if they knew them. The young fiddle player echoed “if you know it, play it. If you’d fake it, don’t.”
At one point, a different guitar player/singer (not the group leader) took up the chair by the singing mic and started playing a song that sounded Irish, but referenced California. My mom, sitting next to me, pointed out how much American “country” music was based on Irish and Scottish folk music.
While this man was singing about California, he accidentally knocked over his beer near a collection of instruments that weren’t being used. While he rushed off to find a towel, the rest of the musicians kept playing, laughing at the situation, and repeatedly singing the chorus while the man who spilled the beer, quite flustered, tried to clean up the mess. The young fiddle player jumped up from his seat and started dancing and clapping, to which the audience responded by clapping along. When the man was done cleaning the mess, he sat back down and was about to start playing again when the rest of the musicians stopped. Very light-hearted moment.
Younger man seemed to recognize me, my brother, and my brother’s friends from the last time we’d come and swung by our table to ask in his thick Irish accent “how we were holding up”, continuing right along to bar before we could respond.
Just as last time, audience seemed constantly aware of the music while continuing to socialize, indicated a comfort with the setting that didn’t require them to sit somberly and watch the performance in silence (lots of singing along of vocal songs, extremely enthusiastic clapping when each song ended).

I talked to several of the people at the bar about what there thoughts were on the Saturday night seisiuns.

Bartender:
She’s worked every Saturday night for last two months.
Traditional Irish music “as it would be heard in Ireland”
Very social atmosphere, the music creates social ambience, but audience always “becomes silent” whenever a soloist is performing or someone is singing (unless they’re singing along)
Usually groups of twelve or more musicians, many recurring yet many “guests” who are familiar with tunes
When I asked how long the seisiuns usually go for, told me that she usually has to “kick the musicians out by 12:30”, saying they would play indefinitely if they could
Teasingly, told me being twenty-one would have made my experience more enjoyable (yet gave some insight into the “assumed” drinking culture of Irish pubs)

Older Man:
Actually from Ireland (thick accent) but hasn’t lived their for forty years
Quite hard of hearing, said that the music they play on Saturday seisiuns is “okay”, fairly similar to what he used to listen to in Ireland, but still felt as though he was listening to Irish music in America
Hasn’t returned to Ireland much since his parents died

Bodhrán player:
Playing bodhrán for only a year, but by playing at seisiuns three times a week has met over two-hundred musicians
Professionally, she is a high school teacher
One of the reasons she loves to play at Saturday seisiuns is “to have a front row seat to watch the great talent of some of the regular musicians
Said “when you come into one of these rooms, it’s as though the music comes out of the walls and through you”
Said that most of the people who participate in seisiuns (audience and performers) identify themselves with “Irish” if they aren’t actually from Ireland
Told me a romantic tale about the male fiddle player (the young man who greeted us at the door while smoking a cigarette the last time I went): “He’s an Irish citizen who came over during Thanksgiving to visit family, met a girl, and has been here since. Because of his great playing, he’s on the payroll at the Cultural Centre. Everyone who plays at the seisiuns is really excited because of the energy he brings”
Said the “communal” social atmosphere is based on the tradition of Irish farmers, after long days of work, getting together with instruments in their fields and homes and playing for each other and themselves
Told me that Irish folk music is an “oral tradition” with people learning to play from exposure to the music over many years
Proceeded to tell me that the young fiddle player didn’t know the names of many of the songs he was playing, rather he knew the melodies by heart from hearing the songs (he often times would sit and listen to the song that was being played for a moment before joining in, seemingly trying to figure out what song was being played)

Seisiun group leader (guitar player, singer):
Told him about the study I was doing and said he’d love to help, only it would be difficult for the next couple of weeks due to St. Patrick’s day making things a bit crazy in his life.
Told me he’d e-mail me about doing a “formal” interview when he got a chance

Middle-aged woman:
Said she used to attend shows like this when she was in college, always made her feel like she was down in the country: home
Used to have many records (vinyl) of Irish music but had lost them during her divorce, though she recognized many of the tunes that were being played
Said there was something “honest about traditional folk music” that you couldn’t find in other types of music, which explains why it “affects people so much”

Critical Review - Tricia Rose

In "A Style Nobody Can Deal With", Tricia Rose describes hip hop as being an "Afro-diasporic cultural form which attempts to negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity and oppression" (71). Rose also notes that hip hop is not entirely resistive, for there are many instances in which hip hop is complicit to the dominant hegemonic white-led society that is partially responsible for the unequal financial and societal circumstances many African-Americans find themselves in. Rose goes on to detail the various historical events that precipitated hip hop in New York City, including the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which displaced thousands of working class African-American families, and the looting that follow the blackout of 1977. During its early years, hip hop consisted of four distinct practices: graffiti, break dancing, DJing, and rapping. According to Rose, each of these practices operated via the concepts of flow, layering, and rupture, concepts which are analagous to the manner in which African-Americans must operate in America on a day to day basis: African Americans create "sustaining narratives" (flow) and "accumulate them" (layering) as an affirmational practice, but are constantly on the look out for ruptures in the fabric of their culture (racism, poverty, etc.) that they must combat in order to survive (82). In many ways, hip hop revolves around competition, around gaining status and being celebrated for one's skills, ultimately around "having a style nobody can deal with". In her concluding statement, Rose articulates that in providing a forum for "counterdominant narratives", hip hop is the real "urban renewal" that is so needed in communities where there appears to be little hope for improving the quality of life (85).

Question: if we are going to call African-Americans a diaspora group, how must we define the term "diaspora" to incorporate a group whose members may feel alienated from "dominant" society but don't necessarily feel an allegience to a homeland outside of their own community?

My Research Materials

Here are a bunch of research materials that I'm going to use for my ethnography:

Websites:

http://www.irishculture.org/
http://www.allaboutirish.com/library/music/dir-music.shtm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_music_in_the_United_States
http://worldmusic.about.com/od/newsarticles/tp/WeekConcerts.htm
http://www.bostonirishpubs.com/
http://www.irishmusiccentral.com/

Scholarly Articles:

Two Irish Folk Tunes James Travis The Journal of American Folklore > Vol. 55, No. 217 (Jul., 1942), pp. 169-170

The Social Context of Irish Folk Instruments Thomas F. Johnston International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music > Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jun., 1995), pp. 35-59

Irish Folk-Song Phillips Barry The Journal of American Folklore > Vol. 24, No. 93 (Jul., 1911), pp. 332-343

Review: The Irish Diaspora Author(s) of Review: Jay P. Dolan Reviewed Work(s): The Irish Diaspora in America. by Lawrence J. McCaffrey Reviews in American History > Vol. 5, No. 2 (Jun., 1977), pp. 174-179

The Origins and Character of Irish-American Nationalism Thomas N. Brown The Review of Politics > Vol. 18, No. 3 (Jul., 1956), pp. 327-358

Critical Review - Rodano

Rodano argues that many historians have fabricated elaborated ideas about slave music from "shards of evidence" and "inadequate alternatives" that attempt fill gaps in a history that is most lacking in credible evidence and documentation. Rodano stresses that much of black music's "originary voice" was a result of/reaction to slavery as opposed to a natural African predisposition to a certain way of creating and performing music. He believes that the tendency to view black music as static, that it's the fundamentally the same now as it was hundreds of years ago, must be done away with in favor of a view that acknowledges how enslaved African-Americans shared their enslavement more than there heredity and that the music was "created by them" as slaves, not as a homogenous body of Africans. Many of the stereotypes held about black music seem to date back as far as the seventeenth century, when observed African behavior was described constantly as "instinctive", "bestial", and "primitive". Even though these stereotypes came more from Africans "being unacquainted with the manners of customs of Europe" than from primitive savagery, they are still used to this day to describe many of the aesthetics of black music. Rodano concludes with a discussion of how "place", physical and psychological, contributed tremendously to the development of slave music and that places should be seen more as "events" than "things". Ultimately, Rodano hopes to denounce the idea that an "African essence" is the sole contributor to black music.

Question: can immersion in a "place" where one is treated as though a primitive savage cause one to believe that they are as they are treated and if so, could one develop an aversion to one's own culture?

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?

Critical Review - Slobin

In his 1994 article/introductory essay, Mark Slobin describes the scholarly study of diaspora music as a study in which "no one has formulated a worldwide viewpoint", mostly due to ethnomusicologists' prevailing focus on "the indigenous and the ancient" as opposed to contemporary cultural-musical landscapes. Because the study of of diaspora music is becoming more and more prominent, Slobin suggests that one keep a number of frameworks in mind while thinking about the complexities of diaspora music. The activity of the superculture, the "overarching nation-state cultural system within which diasporan... live", is an entity that constantly interacts with diaspora groups via governmental control and dominant commercial interests, an entity that acts as a "gatekeeper for visibility and accessibility" for diaspora groups' musics. The networks of interculture, the "links that connect all nation-state systems", plays a large role in the shaping of diasporas via industrial "tentacles" that allow diaspora musics to be sought and presented internationally and via "ties of affinity", or the choosing of diasporic affiliation that doesn't necessarily connect to one's own heritage. Maybe most important of all is the flexibility of music-cultural definition, the dynamism of cultural music which should be viewed in terms of "the fluidity of local aesthetics as opposed to an earlier [anthropological] fixation on 'tradition' as a benchmark fro which to measure 'change'," that is to say, we ought to use an examination of the idiosyncrasies of specific diasporic groups to help us "define" a diaspora at a given time.



Question: if a diaspora's music exhibits a radical departure from "homeland" music (e.g. hip hop) yet the diaspora's music is still culturally unique to that group, is the group really diasporic (at the very least in terms of music)?