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Author: Helen O'Shea
Publication year: 2008
Publisher: Cork University Press
Abstract:
"The Making of Irish Traditional Music provides a valuable, theoretically informed cultural history of the retrieval and codification of Irish music in the context of an emergent Irish nationalism. It offers a valuable critique of notions of identity and authenticity at the very inner sanctum of an essential mode of Irish self-expression, but does so with considerable sensitivity to the pressures that draw people to adhere to notions of ethnic or national identity. The historical dimension of this work, from Bunting in the late eighteenth century and O'Neill in the late nineteenth to the emergence of independent state cultural institutions and their effect on the formation of ‘traditional’ and official versions of Irish music, is one of the very best continuous accounts available."
- David Lloyd, Professor of English, University of Southern California
The first critical study of Irish traditional music, The Making of Irish Traditional Music draws on the author's observations and participation as a musician. It analyses the experiences of foreigners playing Irish music at summer schools, where they encounter the tourism industry's 'Ireland of the Welcomes', and in the heart of Ireland's traditional music empire, County Clare. The book concludes that a view of Irish traditional music as expressive of an ethnically pure, geographically bound, masculine, national culture is an inadequate basis for a multi-ethnic Irish society.
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