I was reading a biography of Séan Ó Riada. The first part talks about his life, and the second part is divided in to two sections dealing with Irish and European music.
There was one part said something like: the shape and form of O'Riordáin's work showed that Irish music was closer to the intricate ornamentation of Celtic sculpture than to the classical style of Europe.
James Joyce wrote to his brother than someone looking to understand his work (Joyce's) would do well to look at the chi rho page of the book of Kells
In a nutshell, some great works of art show a culture the form of life in their society back to themselves, examples given in the lectures being the Odyssey and the parthenon.
Other works of art reconfigure the society, telling people anew (reinventing) what the ideal of a human life is, examples given are the gospels
... taispeáin an Riadach go raibh stíl an cheoil Ghaelaigh níos cosúla le cruth agus deilbh na sean-ealíne Ceiltí, le hornáidíocht ilchasta na dealbhoireachat Ceiltí, mar shampla, ná mar a bhí sí le stíl chlasaiceach na hEorpa.
Not a new idea. Pat Mitchell wrote aboute irish Traditional Dance Music:
'I have described the music as ‘multi-layered’. The picture that comes to my mind is a page from
an illuminated manuscript such as the celebrated ‘Monogram Page’ (the XRI or Incarnation
Initial page) of the ‘Book of Kells’. Standing well back it is possible to see the outline of the
letters. Getting in closer shows ornamental detail. Closer still and more detail becomes apparent.
A magnifying glass shows still more ornamentation. For me, this is a word picture illustrating my
description of the ‘consummate performance’ above – the distance view equating to the good
rhythm and structure which is the principal focus of this article but, as we will see, cannot be
treated in isolation; large scale melodic variation might be the next layer; ornaments such as
triplets and rolls might be the next; with the final layers being those minute shifts in rhythm and
melodic nuance that make a good performance so satisfying to both player and listener. If such a
thing as the Irish psyche exists, then there may be a closer link between the visual art of the
ninth century and the aural art of more recent times than is immediately apparent.'
All well and good but do you really think the Latin-speaking Scottish monks who illumined the Book of Kells were playing the Jig of Slurs or Miss Monaghan in their spare time?
I mean, it seems to me you could make a better case that the intricately-interwoven counterpoint of J. S. Bach, in both it's mathematical balance and harmony and outstanding artistic beauty, is the true sonic equivalent of the angelic geometries of the Book of Kells.
I understand what Pat Mitchell is saying, and accept his notion of "the consummate performance" as applied both to the Book of Kells Chi-Rho page and to a piece of really well-performed Irish music.
(Though I have to say, I see the Chi-Rho page as by far the greater work, possible only by an exceptional talent with prolonged discipline and experience behind him at a particular opportunity in history: one of art's Matterhorn climbers, perhaps. I think playing even great ITM is possible by many more, and costs rather less to achieve.)
I think the Chi-Rho page is the most beautiful single page of any Early Mediaeval manuscript that I have seen - in reproductions, that is: I did a course including these books in the 80s.
The idea that a culture's great historical works indicate to its people, maybe long afterwards, something of their essential nature is always interesting as far as I am concerned. (It may for all I know be entirely tedious to others...) I hope to come back to this one.
The essential nature of the people, eh? This is the very point that bothers me. If you want to talk about the differences between Irish and "European" music you're on safe ground if you stick to the music. Once you start dragging in other art forms from different millennia, you've erected a thesis that there is a "Celtic" culture and that it is hermetically sealed, divided by an uncrossable barrier from other "non-Celtic" cultures. This is simply untrue. The monks who created the Chi Rho were followers of a Roman, Latin religion, and were often antagonistic to the Gaelic (pagan) culture they lived among. All medieval Irish kings wanted to be described in the Annals as "the great Ceasar, Augustus of all Ireland" (spot the classical influence?). By the eleventh century political tools like the charter (a Latin, continental document) were being used in Ireland. Irish language, trade and economics, politics, literature and society were constantly being influenced by Saxon, French, and classical sources; why not Irish music as well? We know O'Carolan was influenced by continental music; why do we assume this makes him unique?
And amidst all this evolution, this flux and mutual influence between nations and peoples, how do you even start to define "the Irish psyche"?
My worry is that supporters of this black-and-white "Celtic/non-Celtic" world-view are driven more by political antagonisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than by a sincere desire to understand the true shared heritage of our ancestors, and ourselves.
Of course, if you want to draw fanciful comparisons between "Celtic" art and Irish music, or baroque music, or jazz, or Arabic illumination, or the internet, then you can. That's one of the wonderful faculties of the human imagination. But it's hardly evidence of how cultures really evolve; such Heideggerian flights of fancy don't really count as true scholarship.
Nonetheless, one can see parallels (or maybe, hear them) between all manner of things that are from different ages and occur in different art forms, and suspect this might sometimes reveal an underlying connection that is other than just a matter of art-historical links or one's subjective likening of, say, a tune to a painting.
John Ruskin, the Victorian critic, and others have presented patterns of development and decline in art, linked to the state of society; and for that matter, degrees of excellence, evil and all things between, that had everything to do with truth and falsehood ("truth", here, not being simply an extent to which the art was representational). I seem to recall Ruskin believed that these qualities revealed themselves through certain diagnostic features constant across the visual arts. In other words, he believed the world of art had laws of its own that crossed ethnic boundaries. (I could bet he pronounced on national traits in art, but can't quote chapter and verse.)
National character is a harder thing to define through a nation's art history because it's a vast, multifarious thing that can't be stuck in a frame and studied at leisure in a frozen state, like a painting! But one *can* look at artworks, or traditions of these, and ask, Why was this or that one produced here, rather than there? Some trick of circumstances helped to determine its creation, and the aptitude of one or more local people. I don't think it's fanciful to think this might be to do with a nation's character or psyche, especially if indications of the same things in this respect seem to crop up again and again through history: it's just impossible to prove definitively, and can feed nationalistic absurdities.
No need for hermetically sealed anything, it's not some form of purity argument about unchanging culture, or about cultural isolation or such. This was never the case nor is it desirable. Micheál Ó Sullibheán used the metaphor of a river of sound.
Tradition isn't static, it changes, but it doesn't change utterly or it wouldn't be tradition.
'How do you even start to define Irish psyche' - indeed, and with every definition of what it means to be an Irish person isn't it composing it anew, or reworking recurring motifs, rather than finding something intrinsic or metaphysical.
'My worry is that supporters of this black-and-white "Celtic/non-Celtic" world-view are driven more by political antagonisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than by a sincere desire to understand the true shared heritage of our ancestors, and ourselves.'
It frequently is used for such. but it's generally more specific than non Celtic, it's portrayed as English vs. Irish. In Matthew Arnold, D.P. Moran, Dev etc the 'Celt' became a mirror opposite of the 'Saxon'. Form and ground. These false dichotomies are boring boring boring. Multiplicity, is far more interesing.
I'm throwing around the idea of recurring motifs, I am not saying that if they do exist they are the only ones or that anything that didn't originate here is bad.
I especially love baroque, and am very interested in the link between O'Carrolan and Italian music.
But I understood that the primary scribe/artist of the Book of Kells had been clearly identified as from Byzantuium, not a Celt, Irish, Scots, whatever ?
So anyone who claims the volume as Celtic has little understanding of the complicated interweaving of cultures across Europe in these far-off days.
"Recurring motifs..." - I think lughlamh has got it here. I certainly see them in national or regional arts. I am very prone to muse along these lines - even if a sensed connection is only that, and proves no direct connection on the ground.
Northumbria's equivalent of the Book of Kells is the Lindisfarne Gospels, made by Eadfrith, who was Bishop there in the early c8 (its context is unusually clear for a contemporary document). Northumbria was then a powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom from the Humber to the Forth.
Subsequently the Scots overran the Northern bit down to the present border; Vikings heavily settled most of the rest except for the bulk of what is now called North-East England; and the Normans took over the English part along with the rest of the country.
People from other parts of Britain and Ireland came to the North-East with industrialisation and the increase in personal mobility. But I suspect there is a substantial descent from the c6 AD-onwards Anglo-Saxon population base, especially in non-industrial Northumberland where historically there was no reason for large numbers of immigrants to go and settle.
The Lindisfarne Gospels knotwork is painstakingly regular, rather tight and sombrely-coloured. Something about it suggests to me the wiring of some vastly intricate, repeated electric layout. And then, producing a vast religious book might have been seen as being as serious, responsible and necessary a job as designing and fitting the layout of a power-station now.
So my mind hopped like a flea from c700 to the Victorians and after. It also picked on my feeling that certain qualities to be seen in the Lindisfarne Gospels have shown themselves, or at any rate been praised, in the crafts of North-East England from then to now: neatness, finish, and the accomplishment of regular pattern and intricate detail through very sustained and attentive labour. With any luck, the finished piece of work will be very "bonny", and maybe even "stot" (bounce)!
Of course the NE has no monopoly on these qualities in art / craft / work. But the Pre-Raphaelite movement in painting, which made much of them, had a major following in the NE; mutatis mutandis(!), miners set store by them in their work; and they are there in the wood engravings of Thomas Bewick, I think the greatest visual artist from the NE in the modern era. Maybe even more in the work of the Victorian brothers Dalziel, who reproduced paintings and illustrations in wood-engraving as faithfully as possible - a mind-crunching task, I would have thought. It brought them fortune: they earned it.
(Of course, Bewick and the Dalziels worked in wood-engraving because this was then the most advanced way to reproduce an image for mass publication in printed books.)
I did once have the privilege of looking through some of the medieval manuscripts in Durham Cathedral, very impressive. I could see a clear affinity to the medieval Irish manuscripts. This isn't strictly "Celtic" art, as art historians and palaeographers talk about "Insular" manuscripts and "Insular" script. "Insular" refers to all the islands in the Hiberno-British archipelago.
Anyway, I was raised on the thesis that Irish music had nothing to do with what went on musically-speaking in England, but only recently I've actually listened to some English tunes (as opposed to folk-songs) and it seems (to my fairly uneducated ears) that there are probably more and greater connections than I was previously aware of. So, how do English players see this? Do they feel there is much of a connection between their tradition and Irish music? Any influences (in either or both directions?) Any artists with a foot in both camps? Or do people prefer to keep the different traditions different? (I know almost nothing about English tunes, I need to get myself educated).
There's no doubt that the Irish, the (Irish) Dalriada Scots and the Northumbrian Anglo-Saxons got hold of Byzantine artworks, or things very directly influenced by them. The Lindisfarne Gospels figure-paintings seem to be copied from Byzantine ones. But interlace of the complexity and sophistication of c8 Insular work is something the Byzantines didn't do: they tended to do foliage scrolls. These could be very dense and intricate, but the essential patterns of these were relatively simple. For a Byzantine to master Insular interlace to a Book-of-Kells standard would have been a really steep learning curve.
For all that, patterns remarkably like Insular interlace do crop up in the East - I've seen them in Coptic (Christian Egyptian) art, and just now in a photo of a stone carving from Armenia. It may well be that Irish monks travelled to visit the notable monastic movement in Egypt, before the Arabs took over North Africa in the early c7 and maybe, who knows, after this - though I don't know if this is recorded or proven for sure.
Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
I was reading a biography of Séan Ó Riada. The first part talks about his life, and the second part is divided in to two sections dealing with Irish and European music.
There was one part said something like: the shape and form of O'Riordáin's work showed that Irish music was closer to the intricate ornamentation of Celtic sculpture than to the classical style of Europe.
James Joyce wrote to his brother than someone looking to understand his work (Joyce's) would do well to look at the chi rho page of the book of Kells
http://www.sju.edu/%7Erhall/Multi/chi_rho_large.jpg
Do ye think this makes sense? Any thoughts on the aesthetic?
There's a great series of podcast look at these sort of themes in Heidegger from the university of berkeley
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978407
In a nutshell, some great works of art show a culture the form of life in their society back to themselves, examples given in the lectures being the Odyssey and the parthenon.
Other works of art reconfigure the society, telling people anew (reinventing) what the ideal of a human life is, examples given are the gospels
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
... taispeáin an Riadach go raibh stíl an cheoil Ghaelaigh níos cosúla le cruth agus deilbh na sean-ealíne Ceiltí, le hornáidíocht ilchasta na dealbhoireachat Ceiltí, mar shampla, ná mar a bhí sí le stíl chlasaiceach na hEorpa.
- Séan Ó Riada, A Shaol & a Shaothar
# Posted on April 4th 2009 by lughlamh
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
Not a new idea. Pat Mitchell wrote aboute irish Traditional Dance Music:
'I have described the music as ‘multi-layered’. The picture that comes to my mind is a page from
an illuminated manuscript such as the celebrated ‘Monogram Page’ (the XRI or Incarnation
Initial page) of the ‘Book of Kells’. Standing well back it is possible to see the outline of the
letters. Getting in closer shows ornamental detail. Closer still and more detail becomes apparent.
A magnifying glass shows still more ornamentation. For me, this is a word picture illustrating my
description of the ‘consummate performance’ above – the distance view equating to the good
rhythm and structure which is the principal focus of this article but, as we will see, cannot be
treated in isolation; large scale melodic variation might be the next layer; ornaments such as
triplets and rolls might be the next; with the final layers being those minute shifts in rhythm and
melodic nuance that make a good performance so satisfying to both player and listener. If such a
thing as the Irish psyche exists, then there may be a closer link between the visual art of the
ninth century and the aural art of more recent times than is immediately apparent.'
# Posted on April 4th 2009 by Prof. Prlwytzkofski
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
All well and good but do you really think the Latin-speaking Scottish monks who illumined the Book of Kells were playing the Jig of Slurs or Miss Monaghan in their spare time?
# Posted on April 4th 2009 by Hammurabi Breathnach
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
I mean, it seems to me you could make a better case that the intricately-interwoven counterpoint of J. S. Bach, in both it's mathematical balance and harmony and outstanding artistic beauty, is the true sonic equivalent of the angelic geometries of the Book of Kells.
# Posted on April 4th 2009 by Hammurabi Breathnach
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
I understand what Pat Mitchell is saying, and accept his notion of "the consummate performance" as applied both to the Book of Kells Chi-Rho page and to a piece of really well-performed Irish music.
(Though I have to say, I see the Chi-Rho page as by far the greater work, possible only by an exceptional talent with prolonged discipline and experience behind him at a particular opportunity in history: one of art's Matterhorn climbers, perhaps. I think playing even great ITM is possible by many more, and costs rather less to achieve.)
I think the Chi-Rho page is the most beautiful single page of any Early Mediaeval manuscript that I have seen - in reproductions, that is: I did a course including these books in the 80s.
The idea that a culture's great historical works indicate to its people, maybe long afterwards, something of their essential nature is always interesting as far as I am concerned. (It may for all I know be entirely tedious to others...) I hope to come back to this one.
# Posted on April 4th 2009 by nicholas
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
The essential nature of the people, eh? This is the very point that bothers me. If you want to talk about the differences between Irish and "European" music you're on safe ground if you stick to the music. Once you start dragging in other art forms from different millennia, you've erected a thesis that there is a "Celtic" culture and that it is hermetically sealed, divided by an uncrossable barrier from other "non-Celtic" cultures. This is simply untrue. The monks who created the Chi Rho were followers of a Roman, Latin religion, and were often antagonistic to the Gaelic (pagan) culture they lived among. All medieval Irish kings wanted to be described in the Annals as "the great Ceasar, Augustus of all Ireland" (spot the classical influence?). By the eleventh century political tools like the charter (a Latin, continental document) were being used in Ireland. Irish language, trade and economics, politics, literature and society were constantly being influenced by Saxon, French, and classical sources; why not Irish music as well? We know O'Carolan was influenced by continental music; why do we assume this makes him unique?
And amidst all this evolution, this flux and mutual influence between nations and peoples, how do you even start to define "the Irish psyche"?
My worry is that supporters of this black-and-white "Celtic/non-Celtic" world-view are driven more by political antagonisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than by a sincere desire to understand the true shared heritage of our ancestors, and ourselves.
Of course, if you want to draw fanciful comparisons between "Celtic" art and Irish music, or baroque music, or jazz, or Arabic illumination, or the internet, then you can. That's one of the wonderful faculties of the human imagination. But it's hardly evidence of how cultures really evolve; such Heideggerian flights of fancy don't really count as true scholarship.
# Posted on April 5th 2009 by Hammurabi Breathnach
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
Hammurabi - your reservations are sensible.
Nonetheless, one can see parallels (or maybe, hear them) between all manner of things that are from different ages and occur in different art forms, and suspect this might sometimes reveal an underlying connection that is other than just a matter of art-historical links or one's subjective likening of, say, a tune to a painting.
John Ruskin, the Victorian critic, and others have presented patterns of development and decline in art, linked to the state of society; and for that matter, degrees of excellence, evil and all things between, that had everything to do with truth and falsehood ("truth", here, not being simply an extent to which the art was representational). I seem to recall Ruskin believed that these qualities revealed themselves through certain diagnostic features constant across the visual arts. In other words, he believed the world of art had laws of its own that crossed ethnic boundaries. (I could bet he pronounced on national traits in art, but can't quote chapter and verse.)
National character is a harder thing to define through a nation's art history because it's a vast, multifarious thing that can't be stuck in a frame and studied at leisure in a frozen state, like a painting! But one *can* look at artworks, or traditions of these, and ask, Why was this or that one produced here, rather than there? Some trick of circumstances helped to determine its creation, and the aptitude of one or more local people. I don't think it's fanciful to think this might be to do with a nation's character or psyche, especially if indications of the same things in this respect seem to crop up again and again through history: it's just impossible to prove definitively, and can feed nationalistic absurdities.
# Posted on April 5th 2009 by nicholas
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
No need for hermetically sealed anything, it's not some form of purity argument about unchanging culture, or about cultural isolation or such. This was never the case nor is it desirable. Micheál Ó Sullibheán used the metaphor of a river of sound.
Tradition isn't static, it changes, but it doesn't change utterly or it wouldn't be tradition.
'How do you even start to define Irish psyche' - indeed, and with every definition of what it means to be an Irish person isn't it composing it anew, or reworking recurring motifs, rather than finding something intrinsic or metaphysical.
# Posted on April 5th 2009 by lughlamh
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
Interesting point about Bach, the picture I put with him is Escher, have you seen Douglas Hofstader's book, Godel, Escher, Bach?
# Posted on April 5th 2009 by lughlamh
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
'My worry is that supporters of this black-and-white "Celtic/non-Celtic" world-view are driven more by political antagonisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than by a sincere desire to understand the true shared heritage of our ancestors, and ourselves.'
It frequently is used for such. but it's generally more specific than non Celtic, it's portrayed as English vs. Irish. In Matthew Arnold, D.P. Moran, Dev etc the 'Celt' became a mirror opposite of the 'Saxon'. Form and ground. These false dichotomies are boring boring boring. Multiplicity, is far more interesing.
I'm throwing around the idea of recurring motifs, I am not saying that if they do exist they are the only ones or that anything that didn't originate here is bad.
I especially love baroque, and am very interested in the link between O'Carrolan and Italian music.
# Posted on April 5th 2009 by lughlamh
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
But it's hardly evidence of how cultures really evolve; such Heideggerian flights of fancy don't really count as true scholarship.
whoa there tiger, it wasn't posted as 'true scholarship' or evidence, it's musing, relax : )
# Posted on April 5th 2009 by lughlamh
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
But I understood that the primary scribe/artist of the Book of Kells had been clearly identified as from Byzantuium, not a Celt, Irish, Scots, whatever ?
So anyone who claims the volume as Celtic has little understanding of the complicated interweaving of cultures across Europe in these far-off days.
# Posted on April 6th 2009 by Guernsey Pete
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
"Recurring motifs..." - I think lughlamh has got it here. I certainly see them in national or regional arts. I am very prone to muse along these lines - even if a sensed connection is only that, and proves no direct connection on the ground.
Northumbria's equivalent of the Book of Kells is the Lindisfarne Gospels, made by Eadfrith, who was Bishop there in the early c8 (its context is unusually clear for a contemporary document). Northumbria was then a powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom from the Humber to the Forth.
Subsequently the Scots overran the Northern bit down to the present border; Vikings heavily settled most of the rest except for the bulk of what is now called North-East England; and the Normans took over the English part along with the rest of the country.
People from other parts of Britain and Ireland came to the North-East with industrialisation and the increase in personal mobility. But I suspect there is a substantial descent from the c6 AD-onwards Anglo-Saxon population base, especially in non-industrial Northumberland where historically there was no reason for large numbers of immigrants to go and settle.
The Lindisfarne Gospels knotwork is painstakingly regular, rather tight and sombrely-coloured. Something about it suggests to me the wiring of some vastly intricate, repeated electric layout. And then, producing a vast religious book might have been seen as being as serious, responsible and necessary a job as designing and fitting the layout of a power-station now.
So my mind hopped like a flea from c700 to the Victorians and after. It also picked on my feeling that certain qualities to be seen in the Lindisfarne Gospels have shown themselves, or at any rate been praised, in the crafts of North-East England from then to now: neatness, finish, and the accomplishment of regular pattern and intricate detail through very sustained and attentive labour. With any luck, the finished piece of work will be very "bonny", and maybe even "stot" (bounce)!
Of course the NE has no monopoly on these qualities in art / craft / work. But the Pre-Raphaelite movement in painting, which made much of them, had a major following in the NE; mutatis mutandis(!), miners set store by them in their work; and they are there in the wood engravings of Thomas Bewick, I think the greatest visual artist from the NE in the modern era. Maybe even more in the work of the Victorian brothers Dalziel, who reproduced paintings and illustrations in wood-engraving as faithfully as possible - a mind-crunching task, I would have thought. It brought them fortune: they earned it.
# Posted on April 6th 2009 by nicholas
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
(Of course, Bewick and the Dalziels worked in wood-engraving because this was then the most advanced way to reproduce an image for mass publication in printed books.)
# Posted on April 6th 2009 by nicholas
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
I did once have the privilege of looking through some of the medieval manuscripts in Durham Cathedral, very impressive. I could see a clear affinity to the medieval Irish manuscripts. This isn't strictly "Celtic" art, as art historians and palaeographers talk about "Insular" manuscripts and "Insular" script. "Insular" refers to all the islands in the Hiberno-British archipelago.
Anyway, I was raised on the thesis that Irish music had nothing to do with what went on musically-speaking in England, but only recently I've actually listened to some English tunes (as opposed to folk-songs) and it seems (to my fairly uneducated ears) that there are probably more and greater connections than I was previously aware of. So, how do English players see this? Do they feel there is much of a connection between their tradition and Irish music? Any influences (in either or both directions?) Any artists with a foot in both camps? Or do people prefer to keep the different traditions different? (I know almost nothing about English tunes, I need to get myself educated).
# Posted on April 6th 2009 by Hammurabi Breathnach
Re: Seán Ó Riada and Celtic Art
There's no doubt that the Irish, the (Irish) Dalriada Scots and the Northumbrian Anglo-Saxons got hold of Byzantine artworks, or things very directly influenced by them. The Lindisfarne Gospels figure-paintings seem to be copied from Byzantine ones. But interlace of the complexity and sophistication of c8 Insular work is something the Byzantines didn't do: they tended to do foliage scrolls. These could be very dense and intricate, but the essential patterns of these were relatively simple. For a Byzantine to master Insular interlace to a Book-of-Kells standard would have been a really steep learning curve.
For all that, patterns remarkably like Insular interlace do crop up in the East - I've seen them in Coptic (Christian Egyptian) art, and just now in a photo of a stone carving from Armenia. It may well be that Irish monks travelled to visit the notable monastic movement in Egypt, before the Arabs took over North Africa in the early c7 and maybe, who knows, after this - though I don't know if this is recorded or proven for sure.
# Posted on April 6th 2009 by nicholas