I was looking at my CD collection. Fine music. A bit from the 70s. mostly 80s, 90's, a bit from 2004 on....and that Gael Linn collection of their old vinyls to show where all of this music came from.
WE have just come through a period where ITM has been 'fusioned' with jazz, 1920's art deco, and highly overproduced, over evening-gowned, hyper-synthesized, over-fireworked show music. It seems like some wandering in the musical desert from where I sit her in County Cook.
It's 2009 going on 2010. We have the internet and You tube where even players like me can put our music out there (in my case it would be if I have little sensitivity to embarassment )
Is there anyone new out there leading the way in Irish music, or setting it on its ear in a constructive way? Or are we continuing to wander?
Funny, this has been on my mind for the last couple of weeks, but avoiding raising it as a topic. Possibly with a slant, the consideration of media in general and how it has and is affecting the music, for good or bad? And that problem of stricking a balance between making music and being a consumer of the endless library of recordings out there...
The ones I would be interested in are those who are leading the way locally, not necessarily the superstars cutting records, but those teaching and playing for their community, planting the seeds for the future, and in the spirit of community rather than celebrity, playing in local sessions and for local dances, including unnamed or little known heros of tradition... Why, well, not to own a recording, but if I were in the area, that's the kind of folks I'd want to learn from and share some time and tunes with. I already have too damned many recordings...
Why does it have to be led? Why does it have to go anywhere? Why does it need to be set on its ear?
I don’t know who the latest international recording stars might be, but I play with some people with great lift and tone and a deep repertoire, fun to listen to and great to play with. Don't know if they've ever recorded, though. Doesn't matter, to me.
How, pray, is the influence of 1920s art deco manifested in the sound of contemporary Irish trad?
My mind is boggled, as I know art deco principally as a style - bulgey, vulgar but not always unlikeable - used for making old cinemas look like Egyptian houses of the dead, or in other ways enshrouding them with glamour and appeal. But it was a silent art, as far as I know. Was there an "art deco" jazz style, or something?
While I used it for purposes of illustration of a statement (ornamentation of a statement maybe) but I have heard a number of players put tracks on recent recordings with that stride wood bass, two step,/four beat piano rythym that was very popular in England and the continent in the 1920's. It may come from some of the Canadian players (Barrage does a couple of numbers in that style on one of their albums.)
Nicholas's second paragraph is much more elegant than my South Side Street Kid reaction to it.
It seems that, with the demise of Big Music Companies due to internet and music sharing and such, that music is getting more decentralized. Maybe the answer is, as SWFL said above, that the future will be led from the folks down in the trenches, in the many pubs all around the world.
All power to the proletariat!
'Is there anyone new out there leading the way in Irish music, or setting it on its ear in a constructive way? Or are we continuing to wander?'
Well, zippydw, there've been far fewer CDs issued in Ireland in the last few years, but one that leaves me utterly thrilled whenever I hear it is 'Dublin Made Me' by the piper Seán McKeon and fiddler Liam O'Connor. If you can't get hold of the album (issued by NPU - http://www.pipers.ie), then check RTÉ for the edition of 'The Full Set' on which they appeared.
In connection with the original comment. I have been listening to a lot of concertina CDs by various players and I noice that there is a delving into older styles and relaxed type playing. A time for turning over the soil and getting some regrowth. It's happened before after hectic periods and trends.
Like cutting back a clematis plant that's got too luxuriant!
I suspect we are still living in the wake of what I like to call a "Classical Moment" in the life of Irish music, which happened thirty-plus years ago in the Seventies.
By a "Classical Moment" (my own expression, although I'm sure the phenomenon has been given names by others) I mean a period in which some human endeavour, art or other, makes a very definite breakthrough, arrives at something new which is also widely seen as a standard of excellence, and has a prolonged half-life in which its forms continue to be used in times and places remote from those that forged not only the forms but the notions and desires of which they were the vehicles. This can produce a lot of lifeless art: the ongoing tyranny of the form can be the flip-side of the fact that it derives from something which was so definitely good in the first place.
I take this model from, among other things, the emergence of Classical art and architecture in Ancient Athens after it had seen off the Persians and when it was riding high in unprecedented local power. Circumstances catalysed the art, which in some respects anyway was quite different from that which had preceded it, though it could not have arisen without that. It was indeed great, but has been through a lot of mutations in the next 2.5 millennia, some of them feeding into terminal banalities like Fascist architecture and unspeakable garden centre statuary.
In its way, I think 70s Irish music was comparable. A lot of pent-up desire for expression and a backlog of increasing expertise - particularly in the use of guitar and other backing strings, which stand to increase the impact of concert performances a great deal in my possibly unwashed view - somehow pushed through the door and found itself on a larger stage than it might have foreseen. Ireland was joining the EEC and beginning to define itself independently of the economics / geopolitics of the Anglosphere and the English or diaspora stereotypings that have emanated from there. And lots and lots of young Continentals for whatever reasons of cultural or social history wanted this music. Everything conspired to make the more prestigious side of the music, at any rate, develop far and fast. It was conspicuous and it was exciting. I assume it brought "bog music" into the centre of contemporary Irish cultural life like nothing before it.
The legacy? Any number of really good players, including those who feature as twosomes and threesomes on Comhaltas clips. But they're probably not going to go on and wow the world in the same way as a handful of scruffs in the Seventies, because the world has changed and the particular conjunction of factors that applied then is not there now. Will Irish music become increasingly something rather hermetic, practised (however finely) in a closed enthusiasts' world, as I imagine Welsh poetry can be in Eisteddfods? For ever polishing smaller gems? Will dance continue to demand it and thereby guarantee its place in the real world - whatever that is?
The Seventies laid down some forms that have predominated since. Backing styles and instrument combos that at best are sensitive and fine to listen to (though obviously they can fall short of best...) seem the main thing here, plus the arrangement of tunes in particular key or tune-type orders in sets of a small number of tunes each played two or three times. These forms are great for purpose - well, musically they are "correct" where this is necessary, while giving space for the particular nuances of Irish music. (Very good musicians have done the groundwork on chords and suchlike.) These forms will last for a long time. They have in the hands of great players been perfected for their place - which has principally been concerts, sessions and album tracks.
But what will players be investing them with in times to come, in terms of their own aspiration or sense of a personal or communal destiny? Will they become trinkets like so much blues material, played largely ironically by its players for the passing amusement of an audience? Does a powerful art phenomenon *have*, willy-nilly, to be born among people who badly need or want to overcome obstacles and fight their way on to conquest / admiration / fame / money (any or all of these), and all told are *not* prepared to accept their supposed place, and might it not all too easily become a rather trivial pursuit when its practitioners are given a modest but habitable place quite readily, and have no great urge or perhaps much opportunity to leave it?
No, I don't have an answer to "Where next?". (And how should I know, not being Irish?) But the question did stir up my grey matter.
Where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here?
I was looking at my CD collection. Fine music. A bit from the 70s. mostly 80s, 90's, a bit from 2004 on....and that Gael Linn collection of their old vinyls to show where all of this music came from.
WE have just come through a period where ITM has been 'fusioned' with jazz, 1920's art deco, and highly overproduced, over evening-gowned, hyper-synthesized, over-fireworked show music. It seems like some wandering in the musical desert from where I sit her in County Cook.
It's 2009 going on 2010. We have the internet and You tube where even players like me can put our music out there (in my case it would be if I have little sensitivity to embarassment
)
Is there anyone new out there leading the way in Irish music, or setting it on its ear in a constructive way? Or are we continuing to wander?
# Posted on October 23rd 2009 by zippydw
Re: Where do we go from here?
Funny, this has been on my mind for the last couple of weeks, but avoiding raising it as a topic. Possibly with a slant, the consideration of media in general and how it has and is affecting the music, for good or bad? And that problem of stricking a balance between making music and being a consumer of the endless library of recordings out there...
The ones I would be interested in are those who are leading the way locally, not necessarily the superstars cutting records, but those teaching and playing for their community, planting the seeds for the future, and in the spirit of community rather than celebrity, playing in local sessions and for local dances, including unnamed or little known heros of tradition... Why, well, not to own a recording, but if I were in the area, that's the kind of folks I'd want to learn from and share some time and tunes with. I already have too damned many recordings...
# Posted on October 23rd 2009 by ceolachan
Re: Where do we go from here?
Haha c~ you posted while I was typing this.
Why does it have to be led? Why does it have to go anywhere? Why does it need to be set on its ear?
I don’t know who the latest international recording stars might be, but I play with some people with great lift and tone and a deep repertoire, fun to listen to and great to play with. Don't know if they've ever recorded, though. Doesn't matter, to me.
# Posted on October 23rd 2009 by fidkid
Re: Where do we go from here?
Hey zippy, you know what we say around here. Strip it all off and whatcha got?
A tune. An instrument playing a tune. The rest is nonsense, your layered harmonies, your jazz strums, your new agey keyboards, etc.
All that will come and go, and at the end of the day, the tune will be there. It doesn't need syncopation, harmonies, jazz, rock, hip hop or whatever.
Amen to Mr. C and fidkid, up the everyday musical soldiers in the trenches!
# Posted on October 23rd 2009 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: Where do we go from here?
How, pray, is the influence of 1920s art deco manifested in the sound of contemporary Irish trad?
My mind is boggled, as I know art deco principally as a style - bulgey, vulgar but not always unlikeable - used for making old cinemas look like Egyptian houses of the dead, or in other ways enshrouding them with glamour and appeal. But it was a silent art, as far as I know. Was there an "art deco" jazz style, or something?
# Posted on October 23rd 2009 by nicholas
Re: Where do we go from here?
See http://www.artdecomusictracks.co.uk/
I'm guessing it refers to pop-music influences on Michael Coleman and others of that era.
# Posted on October 23rd 2009 by tuckered out
Re: Where do we go from here?
While I used it for purposes of illustration of a statement (ornamentation of a statement maybe) but I have heard a number of players put tracks on recent recordings with that stride wood bass, two step,/four beat piano rythym that was very popular in England and the continent in the 1920's. It may come from some of the Canadian players (Barrage does a couple of numbers in that style on one of their albums.)
Nicholas's second paragraph is much more elegant than my South Side Street Kid reaction to it.
# Posted on October 23rd 2009 by zippydw
Re: Where do we go from here?
I see it - 'Art Deco' is becoming used as a moniker for music around in the 20s, 30s, 40s.
# Posted on October 24th 2009 by nicholas
Re: Where do we go from here?
It seems that, with the demise of Big Music Companies due to internet and music sharing and such, that music is getting more decentralized. Maybe the answer is, as SWFL said above, that the future will be led from the folks down in the trenches, in the many pubs all around the world.
All power to the proletariat!
# Posted on October 24th 2009 by AlBrown
Re: Where do we go from here?
'Is there anyone new out there leading the way in Irish music, or setting it on its ear in a constructive way? Or are we continuing to wander?'
Well, zippydw, there've been far fewer CDs issued in Ireland in the last few years, but one that leaves me utterly thrilled whenever I hear it is 'Dublin Made Me' by the piper Seán McKeon and fiddler Liam O'Connor. If you can't get hold of the album (issued by NPU - http://www.pipers.ie), then check RTÉ for the edition of 'The Full Set' on which they appeared.
# Posted on October 24th 2009 by Floss the Tethers
Re: Where do we go from here?
It is hard on a website to convey images without sometimes resorting to broad generalizations set up by a reference.
I found a couple of nice ones by Paudie O'Connor, Different States and Winds and Reeds
You're right though. New CD's are few and far between
# Posted on October 24th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Where do we go from here?
i can propose (again) the new guitar tuning for the backers of the next generation within this genre :
CGCGCD
# Posted on October 26th 2009 by lisaniska
Re: Where do we go from here?
sounds interesting. But the keys like c and g have such a flat sound.. And this lowers things in the relative scale.
# Posted on October 26th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Where do we go from here?
i don't understand how any given key can have a 'flat sound' when you consider that all keys are actually 'sharp' (in the relative scale of things)
# Posted on October 27th 2009 by lisaniska
Re: Where do we go from here?
In connection with the original comment. I have been listening to a lot of concertina CDs by various players and I noice that there is a delving into older styles and relaxed type playing. A time for turning over the soil and getting some regrowth. It's happened before after hectic periods and trends.
Like cutting back a clematis plant that's got too luxuriant!
# Posted on October 28th 2009 by Michael Sam Wild
Re: Where do we go from here?
Hmm...I mulled over this one.
I suspect we are still living in the wake of what I like to call a "Classical Moment" in the life of Irish music, which happened thirty-plus years ago in the Seventies.
By a "Classical Moment" (my own expression, although I'm sure the phenomenon has been given names by others) I mean a period in which some human endeavour, art or other, makes a very definite breakthrough, arrives at something new which is also widely seen as a standard of excellence, and has a prolonged half-life in which its forms continue to be used in times and places remote from those that forged not only the forms but the notions and desires of which they were the vehicles. This can produce a lot of lifeless art: the ongoing tyranny of the form can be the flip-side of the fact that it derives from something which was so definitely good in the first place.
I take this model from, among other things, the emergence of Classical art and architecture in Ancient Athens after it had seen off the Persians and when it was riding high in unprecedented local power. Circumstances catalysed the art, which in some respects anyway was quite different from that which had preceded it, though it could not have arisen without that. It was indeed great, but has been through a lot of mutations in the next 2.5 millennia, some of them feeding into terminal banalities like Fascist architecture and unspeakable garden centre statuary.
In its way, I think 70s Irish music was comparable. A lot of pent-up desire for expression and a backlog of increasing expertise - particularly in the use of guitar and other backing strings, which stand to increase the impact of concert performances a great deal in my possibly unwashed view - somehow pushed through the door and found itself on a larger stage than it might have foreseen. Ireland was joining the EEC and beginning to define itself independently of the economics / geopolitics of the Anglosphere and the English or diaspora stereotypings that have emanated from there. And lots and lots of young Continentals for whatever reasons of cultural or social history wanted this music. Everything conspired to make the more prestigious side of the music, at any rate, develop far and fast. It was conspicuous and it was exciting. I assume it brought "bog music" into the centre of contemporary Irish cultural life like nothing before it.
The legacy? Any number of really good players, including those who feature as twosomes and threesomes on Comhaltas clips. But they're probably not going to go on and wow the world in the same way as a handful of scruffs in the Seventies, because the world has changed and the particular conjunction of factors that applied then is not there now. Will Irish music become increasingly something rather hermetic, practised (however finely) in a closed enthusiasts' world, as I imagine Welsh poetry can be in Eisteddfods? For ever polishing smaller gems? Will dance continue to demand it and thereby guarantee its place in the real world - whatever that is?
The Seventies laid down some forms that have predominated since. Backing styles and instrument combos that at best are sensitive and fine to listen to (though obviously they can fall short of best...) seem the main thing here, plus the arrangement of tunes in particular key or tune-type orders in sets of a small number of tunes each played two or three times. These forms are great for purpose - well, musically they are "correct" where this is necessary, while giving space for the particular nuances of Irish music. (Very good musicians have done the groundwork on chords and suchlike.) These forms will last for a long time. They have in the hands of great players been perfected for their place - which has principally been concerts, sessions and album tracks.
But what will players be investing them with in times to come, in terms of their own aspiration or sense of a personal or communal destiny? Will they become trinkets like so much blues material, played largely ironically by its players for the passing amusement of an audience? Does a powerful art phenomenon *have*, willy-nilly, to be born among people who badly need or want to overcome obstacles and fight their way on to conquest / admiration / fame / money (any or all of these), and all told are *not* prepared to accept their supposed place, and might it not all too easily become a rather trivial pursuit when its practitioners are given a modest but habitable place quite readily, and have no great urge or perhaps much opportunity to leave it?
No, I don't have an answer to "Where next?". (And how should I know, not being Irish?) But the question did stir up my grey matter.
# Posted on November 1st 2009 by nicholas