Beyond “The Soul of a Nation”: New Meanings for Irish Music
Beyond “The Soul of a Nation”: New Meanings for Irish Music

Summary/Abstract: The reception history of Irish traditional music as “the voice of nature” (Joseph Cooper Walker, 1786), or as “the soul of a nation” (John Millington Synge, 1902) has had a long innings. Although a romantic attachment to Irish traditional music as the definitive signature of Irishness itself abides to the present moment, its capacity to define Ireland musically, and to engender national identity, has been overtaken by more recent modes of cultural transmission within the past half-century. This is because the global reception of Irish music now bypasses its national meaning in favour of other distinctive agencies of interpretation. My purpose in this short paper is to examine two such agencies. The first of these can be located within the domain of Anglo-American and American-Irish popular culture, including cinematic culture, in which Irish traditional music more than occasionally functions as a hybridized signature of violence or protest, or both. The second agency is also American-Irish in origin, and it lies along a much older axis of reception history in which the canonic ingathering of Irish dance music in Boston and New York in the early 20th century would gradually relieve the tradition of its national signatures in favour of a new and essentially apolitical emphasis on mastery in performance. In this progression, the refuge of Irish traditional music attains to a globalised condition of meaning.

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