Folk, Art Song, Performance or what?

CAVEAT: Very little of the following is original, but I'm trying to sort some ideas out in order to get them into a coherent framework (see, Dr. Wilson? I truly did listen to what you said!) I make no apologies for relying on decades of conversations, readings, attendance at lectures and similar events, or participation in seminars and workshops without proper citations. I don't have the time to go through notes and files to cite exact dates, places, or publications. Frankly, being just over a thousand miles away from these things is, if not a royal pain, at least an academic one. Having said all of that, please accept that when I refer to a person or book, I am, in fact referring to my memory of that encounter and what I carried away from it in the back of my head.

[You know, I should have used that little bit of weaselly prose on several other things I've written recently. No idea why it debuts here. I'm definitely going to boilerplate it for future use. But I digress.]

Tommy Makem said that Irish musical traditions fall into three loose divisions.

First there is the music that the serfs played for the gentry. Picture Anglo-Irish aristocracy gathering in the great house to hear the Gaelic-Speaking peasants adapt the "better" music of the times to their own techniques of string, voice, pipe, or percussion. Some of the more talented were sometimes sent to study the "proper" way of playing, and returned to blend their own tunes more closely into the styles and sensibilities of their betters. The dynamic remained the same; somebody played or sang and somebody sat quietly (if the musicians were lucky) and listened.

If dance was involved, it was either a planned performance demonstrating "wild Gaelic" dance to the gentry, or a matter of "the peasants play the music and the gentry dance." Depending on the era, it might be the peasants playing music for a "proper" dance of some sort, or a gentrified version of a local dance. Over on YouTube, there used to be a clip of the British Royal Family doing "Scottish Country Dancing" at Balmoral. There are records of British Army officers who retired to the Wicklow hills teaching the locals to play sets of Regimental tunes.

Third (yes, I'm aware of the lack of numeric flow. just stay with me, I think it's going to work) we have the music the serfs and servants sang among themselves. Work songs to keep the pace or synchronize some activity, or simply help the day along. Songs around the hearth, be it cot or tavern, to lament things as they might have been, or to ring up the vision of things as they might be. Teaching songs, worship songs, or songs with no more utility than making a child giggle or help it to sleep. People sang as a group, or when there was one singer who knew all the words, there would be a chorus and the people would sing it sweetly, or roar it out with a grin in the voice, as appropriate. The dynamic was collective and interactive.

Dance was usually established traditional figures, or it might be improvised. Solo dancing, according to some of my relatives, was pretty much a performance (urban, music hall) thing, not found up the country very often.

The second division, lying as it does between two ends of a broad spectrum, blends something of both. It's fairly recent in some cultures, possibly as a result of the continuing demand for novelty, or as the society got more complex, or as a reaction to the ascendancy of one of the two extremes. People singing and playing for other people, without distinction of status or class, other than the idea that we're singing and playing and you've paid to listen. Mostly performance based, with a spectrum much like that between the American "Old-Timey" music and "Bluegrass".

The middle ground would also include "re-enactment" or revived (frequently invented) versions of Traditional Music. This can be as earnest a process as the Chieftans (at least in the early days) or, at the other extreme, Riverdance.

If the people in the cottages sang it for themselves, it was folk. If the people from the cottages sang it for the people in the castle, it was performance. If the people sang their songs in the manner of the castle folk, it usually gets preserved as "Art Song".

THe coming of the tourist industry, happening late as it did in Ireland (compared, for example, to Italy and the Grand Tour), brought its own musical divisions. Within my own experiences, it would seem to be based on the origins of the tourists.

Returning recent emigres wanted to hear the music they or their parents remembered from before their individual diaspora. People whose connection was multiple generations back (and usually part of a more varied cultural background) tended to want music that they knew from whichever New World their ancestors had gone. At one time, this was things like "In My Liverpool Home," "when Irish Eyes Are Shining," or "The Wild Colonial Boy." The Great Folk Scare added an entire packet of songs, some of the originally Irish, others (40 Shades of Green is an easy example) pretty much cut out of whole cloth in a distant land, but relying on the forms and conventions the original emigres carried with them from Ireland.

In 1967, you could go into just about any pub in Cork, ask "Where do we find a ballad session tonight?" and get directions. In 1990, the same question would get you a blank look and directions to wherever a formal band or group of semi-locals were playing "Traditional Celtic Music" .... usually on such traditional instruments as the Spanish/Moroccan guitar, the Northumbrian "Elbow" pipes, the Greek Bouzouki, the Def (a frame drum that a dozen people claim they or their father brought back from North Africa in the 1940's or 1950's), the French/Italian violin, the Hungarian Cimbalom, and the English Flageolet.

Sean O'Rearda not withstanding, I'll go with Mick Kearns, who used to declaim about how the only traditional instrumentation was pounding feet and the human voice. Anything else, he claimed, was an add-on from somewhere. Nice to listen to, no matter what naturalized instruments are used, but it's stupid to get snotty about how my adopted instruments are more traditional than your adopted instruments.

The Scots have the same problem. It's a standing joke that the Hogmany celebrations held in Scotland tend to feature songs about how great it would be if we were in Scotland for the holiday ("blythly ignoring the minor detail that they're IN Bloody Scotland" as one "traditional" performer was fond of saying), set in a welter of Victorian Anglo-Scottish reconstructions of a culture the English (amongst others) had spent centuries trying to obliterate.

To save time, if you hear of a performance of "The Sheep, The Cheviot, And The Black, Black Oil" within a day's drive of you, go. It was originally designed as a piece for the Edinburgh Festival, then adapted to tour schools in Scotland, and then upgraded (simplified in some passages) to be performed to Scottish Heritage groups throughout the world. It explains the whole ironic thing a lot better, and it's much funnier than I.

Sarah Makem said that music was the soul of the world captured in sound. I like that. It puts the whole folk/non-folk/traditional/commercial dispute into a nice context. But on the other hand, without disagreement about music, we would have missed out on a number of wonderful all-night sessions of several descriptions.

Malvina Reynolds, of blessed memory, once wound up such a discussion in the candle hours of the morning with a wonderful summation: "I play something and people sing along, it's folk. I sing something and they sit back and listen, it's commercial."