Introduction: Locating Celtic Music (and Song)

Abstract

All that emotion alone can do in the Celt has done; the very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish airs; but with all this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt, so eager for emotion, that he has not patience for science, effected in to be compared with what the less emotional German, steadily developing his musical feeling with the science of a Sebastian Bach or a Beethoven, has effected? (Arnold 1910:87-88) Mas! elle est aussi condamnee ad disparaitre, cette emeraude des mers du couchant! Arthur ne reviendra pas de son ile enchantee, et Saint Patrice avait raison de dire ti Ossian: Les heros que tu pleures sont morts; peu vent-ils renaitre? (Renan 1947-64, vol. 11:253) We can smile at the antique rhetoric of nineteenth century enthusiasts, a rhetoric that linked Ossian and St. Patrick to King Arthur and a host of otherworldly characters who inhabit a magical, heroic past. Invoking the term Celtic, of course, has always been questionable because the concept is riddled with linguistic, cultural and ideological implications. If that is so, what might the much more specific notion of convey? Does such a thing exist, even as an abstract concept? Allowing for the moment that it does exist, even music in this context is not so simple, for in most European folk cultures the term signifies instrumental rather than vocal music. Music is often conceived in opposition to and this is no different in the handful of cultures with which we will be dealing here. The first issue, then-supposing that the concept of is a valid one-is its ambiguity of reference in comparison with song, which would presumably allude to songs in a language. Older rural concepts contrasted and song more readily than newer urban contexts, in which a healthy middle ground of song with instruments has developed, particularly since the eighteenth century. justifiably applies to such practice as much as to solo or concerted instrumental music. And music, as it is understood in today's urbanised world, can and does include song in usage. As a consequence, the second issue involves a widespread conception of which not only signifies different things to different peopleeven within the same country or culture area-but has an air of insubstantiality about it. Hence the locating as the title of this journal issue. But there is also the more complex issue of whether any made by indigenous musicians in a country with a living language can be called Celtic, whether classical or popular (e.g., Irish country-and-western). This issue has been raised elsewhere in regard to European folk as a whole and is significant simply because it defies neat cultural categories (Porter 1978). It lies, however, beyond the scope of the present discussion, which of necessity confines itself to that is traditional or is constructed in relation to a identity. The semiotic dimensions of the topic, and its conception both within and outside the communities which practise music, are problems that form the rationale for this issue of Western Folklore. THE CELTIC REVIVAL The idea of a Celtic music-whether it signifies bards, bodhrans, The Chieftains, Enya, Jest noz, triple harps, Riverdance, Alan Stivell, the Tartan Amoebas, or U2-is deeply and indelibly involved with the Revival in literature and the arts. For those who imprinted that Revival on public consciousness we should first look to the nineteenth century scholars who took it up: Matthew Arnold's views on literature, for example, are well enough known and have often been subject to scrutiny (e.g., Bromwich 1964, Durkacz 1983, Nutt 1910). Ernest Renan's La Po&ie des Races Celtiques (1854), which Arnold absorbed, is less well known but essentially involves the same aims and ideas. Renan and Arnold constructed a version of the world they derived from Ossian and from Herder's theories on poetry, thereby giving a substantial push to the Revival which is still in evidence today (Chapman 1978, Lang 1897). …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.