Review Articles
Irish Music in the 20th Century
Irish Music in the 20th Century
Composer and guitarist Benjamin Dwyer reviews a major new book on Irish classical music in the twentieth century.
Irish Music in the Twentieth Century is the latest addition to the series of books collected under the general title ‘Irish Musical Studies’. This is the seventh and most recent of the series to be published (the first collection, Musicology in Ireland, dates back to 1990) and is edited by Gareth Cox and Axel Klein. This latest supplement comprises ten essays and a twentieth-century Irish music bibliography, and so, represents a very welcome shift of focus towards an area of Irish cultural creativity which has, in the majority of cases, not enjoyed adequate responses in terms of musicological research, state funding, publication, recording opportunities, general educational awareness and representation abroad.
Naturally, one should not ask too much of a single publication, and the editors are at pains to outline that the articles contained therein cannot aim to be representative of ‘the many diverse paths trodden by over by one hundred Irish composers’.1 However, they do allege to offer a broad taste of certain ‘notable developments in twentieth-century composition in Ireland’.2 Here, one might, quite reasonably, wonder if the very title of the collection is misleading. Half of these essays deal with the emergence of modernism in the new state; with providing a clearer picture of developments in music in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland; and a debate on traditional Irish ‘art’ music vis-à-vis the European aesthetic. The investigations into the second half of the twentieth-century are much more selective – two essays (no less) concerned with works by the relatively young Ian Wilson, and a look at one work each by Seóirse Bodley and Frank Corcoran. Hardly a mention is made of the tremendously prolific James Wilson, while the generation of Barry, Buckley, J. O’Leary and Deane (whose works would represent a hugely significant maturation of Irish musical consciousness) is largely ignored. Nothing of substance either is to be gleaned of the following generation (Johnston, O’Connell, Alcorn). One accepts that it would perhaps be a little too premature to offer confident analyses of younger composers, but surely the title Irish Music in the Twentieth Century is far too broad a term of reference to accurately suggest what the publication actually contains. It begs the question of the editors, had they perhaps forgotten to include in the title the subheading ‘Part I’?
This aside, the book is extremely well presented, with clear accurate texts, diagrams, and footnotes. The essays themselves could be said to fall into three categories – musicological research, musical analysis and theory proposition. The last of these is represented by one extended paper by Harry White and due to the nature of its unusual hypotheses, I have had to respond to it in some depth. Wuth regard to the other contributions I have attempted to elucidate the core of every paper’s mission and estimate the success with which each has achieved its intention.
In his paper The Divided Imagination, Harry White attempts to offer a thesis that as a direct consequence of Seán Ó Riada’s rejection of a ‘European aesthetic’, the musical imagination of Ireland has been suffering since then from a kind of schizophrenia – a split between those who espouse an Irish folk-based aesthetic in music and those who have adopted a Europeanised style. His essay is in three parts. The first highlights many of his views already outlined in his previous work in The Keeper’s Recital 3 and Musical Constructions of Nationalism 4 – Irish music’s enslavement to nationalism and its replacement of the Irish language as the significant carrier of linguistic functions. I do not want to dwell too much on this aspect as it has received much attention already. Suffice it is to say that White’s propositions have been hotly contested and the debate remains very much to the fore.5
In setting up his hypothesis for this essay, White suggests that efforts to establish art music in Ireland since the Act of Union and prior to the founding of the State had foundered repeatedly because, among other reasons, ‘the European musical aesthetic was regarded as an expression of colonial ideology’.6 I find this a rather curious statement. Why should Ireland consider Europe a colonial threat? It was, in fact, towards Europe that Ireland sought assistance in its struggle with British oppression. Was Irish nationalism not intimately influenced by the theory and fact of the French Revolution? Had not the various Armadas failed so miserably, who knows what language we would be speaking today! Was it not, rather, the continuous negligence in Ireland in terms of musical infrastructure and education of that colonial power, which, since the death of Purcell, had ceased to be of much significance for music in Europe anyway. As Richard Pine has rightly pointed out ‘…it could hardly be said that antipathy to that tradition [European aesthetic] was a sign of hostility to Britain, which, until the time of Elgar, had had little more than a tangential and minimal role in the development of Western music’.7
White goes on to offer reasons as to why he thinks Ó Riada has been so influential to Irish art music and divides his ‘legacy’ into four areas – his original compositions; the radio lecture series Our Musical Heritage; the music for film; and Ceoltóirí Cualann. But in many cases, this reader remains unconvinced (if not a little confused) by some of the arguments put forward. For example, White says that Ó Riada ‘produced a small body of works which in hindsight we might judge to be of greater promise than actual achievement.’ Having made this point, he then wants us to believe that ‘…the most interesting voice by far in Irish music, and certainly the most imaginative, was drawn away from the European aesthetic in a crisis of such magnitude (personal, aesthetic, musical and perhaps even psychological), that it forced a crisis in turn that was to affect music in Ireland for long after his death.’
This is the crux of White’s thesis, but it necessitates the acceptance of two significant propositions – that Ó Riada was a composer of the highest calibre, and, that he was so influential that his personal crisis automatically triggered a collective crisis for generations of Irish composers to follow. If one has difficulty accepting these two propositions (as I do), the arguments would appear to be built upon ambiguous foundations. Ó Riada, the persona, seems to have been idolised out of all proportion to his real significance. Maybe he fulfilled perfectly the ideal bard position of de Valera’s pitiful and parochial vision of Ireland. But to see in his contribution a Beethovenian stature and to conclude that he cast a long shadow over succeeding generations is stretching the point to an untenable degree. How often, one might ask, has Ó Riada’s music actually been performed? Are his scores studied avidly as examples of excellence by younger generations of Irish composers? Had his music been received as a beacon of a new Irish identity in other countries in a way that younger composers would have to follow and overcome? The answers to these questions would seem to place White’s thesis in jeopardy.
Ó Riada’s rejection of the European aesthetic towards the mid-sixties paved the way for his radio series Our Musical Heritage, which provided him with the opportunity to reject not only his personal involvement in that aesthetic but also the very relevance of it to the Irish psyche.8 But this rejection seems flawed to a naive degree. What, one wonders, is so special about Irish traditional music that it could not be absorbed into a wider tonal palette? Bulgarian, Hungarian, Spanish and Russian folk music (to name but four) would occupy an equally distant position from a European art aesthetic and yet the classical repertory is drenched with highly successful examples of art music integrated with folk elements from these countries.9 Could it be that Ó Riada simply did not have the requisite skills to successfully merge the Irish folk idiom into a wider European art semantic? Could it be that he was simply too late to pursue such a line when the main thrust of nationalism in music had given way to newer forces many decades earlier?
White continues by suggesting that Ó Riada’s film scores ‘exercised profound influence’ and that they earned for him ‘an acclaim, a reception into the Irish cultural matrix, scarcely enjoyed by any other musician’. But these film scores with their mix of light art and romantic folk imagery could only have been attractive to a rather naïve Irish cultural matrix whose musically ill-educated vision of itself was defined, until very recently (perhaps even still!), by the embarrassing fact that it thought that to win the Eurovision Song Contest would be a wonderful thing. No wonder then that Ó Riada was embraced. But it should be borne in mind that there is a difference between being influential and being merely popular. Ennio Moricone, the composer of the music for the Italian film Cinema Paradiso (among many others), would have more ‘reception’ (in Italy and world-wide) than, say, Bruno Maderna, but there is no doubting which composer would have more influence on Italian composition.
The fourth aspect of Ó Riada’s ‘legacy’, as presented by White, is Ceoltóirí Cualann and he suggests that ‘Without Ó Riada, there would have been no Ceoltóirí Cualann, and without Ceoltóirí Cualann, there would almost certainly have been no Chieftains.’ This would indicate to me that Ó Riada’s influence has been much more profound and far-reaching in the matter of developments in traditional Irish music than in any other area.
By the finish of the first section, White has established (for himself, at least) the existence of ‘two distinctive aesthetics for art music in Ireland’ and this has allowed him to make some extraordinary comparisons. The second part of White’s paper concentrates on one work from the traditional-based category (as he would have it), Shaun Davey’s The Brendan Voyage. He points to Davey’s use of uilleann pipes as a solo instrument pitted against an orchestral ensemble as ‘drawing upon the concerto as a musical genre dominated by paradigms of discourse and dialogue’, which is fair enough. Composed as a musical vessel for Tim Severn’s travel writing, The Brendan Voyage is then subjected to comparisons to works by Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Richard Strauss, on the basis that they each convey ‘musical structure as a model of narrative discourse’. But surely these comparisons are held together by too fine a thread.
A more satisfactory way of looking at the issue would be simply to understand this music, not in terms of whether it uses Irish folk melodies, or utilises established genres like concerto form, but rather in terms of the level of semantic depth it achieves. The more simple a piece of music is, the more diffuse and close it is to common life. The more complex and dense the musical discourse, the more selective and specific are its connections to the social environment within which it is received. This explains why ordinary commercial songs can have a very broad appeal, but can be replaced by other songs (the magical three-chord trick!), whereas, a complex musical discourse like, for example, Beethoven’s Op. 132 Dankegesang, can only be understood as a unique and irreplaceable moment in the history of musical consciousness. Its semantic depth allows endless re-readings. It never ceases to confront our resources of perception and aptitude. In a very real sense (to invoke Steiner), it ‘reads’ us. It is this characteristic which allows us to qualify one work as a masterpiece and another as, well, not.
From this viewpoint, White’s category of Irish folk-based art composition looses the position of importance he would wish to claim for it. For in its relatively simple harmonic support allied to relatively straightforward melodic and rhythmic structures, this ‘traditional art music’ occupies an arena of composition that displays a relatively basic semantic construct. These characteristics would, of course, explain the phenomenal success this music has profited from (not to mention its suitability as a propaganda tool for the government mandarins of Celtic Tiger Ireland). But it also explains why, for example, Seóirse Bodley’s attempts at the integration of the two styles, within a complex semantic matrix, have not received the wide reception that those of his compatriots have enjoyed.
Now, I must be very clear about this. These observations do not amount to criticism. The composers whom White cites (Davey, Ó Súilleabháin, Whelan, McGlynn) have, at times, produced works of some achievement, both technical and musical, but they have accomplished this within a perimeter that requires relatively straightforward semantic discourse. The challenges imposed by this boundary have been occasionally confronted with aplomb. However, to invite comparisons, as White does, between Davey’s The Brendan Voyage and works by Richard Strauss solely on the basis of a shared connection to programmatic writing while, at the same time, avoiding the essential issue of the considerable gap between these works in relation to semantic density, is, ultimately, destructive to his fundamental argument.
It is worth pointing out that my proposition which places traditional-based art music in a relatively simple semantic construct also applies to the source itself: traditional music. However, I insist that that very simplicity of structure allows, indeed, is necessary, as a suitable conduit for the endless possibilities of the re-interpretations of the soloist or group. The power of traditional music lies not with the richness of semantics in relation to its structure but rather with the semantic depth achieved through the subtlety of nuance, shade, timbre and ornamentation explored by its finest exponents. This is a quality, alas, which traditional art music looses to a great extent as it is generally scored, and mostly performed (but not interpreted in the way I have just suggested) by classically trained musicians.
The final part of White’s discourse centres on developments after Ó Riada’s death and outlines how succeeding generations of Irish composers ‘found refuge’ in Europe. Here he hints at the reasons why the works of Irish composers continued to be deemed separate from the established idea of identity – because of Ireland’s ‘strikingly underdeveloped musical infrastructures’. It is a real pity that White does not develop this point as I suspect that it lies at the heart of the vast majority of the problems of the reception of contemporary classical music in Ireland.
The issue of Northern Ireland is introduced and White makes some intriguing points in relation to the lack of response by Irish composers to the Northern crisis. ‘If Friel could write The Freedom of the City (1973) less than a year after the events on which it was based took place, an opera on the same subject would have seemed preposterous, if not ludicrously offensive.’ Leaving aside the unlikelihood of an Irish opera (based on any subject!) being produced in Ireland in the 1970s, it might just be that there is something in the creation and reception of music during times of crisis that causes discomfort.10 Will Nero ever be forgiven?! (Not to mention Peter Brooke, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, when he famously sang ‘Danny Boy’ on the Late Late Show the night after several Protestants were murdered by the IRA). ‘Song and Suffering’ to cite Heaney, have always been difficult bedfellows. In any case, in relation to political responses through art, Heaney himself has spoken eloquently of his reluctance to get stuck into the issues, as it were, offering a concept that to write lyrically is a sufficient response to the human condition, that ‘the co-ordinates of the imagined thing correspond to and allow us to contemplate the complex burden of our experience.’11 Notwithstanding this, the mute reply in Irish music to the Northern crisis does seem rather strange and might very well point to White’s suggestion that Irish composers were busy confronting their own issues as a developing body of new European-Irish intellectual thought.
White goes on to suggest that regardless of Stockhausen’s apparent anarchy, he nonetheless enjoys a strong continuity with the German music that precedes him. ‘No such continuity is available to Barry’. This is an interesting point, and White proposes that the reason is that Ireland ‘continues to develop a strong cultural continuity which all but ignores the European aesthetic in music. I have suggested indeed that it endorses another tradition.’ What he has not done, however, is to bring attention again to the ‘strikingly underdeveloped musical infrastructures’ that are at the root of this myopia. He goes on to say that Benjamin Britten and Peter Maxwell-Davies also maintain this strong continuity (connecting as they do, geographically, to Aldeburgh and Orkney respectively). But a New Complexity (and altogether more Europeanised) composer like Brian Ferneyhough also enjoys a privileged position in a (Euro-sceptic?) British culture and this should serve as a model for Ireland, whose willingness to participate in the European experiment is a matter of record.
There is much of interest here, but reading this paper I get the feeling that White begins first by proposing a theory and only then sets out to prove it. The problem is that those facts which won’t fit into his Procrustean bed are avoided while other points, more suitable to his argument, are somewhat exaggerated. It seems to me that the whole issue of music education has been circumvented here and although the depravity of musical infrastructure was mentioned in passing, it did not receive the attention that I suspect it deserves. White’s theory that Irish music was appropriated to the needs of nationalism is firmly argued but does not provide the complete picture. No doubt the issue is much more complex. Apart from the aforementioned paucity of music education and infrastructure, it would seem obvious that the support of a nationalist stratagem does not automatically imply a rejection of alternative cultural expressions. Finally, I find it difficult to be convinced at all of the two-tradition theory (indeed I have given reasons why I think that the so-called traditional art music genre does not constitute a significant ‘tradition’) and of the ultimate relevance of Ó Riada in the scheme of twentieth century Irish composition. Notwithstanding his unique contribution to traditional music, he has been mythologised to a degree that he himself would probably be embarrassed by. In no uncertain way, this paper places White as the latest contributor to that ongoing process.
Philip Graydon’s contribution is entitled Modernism in Ireland and its cultural context in the music of Frederick May, Brian Boydell and Aloys Fleischmann. This paper is the progeny of Graydon’s MA thesis12 and still displays traits of a tentative talent, relying as it does to an irritating degree, on quotes. Apart from the fact that this gives the impression that Graydon lacks the conviction of his own ideas (and necessitates external affirmation) and that it constantly halts the flow of reading, he also frequently opts to use quotes which are completely facile and unenlightening, for example, ‘elements which contribute to the creation of any identity’ (!). One has to question, therefore, Graydon’s assertion (in his introduction) that his essay intends to examine ‘in a largely unprecedented fashion.’
Notwithstanding this, Graydon does provide a mosaic of the social environment within which May, Boydell and Fleischmann had to work. The synopses he presents of each composer’s background offer useful biographical information and highlight, rather superficially, the ‘Irish’ influence latent within the modernist language of selected works – the exposure of tiny melismatic fragments and ‘Irish’ rhythms (whatever they may distinctly be).
Some aspects of the discussion of cultural context left me a little confused. Graydon’s allusion to the fact that these three composers each spent time as students in a German/Austrian environment that was nurturing National Socialism results in the supposition that ‘…awareness of Nazism… brought the effects of “extreme” nationalism into sharp relief, thus informing their aversion of similar practices as applied to culture… in Ireland.’ Leaving aside the odious comparison between Irish nationalism and Nazism, I find the comment rather strange considering that, earlier, Boydell is quoted as having admitted ‘I was too steeped in cultural interests, and too immature to be politically aware (except in disturbing retrospect) of what was going on at that time.’ Graydon does finally offer a view that these three composers represent the first brave explorations into a European aesthetic. Given Ireland’s parochial regard of music at the time, this remains a significant triumph.
Interval cycles and inversional axes in Frederick May’s String Quartet in C Minor is the prolix title of Robert W. Wasan’s paper. It opens with a debate on the exact time of composition of the quartet, which, in this case, would seem important as it would appear that May’s exploration of the modernist idiom was well under way before he arrived in Austria in 1936. Wasan goes on to make some rather spurious connections between May and Beethoven (Op. 131), Bartok (Quartet No.1) and, a little more convincingly, Mahler (in relation to ‘directional tonality’).
He then sets out to outline (via Berg’s Wozzeck) the concept of ‘interval cycles’. This is clearly done and essential for the uninitiated in understanding how these techniques were applied by May in the first sixteen bars of his quartet. May’s actual application of these techniques is, again, clearly sketched by Wasan, and this is followed by an inconclusive discussion on whether the first sixteen bars constitute a ‘theme’ or (more likely) an ‘introduction’. This paper is, by Wasan’s own account, ‘tentative’ and far from complete. What has been covered, has been covered well, but like much music analysis, a gap remains between (in Schoenberg’s words) the knowledge of how something is made, and the knowledge of what something is.
John Page’s A post-war symphony: Frank Corcoran’s Symphony No. 2 provides a very useful assessment of the symphony in Ireland since the late 1950s. The opening paragraphs are put to the service of attempting to discover the ‘significance and nature of a specific post-war “Irish” Symphony within the broader symphonic context.’ He has provided an understanding of the ‘nature’ of it. Whether he has offered an evaluation of the ‘significance’ of it ‘within the broader symphonic context’ is doubtful.
However, Page does summarise well the various responses to the genre by Irish composers in the twentieth century and has suggested a three-fold categorisation: those composers who have engaged with the symphony as an important means of expression (Victory, Kinsella, Bodley and Corcoran); those who write large-scale orchestral works but avoid the nomenclature in order to be free from the expectations that the title ‘symphony’ carries (Deane, O’Connell); and those who have rejected the concept in name and form (Barry). As far as categorisations go, this would seem at least, a useful starting point.
There follows then a closer look at the symphonies of those four cited composers who have engaged with the genre. With Corcoran, the spotlight is on his Symphony No. 2, and Page delineates insightfully Corcoran’s general compositional approach to the symphony outlining some techniques like macro-polyphony (fundamental to Corcoran’s general compositional approach), his use of ‘divisi tempi’, and the beautifully inscribed ‘bending of the canonic technique to timbral intentions’. Quite interesting is Page’s contention that Corcoran’s understanding of ‘symphony’ as ‘sounding together’ stems as much from an ancient Greek influence as it does from a recent Viennese one. This would seem to echo Corcoran’s obsession with ‘Irish dream-land-scape’13 and his fascination with a ‘pre-historic Irish psyche.’
Despite his tender age, an assessment of Ian Wilson’s work is welcome. He has been extraordinarily prodigal in his output and, to date, has notched up six quartets. Robin Elliot, in his paper Passion, painting, poetry, pessimism: extra-musical themes in the string quartets of Ian Wilson, offers us an appreciation (more than an analysis – only one music diagram is utilised) of four of them (Nos 1, 2, 3 and 5, plus a very brief discussion of No. 4) and how they relate to their extra-musical inspirations.
What Elliot is very good at is providing useful data surrounding these quartets and their premières – the performers, dates, movements, numbers of bars, and durations. Also very thorough (not surprisingly, given the title of the paper) is the background information. Here we are treated to lengthy expositions on specific extra-musical influences like Wilson’s spiritual beliefs, and Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus (Quartet No. 1). Biographical notes on Giacometti (Quartet No. 2) are provided (bringing in Sartre and Yves Bonnefoy) with extensive hypotheses on his sculptures and their relevance to the Existentialist movement. Klee’s works are detailed (Quartet No. 3) and Byron’s visions analysed (Quartet No. 5). All this is more or less satisfactorily done considering the context, and goes some way to providing a framework within which to understand Wilson’s relationship with the genre.
What is lacking here though, is a more studied criticism of the quartets themselves. On the contrary, the essay is littered with subjective and over-complimentary comments that would seem to remove the author from any definable position of objective scrutiniser. Take, for example, ‘…a fine viola solo’; ‘intensely spiritual quality, delicate, magical…’; ‘The rest of the quartet [No. 5] ... is almost too pained and explicit an outcry to bear’; and, the pièce de résistance, ‘Rarely has a composer captured so perfectly an atmosphere of inner quietude and restful contemplation’. It is not so much the descriptive style that cloys, but its total lack of impartiality. Some objective scrutiny might, at least highlight for discussion, certain aspects of derivative writing, a largely conservative use of rhythmic structure and notation, and a relatively restricted use of the instrumentarium. I don’t cite these as criticisms necessarily, but merely as possible topics for enquiry that might help bring us closer to the core of Wilson’s quartet voice.
By far the most interesting and thought-provoking section in the book is the first part of Michael Russ’s Some observations on form-building processes in twentieth-century music: shaping time in Ian Wilson’s Rich Harbour: Concerto for Organ and Orchestra. The paper is in two parts – an extended and insightful discussion on form, with an introduction of an alternative approach to the analysis of form in the late twentieth century, and a look at Wilson’s Rich Harbour concerto utilising this approach.
Russ opens with an observation that analysis of twentieth-century music has concentrated to an excessive degree on pitch class set theory, theories of scales and genera, twelve-tone theory, etc., to the exclusion of other important aspects like register and ‘the temporal positioning of pitches at precisely the moment when these elements take on a greater significance’. He concludes that form has been given insufficient attention. He (bravely) states that much twentieth-century analyses ‘leave us thinking “so what”’ and suggests that a gap lies between analysis and perception. It would not be at all difficult to agree with this observation.
In his evaluation of form, Russ clearly distinguishes for us the importance of observing the relationship between the work itself and its ‘compositional archetype’, how the singularity complies (or doesn’t) to the established prototype. This is not easy reading but will yield, especially for the young composer, a greater understanding of the association between abstract components and the formal contour that would contain them. In setting forth his message that new music requires a new technique of observation (significantly because of the move away from tonality and voice-leading), Russ proposes that the elements of a composition can be divided into ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ categories, and suggests that ‘dynamic’ elements can now play a greater role in the analysis of form. Those ‘dynamic’ elements Russ indicates are gesture, exploitation of register, dynamics and texture ‘notably the relative density of activity’. Is this sufficient? Russ would seem to think so, despite Schoenberg’s view that ‘…the true product of the mind – the musical idea, the unalterable – is established in the relationship between pitches and time-dimensions. But all other things – dynamics, tempo, timbre and the character, clarity, effect, etc., which they produce are really no more than the performer’s resources….’14 Russ would place this as a paradigm of thought carried through from the nineteenth century. What can be observed in his approach is an attempt to find an adequate method to observe the ever-growing body of eclectic music being written at this time, music created free from a specific aesthetic authority based on pitch class. Or does it point to the musicologist’s panic in the face of a growing semantic confusion at the turn of the millennium? One wonders if a method like this could only be truly applied to the shining canvases of a Murail or a Crumb, or non-pitched electro-acoustic music.
As applied to Wilson’s Rich Harbour, I was less convinced. Russ starts by outlining the ‘static’ formal structure, that is, a description of the various sections and the patterns they form. We are told that Wilson places four strands running through the work, each with its own development, but forming one ‘over-arching’ whole. What follows is a ‘tour guide’ through these sections with mostly verbal descriptions of the ‘dynamic’ elements (as described above). Although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a descriptive approach, after four pages I was a little weary and not much the wiser. One imagines also that this approach necessitates access to a recording as even when a score is used, it may be hard for some to imagine a specific timbre being discussed (can a timbre even be seen?). And so, intriguing and thought-provoking as the first part of this paper is, the jury is out on the effectiveness of its application, at least in the format of the printed page alone.
Axel Klein, in his Roots and directions in twentieth-century Irish art music provides an overview of Irish composition, known and not so well known. In his introduction, he is at pains to convince us that there was no vacuum in Irish compositional writing in the very early stages of the twentieth century, which provides an interesting counter balance to the more negative theories put forward in recent times by other musicologists. Again, the significant issue seems to have been a total lack of infrastructure and a poor educational system.
The paper falls into four sections. The first introduces a number of Irish composers dating from the late nineteenth century, generally obscure, and whose works, on the whole, have not been performed. One is immediately struck by the number of female composers including Ina Boyle (1889-1967), Rhoda Coghill (1903-2000) and Mary Dickenson-Auner (1880-1965) among others. Klein certainly has helped fill in the blanks here and this will clearly assist in the re-evaluation of classical Irish music from this period.
He moves on to survey what he has designated ‘Irish musical impressionism’. This is a new one for me, but he does manage to slide some ‘late-comers’ into the thesis, identifying Herbert Hughes (1882-1937) and Rhoda Coghill as main contenders. A strange facet to Klein’s essay is the number of ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’. He discusses the works and contributions of Stanford, Bax and Maconchy only to sadly relegate them to the ‘non-Irish’ dustbin – Stanford, for example, was ‘too English for the Irish, too Irish for the English, and too much of both for the Germans’.
Klein continues with an examination of later composers who occupied themselves with the issue of integrating an Irish voice into a broader European language. Much is made of unconscious usage of Irish characteristics in the works of certain composers like Boydell and Buckley. Klein’s position on the ‘Celtic’ art music debate is interesting in that he essentially (and refreshingly) dismisses the whole genre. He mentions a prominent predecessor in this style, Carl Gilbert Hardebeck (1869-1945), and concludes that his music ‘owed so much to 19th century aesthetics, that it can not be taken very seriously in a twentieth century context’. He goes on to mention Shaun Davey and Bill Whelan, as part of a new generation working in this manner, and concludes that: ‘Nowhere else would this music have achieved such a high level of general acceptance as twentieth-century art music.’ On the other hand, he comes to the rescue of Seóirse Bodley and counterattacks criticism of Bodley’s attempts to juxtapose (as opposed to integrate) two distinct elements (Irish music and a modernist semantic) within his work – ‘a unique achievement which, in my opinion, is not sufficiently appreciated today.’
Klein goes on to offer a very brief outline of developments in the latter half of the twentieth century and traces early attempts to tackle the twelve-tone issue. The survey of developments in the field of electro-acoustic music is rather scant. Notwithstanding that it is the fastest growing area of Irish composition today, even a perusal of the last seven years would have been welcome. Overall, however, the main thrust of this paper was to fill in the grey areas of Irish composition before 1930 and to help provide a perspective of the scene since, and Klein has done an excellent job. (I speak also of his other contribution here, ‘A twentieth-century Irish music bibliography’, an extensive compilation of published material in the form of books, articles in periodicals, entries in dictionaries and encyclopaedias, newspaper articles and some unpublished postgraduate theses.) I would be surprised if his research does not have significant results in terms of performances and a more positive appreciation of our recent musical heritage.
In his Opera in Ireland before 1925, Joseph J. Ryan (like Klein and Graydon in their respective areas) goes a long way to fill in the grey areas of a genre that has always had a mixed reception in this country. He traces for us the environment (mainly in Dublin, Cork and Belfast) in which opera functioned and I was genuinely surprised to note the speed at which new opera from Europe reached our shores. Early Irish opera is outlined in the works of Roseingrave, Carter and Gogan and an interesting survey of Irish language opera is given (a genre largely contrived under the auspices of the various Gaelic organisations). Ryan highlights with clarity the early attempts by Geoffrey Palmer, Robert O’Dwyer and Harold Robert White. But if there was a nationalist agenda here, it certainly did not dominate the genre, as perhaps the finest accomplishments in Irish opera came from non-nationalist quarters in the works of Harvey Pelissier and, more pertinently, Michele Esposito.
In closing, Ryan suggests that an ideal to develop an Irish voice in art music led to the suppression of a European aesthetic, and so, the finest achievements in Irish opera, in the works, for example, of Esposito, were not built upon. To enforce his argument, he quotes from a rather obscure, patriotic and somewhat naive Annie Wilson Patterson whose desire for ‘a distinctive Irish school’ also leads her to foolishly dismiss French composers for their ‘vagueness’. We are not offered any other (or more convincing) reason as to why the European aesthetic was not developed here. Considering that endeavours towards an ‘Irish’ aesthetic also ended in a cul-de-sac, one can only come to the conclusion, yet again, that the paucity of development was, for the most part, a result of a poor music educational system and pitiable infrastructures. As Ryan mentions early in his paper, ‘little enough’ happened. He goes on to paint a, more or less, sad picture of the story of Irish opera before 1925. What is sadder, perhaps, is that, despite developments in Ireland, ‘little enough’ has occurred in the genre since.
After a very brief outline of the progress of electro-acoustic music in Europe, Paschall de Paor in his The development of electro-acoustic music in Ireland surveys the tentative exploration of the genre in Ireland and highlights Gerard Victory as the first voyager to this unknown terrain. Roger Doyle, of course, is recognised as the ‘father’ of Irish electro-acoustic music in Ireland and de Paor traces, rather dryly, the hindered progress of Doyle’s early work, highlighting how his style and approach shifted with the acquisition of new working materials – we are scholarly informed that Doyle ‘purchased a tape recorder in 1970’. Given the threadbare conditions in Ireland at the time, one wonders should he not have spent the money more wisely and bought a one-way ticket to Pierre Schaeffer’s Paris! Doyle, however, remained and embarked instead on writing what would become the first body of Irish work in this genre.
Compositions by other composers working in the field, like Michael Alcorn, Paul Hayes, Donal Hurley, Michael Holohan and Jerome de Bromhead, are also discussed. There follows a useful ‘historical timeline’ list displaying works from 1957 to 1989, which makes for interesting reading, highlighting, for instance, Gerald Barry’s early but extensive endeavours in the genre. Given the terms of reference of the paper, de Paor has done a good job. However, the surveying of developments in electro-acoustic music since 1990 remains the greater challenge.
Gareth Cox (An Irishman in Darmstadt: Seóirse Bodley’s String Quartet No. 1) highlights Bodley’s ‘Darmstadt Period’ when he attended the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in the years 1962, 1964 and 1965. Exposed to seminars given by an extensive number of ‘masters’, Bodley is quoted as having been more influenced by ‘…the spirit of Darmstadt rather than any specific music.’ Cox is nothing if not thorough. He offers a microscopic survey of Bodley’s Quartet No. 1, outlining in detail bar changes, shifts in metronome markings, the twelve-tone row and its matrix displaying inversions and retrogrades. The first bar is deconstructed and Bodley’s scattering of the row material is clarified and presented. But Cox also sheds further light on the work through an assessment of the employment of instrumental techniques, exploitation of dynamics, aspects of Klangfarbenmelodie and the use of melodic leaps to guide us through Bodley’s use of variation technique utilised in the first movement. The second movement is subjected to similar scrutiny with an identification of the principle sub-sections and the attribution of the form to the serialist prototype. This paper has thrown light on a neglected but significant Irish quartet. Despite the microscopic investigations and observations, one gets the feeling, thankfully perhaps, that (to invoke George Braque), the only thing in art that matters is the bit that can’t be explained.
I have mentioned the microscopic investigations that some Irish works have been subjected to, but there is something in the nature of the microscopic analyses set out in this welcome collection of essays which excludes a very significant procedure – that is, a macroscopic assessment. This does, of course, present the musicologist with a much more difficult task – the evaluation of the Irish musical creative process within the context of international developments. Often, during the course of reading this publication, one gets the feeling that assessments and evaluations have been made within the all-to-often insignificant glasshouse of the Irish context, indeed, there is a sufficient level of ‘mutual quoting’ (among some of the contributors) to convey a vaguely incestual feel to the publication. Nowhere, however, did this reader encounter a serious attempt to evaluate the significance of a given work within the broader international perspective.
At the very least since Bodley’s String Quartet No. 1 (1968), it has been the intention of Irish composers to write seriously within the perspective of a European milieu. The (much-cited but significant) lack of musical infrastructures, educational systems and state finance, the resultant general national ignorance of contemporary music, the unsuitability of the genre for marketing strategies, the disgraceful lack of recordings available, the exaggerated promotion of other forms of Irish musical and cultural expression all join forces to ensure that the works of Irish composers remain relatively unappreciated here and unknown abroad. But this should not be the only concern of the musicologist and I believe that a true appraisal of Irish contemporary music will only be really achieved when we let Ó Riada sleep and get on with a less parochial and a more important process of assessment within international standards, regardless of how painful that may be, if at all, for the composers concerned. This remains a challenge for musicologists here and abroad.
Irish Musical Studies 7 – Irish Music in the Twentieth Century, edited by Gareth Cox & Axel Klein, Four Courts Press, 2003. d55.00
Notes
1. Irish Musical Studies 7 – Irish Music in the Twentieth Century, Preface.
2. ibid.
3. Harry White, The Keeper’s Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770 – 1970, Cork University Press, 1998.
4. Harry White and Michael Murphy (eds), Musical Constructions of Nationalism 1800–1945, Cork University Press, 2001.
5. I would direct the reader’s attention to: Barra Ó Séaghdha, ‘Harping On’ (a review of The Keepers Recital), Graph 3:3; Patrick Zuk, ‘Music and Nationalism’ (a review of Musical Constructions of Nationalism), JMI 2:2 & 2:3; Patrick Zuk, ‘Music and Nationalism: The Debate Continues’, JMI 3:5; and Raymond Deane, ‘Ó Riada is Dead – Long Live Ó Riada!’, JMI 1:2.
6. Harry White, ‘The Divided Imagination’ , as Note 1. (Note: all following quotes are taken from the essay reviewed unless otherwise stated)
7. Richard Pine, ‘The National Ear’ (Part 1), JMI, 3:2, 7.
8. ‘Irish music is not merely not European, it is quite remote from it. It is, indeed, closer to some forms of Oriental music. The first thing we must do, if we are to understand it, is to forget about European music. Its standards are not Irish standards; its style is not Irish style; its forms are not Irish forms.’ Seán Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritage [ed. Thomas Kinsella], Portlaoise, 1982, 20.
9. Non-European examples could include Japanese music (Takemitsu’s November Steps) or South African music (Volans’ White Man Sleeps) to mention just two more recent examples.
10. Although Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony offers the quintessential alternative to this theory, written and premièred, as it was, during the Siege of Leningrad in 1944.
11. Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry, Faber & Faber, 1995, 10.
12. NUI Maynooth, 1999.
13. Frank Corcoran in an interview with Michael Dervan, Irish Times, 22 September 1995.
14. Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, London: Faber, 1975.