The annual event that is Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann (or the Fleadh) is the largest music festival in Ireland and holds its own among festivals across Europe. Founded by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in 1951, Mullingar was the town chosen to host the inaugural event. Its founding ethos was competition-based and it is notable that in 2024 more than 5,500 competitors took part in music, singing, lilting, dancing and storytelling competitions. The Fleadh is a significant presence in the Irish traditional music calendar.
Méabh Ní Fhuartháin is the head of Irish studies at the University of Galway and editor of the Ethnomusicology Ireland journal. In the introduction, she recognises the power of “festival time”, where “the normal rituals of everyday life and the demands of work are temporarily suspended”.
Recognising the dual roles the Fleadh played of both feting and validating traditional music at a crucial time, Ní Fhuartháin embarks on a forensic and fruitful analysis of the progression of a grassroots organisation to a professional one in under two decades.
Setting her study against the backdrop of significant social change, not to mention the emergence of very different and independent traditional music initiatives – including the founding of Na Píobairí Uilleann and the Willie Clancy Summer School, as well as the visionary contribution of Seán Ó Riada – Ní Fhuartháin brings a subtlety and depth to her analysis of the diffuse influences, threats and supports that shaped the Fleadh during its formative years.
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Ní Fhuartháin brings a clear-headed, unbiased perspective to her analysis, mining the Fleadh’s strengths while also recognising that a competition-based ethos flies in the face of the essence of creative expression for many traditional musicians, dancers and singers, as well as listeners.
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She further delves deep beneath Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann’s assumptions underpinning competition in a fascinating chapter: The right kind of traditional music: Adjudication at the Fleadh. The notion of standardised or exhibition styles inherent in a competition culture is at odds with the local, regional and personal styles that define traditional music, not only in Ireland but elsewhere.
Ní Fhuartháin’s great strength is her ability to marry a bird’s-eye view with a forensic attention to the colourful as well as pedantic details that defined the first two decades of the Fleadh.
