TRADITION AT THE CROSSROADS - PART 1: Did Planxty and The Bothy Band cross the final frontiers? Is there anything worthwhile left to say? Siobhán Longbegins the first of a three-part series examining the current state of traditional music and arts.
WITH THE PLETHORA of traditional music flooding the marketplace these days, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's keenly attuned to a 21st century audience: invigorated even, by the challenges that listeners and life in the Noughties pose.
We live in an age of unprecedented access to music, and traditional musicians jostle for space alongside an ever-swelling amalgam of alternatives in an intensely stratified musical landscape. The sheer quantity of musical activity isn't in itself a measure of traditional music's success, though, as any three-minute pop wonder from the Bay City Rollers to Girls Aloud will attest. As the Arts Council's three-year Traditional Arts Strategy draws to a close, it might be timely to explore the relevance of traditional music as we hurtle through the 21st century.
Traditional musicians sometimes complain of shrinking audiences and a consequent need to constantly tour (often abroad) if they are to eke a living from the music.
The ready availability of able musicians plying their tunes in local pubs is an obvious deterrent to punters digging deep into their pockets to meet even the most modest cover charges for paying gigs. But if we probe a little deeper, might this audience deficit be related to a certain lack of creativity on the part of some traditional musicians themselves? Even whispering such a suggestion will undoubtedly invite the ire of many who will cite the tunes' inherent qualities in defence of the music, as if that alone should be licence enough to guarantee a healthy listenership into infinity.
In truth, traditional music has enough sacred cows to fuel a lifetime's worth of Hindu burial ceremonies. Its protectors, understandably, guard its inheritance with an astringent disdain for those who dare to break the mould.
All that protectionism can result in an incurious environment, one that casts a baleful rather than an inquisitive glance at the art of the possible, rather than the craft of the predictable.
Iarla Ó Lionáird, sean-nós singer and winner of the 2008 TG4 Traditional Singer of the Year award, has always been on the edge, and often outside the boundaries of traditional music. This writer, among others, struggled with his work with the Afro Celts, and yet in hindsight, his marriage of traditional songs in the Irish language with drums and bass injected fresh life into sean-nós singing, a singing style largely neglected outside of our Gaeltacht areas.
For Ó Lionáird, forging new ground is nothing more than his own response to the creative urge within, yet he admits that his work has often alienated him from his peers. His more recent collaboration with composer Donnacha Dennehy and The Crash Ensemble with Aisling Ghealhave seen him push not only sean-nós but also his listeners to the outer limits where words and music collide as often as they coalesce in a heartstopping mix of experimental classical and traditional arrangements. This is no music for the faint-hearted. It's a signpost to bóthareens not so much less, as never before travelled.
"If one is to judge by the results, there doesn't seem to be that many new creative forms of traditional music going on in the marketplace", he suggests. "There's a lot of 'we've heard it all before' going on though, with some downright retrograde stuff going on. Well, if we take the notion of innovation as being interesting, then we can examine it closely to see what it might mean. I think there's internal innovation that you see with the likes of Martin Hayes, where he takes the tune - and it's not as if he's strapping on synthesizers, or indeed that he's playing with different outfits - but his innovation is a personal step. It's a very carefully thought-out emotional and intellectual response to the music. It's very valuable, what he's doing, because it proves that you can do it without having to sacrifice your sense of genre boundary.
'TO BE HONEST, though, there are very few others that I hear attempting to find their own personal innovative space within the music. I think one of the reasons is that they're not encouraged to do so, not emboldened to do so, and aren't aware that that's a possibility for them. In some ways, the playing of traditional music is for them a regurgitative activity: a shared sameness." Surely though, traditional musicians shouldn't be depending on some external permission to be granted to them before they light a fire in their own bellies?
"It's true that some people, by natural inclination, are bolder than others," Ó Lionáird agrees, "and some are more curious than others, and some are also less drawn to authority and to dogma than others. The people I'm drawn to in traditional music have a kind of iconoclastic bent in their nature, and their output is iconoclastic too. They do very unusual things to the tradition, but all too often, there's a lot of the same old thing. The 'wow' factor is all too rare."
The tradition is a music form steeped in competitive energy, with many of its young protagonists ruled by the whip of contest. If you loiter around the sidelines, it's the player's ability that will be remarked upon, and the question of emotional investment or personal expression may not even merit a passing mention. The rule of law laid down by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann may have some bearing on the Irish tradition's cleaving to the road well travelled. Certainly singer Niamh Parsons suspects this to be so.
"Comhaltas, while it's brilliant in some ways, can also be very damaging," she maintains. "For example, if you play a particular keyed accordion - you're laughing with Comhaltas; but if you play another type of accordion tuning, you can forget it - don't even enter [their competitions].
"Plenty of musicians have switched just so that they can do the competitions, so that if they sound like Joe Burke or Paddy O'Brien, they're in, and if they don't sound like them, they're out."
Parsons shares Ó Lionáird's frustrations with the dominance of the status quo.
"I just think that there are a lot of very closed minds in Ireland, musically," Parsons continues. "I love the pure drop, and I don't think that there's a need to break new ground in that sense. But there are an awful lot of fast players, who have great ability, but there's nothing there emotionally."
This question of self-expression is one that preoccupies Ó Lionáird too.
"Traditional music, structurally, is quite simple," he contends, "and it's not really that hard to learn, but what's hard to do in any art form is to ensure that you're using the form as just a matrix for self-expression. The form is just a structure that allows you to express yourself. A lot of what I find deficient in contemporary traditional music is the sheer lack of emotion. There's a very narrow spectrum of emotion. A lot of that has to do with very fast playing. In sean-nós, I think we're guilty of watering it down a bit. I have an instant response to the strong performers from the past: there's a huge, commanding, emotional presence from people like Darach Ó Catháin, but it's not the kind of emotion that we're trained to want these days, nor is it the kind of emotion you hear in opera. It's far more remote by nature and, possibly, more honest.
"In instrumental playing, I think there's very little room for emotion, if the emphasis is on technical prowess."
The truth is, too, that traditional musicians are exposed to as diverse a range of musical influences today as Michael Coleman was when he left Sligo for New York, fiddle in hand, in 1914, but it's as if they can't possibly permit even a trace of it to surface in their music. Iarla Ó Lionáird considers this a ridiculous approach to the music.
"I'm mindful of something that Martin Hayes told me once: he said that there are a lot of musicians going around pretending that they haven't heard things like The Beatles," he laughs. "He said that this was fallacious, to pretend that you hadn't heard these things, and to insist that 'I do this - and I don't hear anything else'.
"Classical music is very wide, and it's very malleable and any of the young composers whom I've encountered have a very broad palette that they like to choose from," Ó Lionáird adds. "They're interested in electronica, in 19th century classical composition. They're skilled in arranging for ensembles of different sizes and they also seem to have a very strong interest in sounds and voices external to their classical 'world', including what they would call 'ethnic' voices. The role that I'm cast in then, is that I provide the emotional solution, because traditional singing places a high value on emotion. It's not a florid, torrid kind of thing, but more dispassionate, hard-fought and raw. I think I'm drawn to that because my natural inclination is to be quite curious, and to put myself in harm's way, to an extent."
Traditional music is influenced by many other factors, from the way in which it is taught to how we relate to it as an expression of our own identity.
• Next Friday: Part 2, traditional music, education and innovation. The following week: Part 3, the Arts Council and the traditional arts as a mirror to our identity
