"TRADITION is change." That mantra, first spoken by Dr Micheal Suilleabhain during the his opening "bun fight" debate with Tony Mac Mahon, became the keynote of the Crosbhealach an Cheoil conference on tradition and change in Irish music at the Temple Bar Music Centre in Dublin at the weekend.
The latest call to the ramparts to defend our tradition has come in the wake of Hummingbird's River of Sound series on traditional music which ran last year on RTE and BBC. But it soon became obvious that the call echoes down the years and, perhaps, the centuries.
For what we call traditional music is, if not a fashion victim, at least interested in fashion. Tommy Munnelly, a folklorist with UCD reminded us, in his concluding address, how the mandolin had made a place for itself in the music in the 1960s, and then had given way to the Greek bouzouki; how rare it was now to see a piano accordion at a session; how even the media image of the music has changed: "Singing ganseys are now decidedly threadbare."
Joe O'Donovan, dance tutor at UCC, told us how a certain Bean Ui Chorain had made up ceili dances such as the Walls of Limerick and the Siege of Ennis, and how the Gaelic League banned set dances as "foreign" once there were enough makey uppy dances to employ an evening. The set dances were, he said, traditional dances for two couples, adapted to the French style to become dances for four couples.
With O Suilleabhain positing a genre of "trad pop", it became clear that popular culture would always alight, magpie like, on folk tradition, and not everyone was going to like the result." Examples of popularisation not to Tommy Munnelly's taste include the high profile given to performers from outside the tradition who make unsuccessful attempts to sing in it - such as Sting's on The Long Black Veil and Kate Bush on Lunny's new Common Ground album.
Perhaps the problem is more that people are still so insecure about the value of the tradition that they give these outings too much credence - it is not as if they are morally wrong, they are just not to everyone's taste.
Tony Mac Mahon, the radio producer and accordionist who has been River of Sound's vocal opponent since his comments on a hagiographical Late Late Show, has very different ideas. He seems to have a fierce belief in the tradition as "a gift of nature, dispensed with the abandon of wild flowers", rather than as an artifice endlessly rebuilt by many hands.
This picture of polarisation hides the warmth and humour of his exchange with O Suilleabhain. He may have described O Suilleabhain's music as "boring", but touched his shoulder in solidarity as he walked across the stage.
The conference, which attracted more than 300 punters and was organised by a voluntary committee, including writer, flautist and singer Fintan Vallely and fiddler Liz Doherty, was dynamic, exhilarating and absolutely hilarious. It is depressing, however, that neither Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann, Na Pioboiri Uilleann nor RTE could find a speaker for the conference; let them beware the slag heap of out of fashion tradition, where the threadbare ganseys lie.
