Irish Art Music in the Twentieth Century

Irish Art Music in the Twentieth CenturyDie Musik Irlands Im 20. Jahrhundert. (Hildesheimer Musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten, Bd.2)by Axel KleinReview by: Harry WhiteThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 24 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 139-143Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735950 .

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This reviewer has two main criticisms to make regarding Newspapers and

Nationalism, but these criticisms have much more to do with presentation than con?

tent. The first centres on apparent carelessness in proof-reading ?

something which

may well have more to do with the publisher than the author. Misprints, omission of

words, and incomplete correction of text after cutting and pasting can be found on a

number of pages (e.g. p. 32, line 3; p. 124, line. 3; p. 140, line 12 provide just a few

examples) while non-sequiturs in the text, again suggesting hasty editing, can be found

particularly in Chapters 6 and 7 (e.g. p. 82, paragraph 1; p. 85, paragraph 2; p. 102,

paragraph 2; p. 103, paragraph l).This is not meant to be petty nit-picking ?

although it may well look like it. It is based on the conviction that sound scholarship deserves

no less than sound proof-reading and that the absence of the latter irritates the reader

who is otherwise fascinated by the content and analysis of the work. The second crit?

icism is certainly a matter for the publisher. While the use of footnotes (as opposed to

endnotes) is gready to be welcomed by the research-conscious reader, the omission of

a self-contained list of primary sources to precede the bibliography of secondary

works makes this book somewhat researcher-unfriendly. If scholarly works are to as

be accessible to the research community as to the general reading public they must

provide more coherent source-lists of primary material

- such as the excellent appen?

dix which lists, describes and analyses almost 220 provincial newspapers. This book is described by its author as 'the basis for further work', opening up an

area which has only been touched tangentially up to now. This is certainly true.

She has worked painstakingly through an

impressive range of elusive sources from,

for instance, the account books of provincial printers through personal memoirs to

newspaper and periodical articles, demonstrating how what at first sight looks like

episodic and fragmentary evidence can be woven into a convincing and coherent

analysis. Marie-Louise Legg will set many other historians (particularly those who

work in equally elusive areas of popular politicization) thinking about the role of

the nineteenth-century Irish provincial press, the personnel who worked on it, and

the nature of its readership. I only wish her brief had included the pre-famine press

which, although its readership may well have been narrower, presents a tantalizing

subject of study. More work of this type from Marie-Louise Legg will be welcome.

MAURA CRONIN

Irish Art Music in the twentieth century Axel Klein. Die Musik Irlands im 20.fahrhundert. (Hildesheimer Musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten, Bd. 2). Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 1996. 526pp.

The presence of music in Irish cultural discourse has until recently been a sporadic one, characterized by isolated but important publications which tended to prove the general rule of silence which applied to research on music in Ireland. Scholar?

ly works such as Aloys Fleischmann's Music in Ireland: A Symposium (1952), Donal

O'Sullivan's Carolan: The Life, Times and Music of an Irish Harper (1958) and Ita

WHITE, Irish Art Music in the twentieth century', Irish Review 24 (1999) 139



Hogan's Anglo-Irish Music, 1780-1830 (1966) seemed to adumbrate a wider

commitment to the development of musicology in Ireland, which failed neverthe?

less to materialize.

Within the past decade, however, a genuine sense of animation has at last begun

to inform the investigation of Irish music, just as the presence of music itself has

taken firmer hold both as a performing

art and as an issue for debate in terms of

cultural history. The cultivation of musicology lists by publishers in Cork and

Dublin (notably Cork University Press, Irish Academic Press and Four Courts

Press) is one indication of this improved state of affairs; another is the gradual but

unmistakable pursuit of Irish folk music studies as a species of ethnomusicology,

notably at the University of Limerick (and indeed elsewhere). Given this regeneration of scholarship, it is nonetheless fair to say that even the

acquisition of basic information of music in Ireland remains largely unfinished busi?

ness: there is so much work of a positivistic nature that remains to be done that the

case which I made several years ago in this journal for an encyclopedia of music in

Ireland seems to me as urgent as ever it was.1

Nevertheless, it is not too much to say that the publication of Axel Klein's book

redeems a whole century of Irish art music from musicological neglect. It is the first

systematic scrutiny of twentieth-century music in Ireland to appear in any lan?

guage, and it marks a vital achievement in the integration of Irish music studies into

European musicology.

Die Musik Irlands im 20. fahrhundert divides into three sections. The first section

'Musikgeschichte' ('History of Music') surveys the history of art music in Ireland

and is subdivided into five sub-sections: 1.'Background' (eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries); 2.'Between Colonialism and Civil War' (1897-1923); 3.'Ignorance and

Acceptance in the Irish Free State' (1923-49); 4. 'Towards a European Musical

Community' (1949-73); 5.'Irish Music as a European Avant garde' (1973-95).The second section is entitled 'Werkbetrachtungen' ('Appraisal of Works') and it surveys some fifty-five individual compositions which date from Carl Hardebeck's The Red

Hand of Ulster (1901) to KevinVolans' Dancers on a Plane (String Quartet no. 5) (1994). Each of these works receives a commentary which is at once a

sympathetic disclo?

sure of its internal compositional structure and -

to a lesser extent - an appraisal of

its place in the mosaic of Irish music in the twentieth century. The final section

('Biographien') is a series of biographies of seventy-six Irish composers (or com?

posers who have worked for a significant time in Ireland) in the twentieth century. The first section, 'Musikgeschichte', is an incisive and penetrating survey of the

condition of art music in Ireland from the late eighteenth century to the present day.

Its main strength unquestionably derives from Dr Klein's thorough absorption of

secondary sources on Irish music (his command of the literature in this field is

exemplary) and also from his determination to rely on 'oral history', by which I

mean the extensive interviews which he has conducted with Irish composers and

other musicians. While it is true that Klein does not engage to any significant extent

with the other arts in Ireland (his comparative neglect of literature may strike some

people as puzzling, but his remarks on the popularity of cinema in the 1940s are

140 WHITE, Irish Art Music in the twentieth century', Irish Review 24 (1999)



most instructive), it is equally true that he charts with absolute clarity the develop?

ment of infrastructures - such as the Feis Ceoil, the Dublin Festival of

Twentieth-Century Music and Radio Telefis Eireann -

by which art music in Ire?

land attained a significant presence during the twentieth century. Klein identifies

various phases of cultural insularity, expansion and regression insofar as art music in

Ireland is concerned and he thereby builds up a portrait which is both comprehen? sive and persuasive. A central and recurring theme of this section (as of the

commentary on individual works) is the question of an 'identity' for Irish music, and

this question is cleverly and convincingly investigated. Dr Klein looks to various

sources at the beginning of the century (Annie Patterson, et al) through the 1930s

and '40s (Daniel Corkery, Sean O Faolain, Fleischmann) and the 1950s (Brian Boy dell, Denis Donoghue) to establish the crises of understanding which marred not

only the development but also the reception of art music in Ireland in this century.

The second section,'Werkbetrachtungen', is perhaps the heart of the book and is

also the most challenging of the three. Its great merit is that Klein offers the reader a

substantial anthology of genres, styles and ideologies in Irish art music from 1900

almost to the present day. The nature of such an anthology is that (inevitably) other

specialists may prefer some works to others and propose the exclusion of some and

the inclusion of others. For example: I don't believe that Klein's choice of works

before 1930 adequately reflects the attempt to produce two idioms of Irish art music

which can be found in the music of Charles Villiers Stanford, Hamilton Harty and

Mich?le Esposito as a means (however unsuccessful) of resolving the difficulty of

reconciling indigenous and European elements in Irish music. The omission by

Klein of any work by Arnold Bax seems to me a serious difficulty here, particularly because Bax stands alone as the only composer to have received into his music the

fidl impact of the Irish Literary Revival, of which he himself was a part. At the other

end of the timescale, it might have been helpful to group together more clearly such

works as Frederick May's Songs from Prison, Sean O Riadas Nomos no. 2 and Gerard

Victory's Ultima Rerum as music which collectively attests to an effort on the part of

Irish composers to explore large-scale resources in a central European idiom.

Having made these observations, I am sympathetic to Klein's decision not to

explore the repertory exclusively in terms of genre (e.g. the development of cham?

ber music or of the symphonic repertoire), in favour of the method he has chosen

here. For one thing, he leaves the way open for more

comprehensive genre studies of

this nature; for another, he allows his anthology of representative examples to chart

the development of European idioms and techniques in Irish musical composition. The composers who figure most

prominently in this section

- Boydell, Fleis?

chmann, Victory, Se?irse Bodley and Barry -

confirm Klein's tendency to regard

the absorption of European compositional techniques as the hallmark of Irish musi?

cal maturity. If I have one serious criticism of this point of view it is that the

ensuing discussion tends to favour the notion of a 'comprehensive survey' over the

identification of problems and trends in the history of Irish music. It is not that

Klein is insensitive to such problems - his painstaking research and his command of

secondary sources ensure that this is not the case ?

but rather that one sometimes

WHITE, 'Irish Art Music in the twentieth century', Irish Review 24 (1999) 141



has difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees. The primary instance of this is in his

treatment of ? Riada. Dr Klein seems to be anxious to avoid the 'exaggerated' con?

dition of ? Riada's reputation in the 1960s and 1970s, but I think that he has

underestimated both the quality of ? Riada's musicianship and the critical pres? sures which his complex career represents. ? Riada is in my view the crucial figure in Irish music of the twentieth century, but he does not figure as such in this study. In fact, I would argue that the line from Stanford, Bax, May, Fleischmann, Eamonn

? Gallch?bhair and Boydell to ? Riada should be much more clearly delineated

than appears to be the case here. One might want to have eliminated one or two of

the analyses (on Frank Llewelyn Harrison and Howard Ferguson, for example) to

press home this point.

It is clear that in this section Dr Klein has largely and deliberately excluded that

seam of Irish music which many people in this country would regard as the 'main?

stream' development of art music (i.e. beyond the purview of commercial and

purely folk idioms). It is not simply that such figures as M?che?l ? S?illeabh?in, Shaun Davey, Bill Whelan and Patrick Cassidy are afforded nugatory treatment.2 It

is that the inclusion of many younger composers born after 1960 tends to reinforce

the notion that figures such as Whelan do not comfortably belong to an assessment

of Irish art music. While I have some sympathy with this point of view, I think that

the author might have been much more explicit in nailing his colours to the mast.

The folk music revival of the 1960s - and this is addressed by Dr Klein - undoubt?

edly influenced a good deal of orchestral music which is not mentioned in this

book. It will surprise many Irish readers that so little space is afforded to those

musical works which interface with the popular and folk traditions (almost all of ?

S?illeabh?in's oeuvre falls into this category). Given the range and breadth of

Klein's anthology of works ?

many of them by composers who have yet to attain

national, to say nothing of international significance - there may be a difficulty in

nevertheless choosing not to confront this other repertory. The exhaustive nature

of the book is curiously at odds, for example with clearly striking, even provocative

omissions, so that the absence of Shaun Davey's The Brendan Voyage silently argues

the author's dismissal of such a piece from the canon of Irish art music. I think that

Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert would have benefited from a more forthright consideration of this point of view.

Purely as a work of reference, the final section ('Biographies'), and the appendices which follow, provide much that is of enormous value in the study of Irish music

since 1900. The distinguishing feature of these entries is that they cogently address

not only the biographical facts of each composer but also the aesthetic beliefs which

have influenced the music. If I have any quibble with this section it is that many of

the composers on whom Klein was unable of find information are more important

than some of those which are included here. To have entries on Elaine Agnew, Rhona Clarke, Michael Holohan and Donal Hurley, for example, is unquestionably of interest. But such figures,

I would submit, attain unwarranted significance when

one realises that Klein has been unable (or even in some cases unwilling) to offer

information on Shaun Davey, Jim Doherty, Joseph Groocock, Ronan Guilfoyle, Paul

142 WHITE, Irish Art Music in the twentieth century', Irish Review 24 (1999)



Hayes, Piers Hellawal, T.C. Kelly, David Morris and Adrian Thomas.The omission of

Morris and Thomas prompt me to add that composers from (or working in) North? ern Ireland nevertheless enjoy

a strong presence in this work.

I have no doubt that Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert should be published in

English translation. It might benefit from being slightly re-titled as Irish Art Music in

the Twentieth Century. It is a work which richly deserves to be made available to the

English-speaking community of scholars; it would serve splendidly as a textbook

for studies in Irish music, it would also stimulate much further research. As a schol?

arly investigation it is outstandingly comprehensive notwithstanding the criticisms

offered above. Its greatest merit, perhaps, is that it concentrates on the music and on

those biographical/historical/cultural issues which are immediately germane to the

music. Its wealth of musical examples, its discrete and non-technical analyses and its

constant effort to perceive of Irish music in a European musical context are all of

immense significance for the understanding of music in this country.

Notes and References

1. Harry White, 'The Case for an Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland', The Irish Review 6

(1989), pp. 39-46.

2. The book does contain a biography of O S?illeabh?in, but he is not represented in this

second section. Bill Whelan is mentioned in passing as the composer of the music for

River dance.

HARRY WHITE

Searching in vain for national consciousness

Marc Caball. Poets and Politics: Reaction and Continuity in Irish Poetry, 1558?1625.

Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 1998. ISBN 1 85918

162 7. IR^16.95 pbk. (Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs, 8)

Historians of early modern Ireland concerned with analysing the implications of

conquest and colonization have been conscious of a need to balance the literature

of conquest with some assessment of the literature of the 'colonized'. Some work

has been done on Irish annals, but to date the principal focus has been on bardic

poetry as a key to the interpretation of political change in early modern Ireland.

The handful of historians least daunted by the technicalities of analysing early mod?

ern literary sources in the Irish language have refined their methodologies over the

last twenty years. The interpretative framework adopted in Marc Caball's Poets and

Politics is a logical progression from the work of Brendan Bradshaw, one of the first

historians to attempt to tease out the political significance of the compositions of

professional poets in Elizabethan Ireland. Caball searches through much of the late

sixteenth and early seventeenth-century bardic poetry available in print for coher?

ent answers to the questions about nationalism raised by Bradshaw. Caball's book

CUNNINGHAM, 'Searching in vain', Irish Review 24 (1999) 143



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Irish Art Music in the Twentieth Century