Irish Music Orientalism Author(S): Aileen Dillane and Matthew Noone Source: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

Irish Music Orientalism Author(s): Aileen Dillane and Matthew Noone Source: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 20, No. 1 (EARRACH / SPRING 2016), pp. 121-137 Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44807170 Accessed: 08-07-2021 10:29 UTC

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Aileen Dillane and Matthew Noone

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Irish Music Orientalism

In a 2005 review of Joseph Lennon s Irish Orientalism (2004), Nicholas Allen commends the author for the manner in which he has opened up "new perspectives on a discourse" that continue to be relevant for "the new century," adding that the "phenomenon of Irish orientalism needs further examination . . . and critical attention" from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.1 One of those new perspectives is surely that of music. Studying Irish music through the prism of Orientalism, and expanding discussions on Irish Orientalism to include music, has much to offer to Irish Studies more broadly - particularly given that Irish music has long been at the center of discussions on different registers of Irish identity over the centuries.2 The central tenet of Edward Said s seminal 1978 study, Orientalismy is that nations appropriate from others to define themselves and that the Orient is one of Europe's "deepest and most recurring images of the Other ... a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes [and] remarkable experiences."3 These ideas are familiar terrain for anyone who reads about Irish music and its connections to landscape and memory.4 But Said also cautions that the Orient is an invention "with no corresponding reality" and a construction based on myths that "has helped to define Europe as its contrasting image, idea,

1. Nicholas Allen, review of Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History, New Hibernia Review, 9, 1 (Spring, 2005), 157-59. See also Michael Griffin, "Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intel- lectual History (review)," Field Day Review , 1 (2005), 268-69. 2. See: Grattan Flood, Introduction Sketch of Irish Musical History: A Compact Record of the Progress of Music in Ireland During a Thousand Years (London: William Reeves, 1904); Tomas Ó Canainn Traditional Music in Ireland (Cork: Ossian, 1993); Breandán Breathnach, Folk Music and Dances of Ireland: A Comprehensive Study Examining the Basic Elements of Irish Folk Music and Dance Tradi- tions (1977; Dublin: Mercier, 1996); Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, The Pocket History of Irish Traditional Music (Dublin: O'Brien, 1998); and Helen O'Shea, The Making of Irish Music (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008). 3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 1-2. 4. See Sally K. Sommers Smith, "Landscape and Memory in Irish Traditional Music," New Hibernia Review, 2, 1 (Spring, 1998), 132-44.

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW / IRIS ÉIREANNACH NUA, 20:i (EARRACH / SPRING, 20l6), 121-137

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism personality [and] experience."5 If Orientalism is a myth-building project, how does it operate in the realm of Irish music? And is its operation there any different from what happens in other artistic and cultural realms? A powerful iteration of Orientalism in musical terms may be found in a 1970 Danish documentary in which the celebrated Irish composer, musician, and scholar Sean Ó Riada (1931-1971) tells the interviewer that "Ireland has a highly developed traditional music, very complex, very sophisticated, but it's more Ori- ental than Western," and goes on to compare it with different Oriental traditions, including Indian classical music.6 In the course of the interview, Ó Riada not only recreates the Orient through sound; he also uses the Orient to validate ancient Irish cultural practices, which he explicitly locates as standing in opposi- tion to Europe. This "perceived otherness" is something by which Irish cultural identity has long been shaped, a point that John O'Flynn asserts in The Irishness of Irish Music (2008). 7 But Ó Riada takes it a step further, by harnessing alter ity as a double Otherness in order to copper-fasten the distinctiveness of ancient Irish musical heritage. Ó Riada's allusion to Irish-Indian sonic connections may rest upon colonial sympathies and cultural links between India and Ireland dating back to the nineteenth century and earlier.8 But can this account for the Indian-inspired music Orientalism that main- tains a sustained presence in Irish "musicking" currently?9 Among other contemporary performers and composers working in this vein, we find the traditional group Trúir, which has utilized an Indian drone instrument, the tanpura, to accompany newly composed sean-nós ("old style") songs.10 Irish traditional and jazz musicians under the leadership of Ronan Guilfoyle have toured, col- laborated, and recorded with South Indian musicians in his ensemble named Khanda.11 The Ó Snodaigh brothers of the Irish group Kila were recently filmed

5. Said, 5. 6. "Seán Ó Riada 1970," YouTube clip uploaded on May 8, 2011, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=bSno7vfWwKM. 7. John O'Flynn, The Irishness of Irish Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 193. 8. For a more thorough exploration of connections between Ireland and India, see Ireland and In- dia: Colonies, Culture and Empire , ed. Maureen O'Connor and Tadhg Foley (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006). 9. The musicologist Christopher Small coined the term "musicking" in order to emphasize that music is not an object or "thing," but rather, an activity encompassing the acts of composing, performing, listening and other acts. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 10. See the albums Peadar Ó Riada, Martin Hayes, and Caoimhin O Raghallaigh, Triúr sa Draighe- an, Ó Riada, 2010; Peadar Ó Riada, Martin Hayes, and Caoimhin Ó Raghallaigh, Triúr Aris, Ó Riada, 2012; Peadar Ó Riada, Martin Hayes, and Caoimhin O Raghallaigh, Triur Omós , Ó Riada, 2013. All three albums were self-published by Ó Riada. 11. Khanda, Tale of Five Cities (Improvised Music Company, 2007).

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism on a trip to India as part of the documentary Cheoil Chuairt , broadcast on the Irish-language service TG4. They met and played with a variety of Indian musicians, and their interactions unmistakably suggested connections between their Irish culture and the "ancient" one they encountered.12 And Mícheál Ó Súilleab- háin, the founder-director of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, has composed a piece titled "At the Still Point of the Turning World," which uses Indian musical sounds, instruments, and compositional techniques.13 In light of these and other examples, a provisional definition of "Irish Music Orientalism" might be the adoption, adaptation, and application of perceived Irish-Oriental cultural sympathies - both real and imagined - through music making and its surrounding discourses. Musically, it manifests as the appropriation of the broad attributes and musical indicators that have stereotypically signified, or have come to be associated with, the Orient.14 What is at stake in these musical collaborations and elaborations? And what is there to be gained by critically examining Irish culture through music from a postcolonialist perspective, as an Orientalist critique implies? As David Lloyd argues, "the study of one given [postcolonial] site may be profoundly suggestive for the understanding of another" as a consequence of the "remarkably diverse ways its rationalizing drive is deflected by the particularities of each colonized culture."15 This "deflection" of colonial logic is uniquely exemplified by the way in which Irish artists have drawn upon Orientalist imagery from the Empire. Rather than accepting such imagery wholesale, many Irish collectors, composers, and performers have inverted it through subversive poetic and musical re- imaginings. In other cases, there has been the continued perpetuation of certain British Orientalist forms that prove nonetheless compelling or worthy of study in an Irish Music Studies context precisely because of Ireland's relationship with

12. Cheoil Chuairt (Teilifís na Gaeilge, 2008). 13. Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Gaiseadh/Fìow'mg , Virgin, 1992. More broadly, within such genres as "world music," "New Age fusion," and "global beat," there are a number of artists who draw either explicitly or more metaphysically from Irish-Indian connections such as the fusion group Delhi 2 Dublin, We're All Desi , Westward Records, 2013; Indo-Celt, Land of Dreams, Indocelt, 2005; and Chin- maya Dunster and Vidroha Jamie, Celtic Ragas , New Earth Records, 1998. 14. Another strand of the Orientalism in Irish music deals with connections to the Middle East and the Arabic world, particularly in the realm of vocal music. For example, Bob Quinn has asserted there is a clear connection between Arabic and Irish sean-nós singing traditions, whereby the sounds and culture were circulated through age-old maritime trade and cultural routes. See Bob Quinn, TheAtlantean Irish: Ireland's Oriental and Maritime Heritage (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1986). A further example of performed connections between the Arabic-Muslim traditions and Irish-language song, is the sean-nós singing Imam from London, Muhammad Al-Hussaini, who competed in the Fleadh Cheoil Irish-language singing competition to great acclaim. Mark Hennessy, "How a London Imam became a Singer," Irish Times , 16 March 2015. 15. David Lloyd, Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), 3.

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism the Empire.16 It is therefore worth reiterating Lloyd s insistence that although Ireland has undergone and continues, in part, to undergo colonialism, its mani- festation in quite specific cultural forms in Ireland is due to "multiple and different social imaginar ies at work."17 This rings particularly true for music, which has to grapple with the very real issue of how one can study and adapt other music cultures and engage in the more equalizing phenomenon of intercultural exchange, without reifying essentialist binaries of East versus West. In Ó Riadas 1970 comments, for example, he both creates East and West as equals (where Ireland is West) while simultaneously relocating Ireland within an Orientalist musical geography (where Ireland is Other). In doing so, Ó Riada was drawing upon an older idea of Ireland as connected to the Orient, not just one based on sounds and musical structures. Lennons study describes how a tradition of Irish contact - both real and imagined - with what is commonly termed "the Orient" has existed from the ninth century up to the present day. Links between Celtic and Oriental cultures, he observes, "existed independently in native Irish and Gaelic culture as far back as Irish writing extends."18 The exact processes by which Oriental sympathies, whether real or imagined, have developed within the context of Irish traditional music has been sparsely documented. Similarly, little attention has been given to Irish Orientalism in terms of Western art music in Ireland.19 Yet, in the first collections of Irish folk music from the late 1700s until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Indo-Celtic origin legends not only persisted but were also adapted into the practices of musicians, and played a distinct role in the emer- gence and construction of Irish cultural identity. Imperial British texts, which included images of the barbaric Scythians as

16. See Harry White, The Keeper's Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770-1970 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999). Though the term "Orientalism" does not appear in his book, Whites interrogation of the relationship between Irish traditional music and what he sees as the failure to establish a robust, indigenous art music tradition in Ireland is an important consideration here. Given the pervasive ambivalence toward imperialism felt by Irish writers, composers and artists of all traditions, Irish Orientalism offers a different perspective on musical production and creation that is potentially less sectarian and divisive. 17. Lloyd, 3. Said himself has written that "The signs of many such common features seem to me to be unmistakable, since what drew me to Irish culture and history in the first place were the underly- ing connections to be drawn between knowledge and power that I had first studied in the context of Orientalism." Said, "Afterword: Reflections on Ireland and Postcolonialism," Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Clare Carroll and Patricia King (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 177. 18. Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse Univer- sity Press, 2004), xv. 19. Axel Klein's work on composer biographies is a notable exception to the neglect of Orietalism in art music. See, for example Alex Klein, "Butler, Thomas O'Brien," in The Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland, ed. Harry White and Barra Boydell (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013), 142-43.

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism ancestors of the Celts and were often explicit in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century depictions of the Irish, had long compared Ireland with Oriental cultures in order to, as Lennon writes, "textually barbarize Ireland."20 This typically as- sumed construction is one of what in postcolonial studies is called the "posi- tional superiority" of the West over the East. Within the Irish Music Oriental aesthetic, however, the inverse of this is true: in that context, music serves as a prime example to demonstrate the noble, and arguably Oriental antiquity of Irish culture, leading to such claims as Joseph Cooper Walker s declaration in Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786) that "music was cultivated in Ireland when melody was scarcely known in other countries."21 India - rather than being presented and sometimes denigrated as the barbaric and sensuous Other - has had an imaginative and allegorical potency for Irish writers and intellectuals, including composers and musicians. Although music's particular role in the actual and imagined encounters between Ireland and India has been largely unexplored, even a quick look across both Western art music traditions of composition and Irish tune collecting by Irish antiquarians finds references to India, and the Orient in general, in Irish music. More interestingly, these are not necessarily based on actual material connections and encounters but often, rather, on imagined ones. In 1784, Walker asserted that "Irish music is, in some degree, distinguished from the music of every other nation, by an insinuating sweetness, which forces its way inextricably to the heart, and there diffuses ecstatic delight, that thrills through every fiber of the frame, and agitates or tranquilizes the soul."22 In many of the early collections spurred by Revivalist impulses, writers ascribed mystical and neo-classical attributes in the ancient music of Ireland that found a mirroring in the musical systems of the Near East and, especially, in the Indian classical tradition. These writers believed that Irish music was infused with sensuous characteristics of the Orient, in terms of emotion and passion. The use of minor scales, and of flattened sixths and other accidentals (pitches outside expected or more familiar scales) were held up as musical and emotional indicators of the ancient Eastern origins of Irish music. This, in turn, had the effect of further distinguishing Irish music from the formality, logic, and tonality of Europe and, by extension, of the British Empire. In the nineteenth century, George Petrie expresses the romantic and subtly political imagining of Irish- Indian musical affinity in his 1855 Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland. Petrie discusses three separate lullabies as bearing a striking resemblance to similar melodies from India. In his reflections on the air

20. Lennon, 52. 21. Quoted in White, The Keeper's Recital , 21. 22. Walker, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards , quoted in White, 20.

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"Seo Hú Leo/ he describes "its strong affinity to the lullaby tunes of the Hind- ostán and Persia."23 Petrie seems to base this comparison on the use of a minor/ modal key and on the somewhat melancholic or plaintive mood of the piece, which he takes as evidence of an Eastern, as opposed to Western, aesthetic. For Petrie,

such affinity with Eastern melody is not confined to the nurse tunes of Ireland, but that it will no less be found in the ancient funeral caoines , as well as in the ploughman's tunes, and other airs of occupation - airs simple indeed in construction, but always touching in expression and I cannot but consider it as an evidence of the early antiquity of such melodies in Ireland.24

Petrie also contends that the mythological nature of the song - which relates to the Tuatha De Dannan - provides further evidence of Asian links. As it is connected with "a fairy legend," Petrie asserts that "this affinity must be regarded with interest by those who trace such superstitions to an Eastern origin."25 In- terestingly, this is the same George Petrie who had dismantled the myth of Irish round towers as being built by "colonizing Oriental Phoenicians," arguing instead that they were the product of the Normans.26 This different treatment of musical materials - as repositories for Indian connections, and therefore for Orientalist imaginings - as opposed to archaeological materials turns up repeatedly in the writing of the early antiquarians. The inconsistency points to the peculiar characteristic of music as a medium that seemingly allows for the evasion of logical scrutiny, because it appeals directly to the emotions. This presumption of a heightened emotional and non-logical dimension to music, is likewise a discussion with older origins, and one that continues to persist today.27 The national instrument of Ireland, the harp, would also become implicated in this discussion. The harp came to be seen as evidence of an ancient and noble past and represented an "intense nostalgic longing for a misplaced identity."28 It is hardly surprising then, that the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792 and the sub- sequent publishing of Bunting's Ancient Music of Ireland materials up to 1840

23. George Petrie, Ancient Music of Ireland (London: Holden, 1855), 106. 24. Petrie, 169. 25. Petrie, 106. 26. Lennon, 109. 27. For example, see June Skinner Sawyer, Celtic Music: A Complete Guide (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), which perpetuates many such ideas around the "ancientness" and "authenticity" as well as interconnectedness of Irish with other Celtic musics. For a more critical approach, see The Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe, ed. Martin Stokes and Philip Bohlman (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), in particular Bohlman and Stokes's introduction, 1-26. 28. Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, "An Orient of Time," Cork Review (1992), 45. This is an article first first featured in the program notes for the Harp festival Cairde na Cruite in Dublin, June 1992 .

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism both served as important points when Irish Orientalism was introduced into the aim of music theorizing.29 Buntings collection claims that several melodies represent something of the old harp tradition of Gaelic court life, and as such, are remnants of an ancient high culture. These examples have gone on to inspire practical application and re-interpretation of Orientalist ideas in the twentieth and twenty-first century - an interpretation that has also been encouraged by studies on the linguistic and sonic links between Sanskrit and old Irish.30 Joan Rimmer, a scholar of the harp, has suggested that the Irish word for harp, cruit , can be linked etymologically with the Indo-European root ker , meaning bent or curved.31 One type of tune in particular, the "Hindoostani Air" that was widely included in nineteenth-century British and Irish parlor music provides an excel- lent example of, as Gerry Farrell remarks in Indian Music and the West (1997), the ways in which "musical material changes when it crosses divides between musical cultures," where the structure and logic of one musical system is sub- sumed into the paradigms and structural demands of the other.32 Farrell com- pellingly argues that in the history of Indian music and the West, the "Hindu- stani Air" truly illustrates how music functioned as a bridge between cultures, an aesthetic realm that operated outside wider political and economic structure."33 The "Hindustani Air" encapsulates the particular Orientalist commodification and mistranslation of culture from the perspective of the Orientalist gaze, rather than from actual ear of the colonizer.34 Farrell notes, too, how the instrumental melodies that were adapted, transformed, and often put to English lyrics, were often derived from folk tunes that accompanied the sensuous and rhythmically "strange and convoluted" Indian dance performances, rather than from high art.

29. See Edward Bunting, The Ancient Music of Ireland Arranged for the Piano Forte: To Which is Pre- fixed a Dissertation on the Irish Harp and Harpers , Including an Account of the Old Melodies of Ireland, (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1840). Bunting also published two earlier collections titled A General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland , vol. I (1796) and vol. II (1809). 30. A particularly interesting recent study is Mahesh Radhakrishnan, "Irish traditional singing and South Indian Carnatic singing: Performance, language choice and language ideologies, and musi- colinguistic artistry," Ph. D diss. Macquarie University, 2012. See also his more recent presentation at the Moore Institute, NUIG, titled "South Indian Carnatic singing and Seán-nós: an ethnographic, musical and linguistic comparison of two distinct performance traditions," http://www.nuigalway.ie/ mooreinstitute/site/view/1804/. 31. Joan Rimmer, The Irish Harp (Dublin: Cultural Relations Committee. 1969), 22. 32. Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 37. See also Reginald Byron and Jamila Massey, The Music of India (1976: London: Kahn and Avril, 1993), especially the chapter "Indian Music and the West," 85-92. 33. Farrell, 5. 34. For further contextualization, see Music and Orientalism in The British Empire, 1780S-1940S, ed. Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007).

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Such folk tunes were transformed for the "genteel bourgeois listening pleasures" of Western audiences in collections of "Hindustani Airs."35

A number of works by Irish composers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrate an Orientalist influence, though they do not necessarily embody the actual sounds of the Orient. These include "The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan" (1887) by Charles Villiers Stanford; "The Hindoo Widow" (1848) by Wellington Guernsey (1817-1885), with words by H. Forbes White; "Dinah Doe. The Golden-Haired Darkey: Indian pastorale from 'My Aunts Secret', "(1880) by James Lynam Molloy, with words by F. C. Burnand; "Oriental Suite" op. 47 for orchestra (1900) by Michele Esposito, an Italian composer (1855-1929) who lived most of his life in Dublin; and "Orientale" for oboe and piano (1911) and "Fantasy Scenes (from an Eastern Romance)" for orchestra (1919), by Hamilton Harty (1879-1941). 36 Such compositions evidence a British and Irish imagining of the East, and of India in particular, based on stories and ideas and musical tropes of Otherness that were already in circulation. It is important not only to understand many of these composers as subjects of Empire, but also to see them as distinctly Irish Orientalists. The lives and works of each of these composers warrant further unpacking to locate locating them within an Irish-inflected Brit- ish Orientalism, as well in a broader "Irish" Orientalism. The music produced, by and large, was not about faithfully recreating the sounds and modes from traditions in the East of the Orient, but rather, about creating and mediating the Orient through western musical languages and modes. Other composers from Ireland in the same period engaged with the Indian world in more direct ways. Thomas O'Brien Butler's (1861-1915) Irish-language opera "Muirgheis" (1903) was written while the composer lived in Kashmir, In- dia. O'Brien Butler also dedicated his song "My Little Red Colleen (Mo Cailin Beag Ruadh)" (1900) to "His Highness Rajendrah Singh, Maharajah of Patiala G. C.S.I." The degree to which "authentic" sounds permeate such works is a discussion for another day; what is clear is that there were Irish composers who had experiences of being "there," whose works warrant closer attention in any sketching of an Irish Music Orientalism. The British composer Adela Maddison (1862-1929), who composed two songs on texts by Indian authors - one "Na- tional Hymn for India" (lyrics by K. N. Das Gupta, 1917) and the other "If you would have it so" (lyrics by Rabindranath Tagore, 1919) - also spoke to an inti- mate encounter with India, and with a greater sense of reciprocity.37

35. Farrell, 31. 36. We are indebted to Axel Klein for his help in putting together this list. Klein has written widely on these composers, including entries in the Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland (2013). 37. See Axel Klein, "Adela Maddison (1863-1929) and the Difficulty of Defining an Irish Composer," presented at the "Women and Music in Ireland "conference, National University of Ireland, May- nooth, April 17, 2010, http://axelklein.de/academic-papers/ .

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In general, the period around the Celtic Revival is understood by many scholars, including Lennon, as the most recognized moment of Irish Orien- talism in literary terms. One well known example is the relationship between Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and such Irish artists as W. B. Yeats and James Cousins.38 Exotic images of the East, both in its music and mythol- ogy, provided a powerful symbol for poets and writers in response of their longing for an ancient unbroken cultural heritage; Harry White has gone so far as to assert that the impact of "music upon the Irish literary imagination" can seem "more significant than the impact of music" itself.39 A Hiberno-Indian mythos provided a counterhegemonic force against a shared colonial oppression of the Empire, and it entered the stream of "Celtic" poetry indirectly through sensuous and sometimes, musical analogy. James Cousins, as an Irish poet living in Madras for most of his adult life, firmly believed in the "shared sensibilities between Celtic and Oriental peoples," suggesting that so "subtly had the Aryan-influence intermingled with the Indian . . . that poets found their inmost nature expressed in Indian modes."40 Though not a musician, Cousins was compelled to make recommendations for an All- India music conference based on an Irish model for "those who have at heart the fostering of the musical art as on of the highest expressions of the Genius of India."41 Central to his work was the notion of samadharsanay a concept that can be translated as "synthetic vision" related to an expansion of consciousness, an example of the burgeoning post-long-nineteenth-century artistic globalized outlook that understands place "through metaphysical elaboration, mysticism and exoticism."42 India, it seems, was viewed as something of a spiritual mentor to Europe. Such connections between music and spirituality, by way of an Irish-

38. Tagore's relationship with Yeats is well documented. See: Roy F. Foster, W. B. Yeats , A Life , vol I: The Apprentice Mage , 1865-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and vol II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Sirshendu Majumdar, Yeats and Tagore: A Com- parative Study of Cross-Cultural Poetry, Nationalist Politics, Hyphenated Margins and The Ascendancy of the Mind (Pal Alto: Académica Press, 2013). For a discussion of Yeats in relation to music more specifically, see Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). On Tagore's relationship with James Cousins, see Lennon, 324-70. 39. White, 97. 40. James Cousins, The Cultural Unity of Asia (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1922), p. 160. Cousins was a member of the Theosophical Society and was invited by Madame Blavatksy to move to Madras, modern-day Chennai, to become and editor for the Theosophical journal. Dur- ing his residency, he befriended many key Indian personalities including Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. 41. James Cousins, "A Plea for an Indian Musical Festival," New India (April 22 1916), quoted in Len- non, 334. 42. Lennon, 334.

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Indian imagination, would persist throughout the twentieth century in various guises, particularly in the work of Sean Ó Riada. Ó Riada is often credited as the seminal agent provocateur in relation to the Indian Othering of Irish music. The Irish Traditional Music Archive defines Irish traditional music as "European music ... in structure, rhythmic pattern, pitch arrangement [and] thematic content of songs," adding that, "it most closely re- sembles the traditional music of Western Europe."43 Echoing his argument in the 1970s interview on Danish television, Ó Riada insists in his influential collection of lectures Our Musical Heritage (1982) that "the first thing to note, obviously enough, is that Irish music is not European."44 Ó Riada extends his thesis even further by proposing that "Irish music is not merely not European, it is quite remote from it. It is, indeed, closer to some forms of Oriental music."45 He based this assertion largely on a differentiation between the terms of folk and classical music, and on his own quest for a "native Irish art," in which traditional Irish music became equated with the classical music traditions of the Orient, most notably India.46 In the 1970 television interview, Ó Riada stated

I would differentiate between folk and classical. When you say classical, you mean European classical. There is not a European classical tradition in this country. There is on the other hand a highly developed traditional music, which because it is aurally transmitted, must not be considered as folk music. For example, in the Orient you have music which is aurally transmitted but is still highly developed. . . . Here we also have highly developed traditional music, very complex, very sophisticated, but its more Oriental than Western . . . it's improvised . . . very much like Indian rag.47

This highlights Ó Riada s general view, though it only touches on his percep- tion of the musical indicators of Oriental and Celtic influence on Irish culture, such as the use of improvisation. Though is difficult to find details regarding O Riadas theories of cross-cultural links, he does refer to the importance of instruments with an unfixed scale - such as fiddle and the voice - because of

43. "What Is Irish Traditional Music?" is a 1991 pamphlet reproduced on the Irish Traditional Music Archive, web site, http://www.itma.ie/. 44. Seán Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritagey ed. Thomas Kinsella and Tomás Ó Canainn (Mountrath: Dolmen Press, 1981), 1. 45. Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritage , 1. 46. Though influential, Ó Riada is certainly not without critics. Harry White offers a comprehensive and largely negative assessment of Ó Riada, lamenting his journey from art music to Irish music, "from serialism to Seán-nós," and positing that "the curve of Ó Riada's musical imagination led downwards." White, 126. 47. "Seán Ó Riada 1970" (see note 6). A rag (or raga) is somewhere between a scale/mode and a more complete piece of music, an organizational unit for composition, and an improvisation with particular emotional and temporal associations.

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism their use of microtonal nuances; he singles out the importance of the drone; and he repeatedly returns to the image of cyclical symbols. All of these traits do, in fact, bear a resemblance to Indian classical music structures and associated philosophies. And yet, Ó Riada s connecting of the Oriental world and Irish traditional music relies more on an assertion of fundamental differences between Euro- pean and an older precolonial Irish culture than it does on clear musical syner- gies and commonalities. The main artistic form upon which Ó Riada drew his comparison between Irish and Oriental music was that of the circle, as manifest in the cyclical nature of Irish art. Taken as a whole, such connections between Irish, Orientalist, and Celtic art and music helped to create an intellectually and emotionally seductive idea about the noble origins of Irish music.48 Although Ó Riada did not fully explore these connections in his lifetime, such ideas and imaginings continue to resonate. This influence includes the introduction of ensemble playing, which is primarily based on an Eastern model such as Arabic instrumental ensembles; in the development of new instruments, notably the bodhrán (Irish frame drum); and in the elevation of the music from a "folk" tradition to the global concert stage The folk revival movement that began in the 1950s, in which Ó Riada played a key role, can also been linked to an uneasy expression of Ireland s emerging postcolonial nationalism.49 This movement, and many of Ó Riadas ideas, have both been critiqued as overtly romantic, culturally idealistic, and intrinsically nation- alistic.50 Despite these misgivings, Ó Riada has inarguably exerted an enduring influence on musicians, scholars, and audiences alike. Many of his ideas have been taken up by modern musicians and applied in practice, most notably by his son, Peadar.51 In particular, the harp tradition of Ireland, through Ó Riadas rein-

48. For discussions on Celtic music specifically, see Malcolm Chapman, "Thoughts on Celtic Mu- sic," in Ethnicity, Identity, Music, ed. Martin Stokes (London: Berg, 1994). See also Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), in which Chapman aims to, and succeeds (within the terms of a deconstructionist project), expose the lack of continuity in the notion of a unified Celtic identity from the ancient past to the present. 49. This could be summed up by drawing upon Lennon's argument from a literary perspective that this desire for Oriental sympathies "may stem from Irish culture's collective need for a certain and noble past in light of its uncertain present and future." Lennon, 161. 50. See: Helen O'Shea, The Making of Irish Music (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008), where the author asserts that "Yearning for symbols of an imagined past are driven by the estrangement and alienation symptomatic of modernity and central to the homogenizing requirements of the modern nation-state in the face of ethnic and cultural diversity. Folk revival movements, such as the one that has promoted Irish Traditional Music since the 1950's, accommodate such longings." Chapman, 2. 51. Peadar Ó Riada (b. 1954) is a well-known composer, musician, choir leader, film-maker, and radio broadcaster. He has continued the tradition of Cór Chul Aodha, the choir set up by his father, and he has recorded and produced a number of CDs. His website is http://www.peadaroriada.ie.

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism terpretation, became an important touchstone for representing the indigenous, noble court music of Ireland which is seen as similar to the Indian tradition.52 Ó Riada argued that Edward Buntings manuscripts from the Belfast Harp Fes- tival of 1792 provided evidence that the harping tradition in ancient court life could be favorably compared with the modal improvisational model of North Indian classical court music.53 Earlier, Ó Riada had used a similar understanding of Indian music to reinvigorate the medieval harp culture, and introduced the harpsichord into his own playing as part of this. Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, his student and inheritor of his ideas, would write in 2004 that one could translate "the sitar into the harp, and the Maharaja into the Taoiseach or Chieftain of the Irish clan, and the equation was set."54 Various scholars have interrogated the idea of a connective tissue between Irish music and Indian music. For example, the musicologist Fanny Feehan has compared the slow air "Mabhana Luimni" to Indian raga presentation formulations:

Like the Indian, the Irish singer uses whatever pitch is convenient. As in some ragas the great Irish songs revolve around three of four notes which recur again and again. "Marbhana Luimni" was composed, we are told, about 1635, but it is conceivable that the tune which circles like a culture over a corpse round the notes E flat, F natural, G natural, B flat, G natural, F natural, and E flat could be transformed by changing the rhythm and altering the pitch upwards a tone; the result, with a little imagination, could approach a raga style.55

But to be sure, it requires more than a little imagination to allow a rendition of a slow air to be construed as raga style. Feehan argues that "it is in the interpretation of the melody, and chiefly with regard to ornamentation, that some of the most significant resemblances between Irish and Eastern music can be

52. Ó Riada would not have been the first to do this. There are many precedents, not least Edward Bunting, Ancient Music of Ireland and Thomas Moore (1779-1851) and his Irish Melodies, published from 1808 to 1837, which featured "ancient" melodies drawn from Bunting's work and set to the poetry and lyrics of Moore (see in particular "The Harp that Once in Taras Halls"). Moore's Melodies was subsequently reset by Charles Villiers Stanford in 1895, the same composer who wrote "The Veiled Prophet Khorassan" (1877) and also set many Irish tunes. See Charles Villiers Stanford, The Irish Melodies, Op 60, by Thomas Moore (London: Boosey, 1895). Moore himself wrote on Orientalist themes, notably in Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818). 53. See Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, "'Around the House and Mind the Cosmos': Music Dance and Identity in Contemporary Ireland" in Music in Ireland 1848-1998, ed. Richard Pine (Cork: Mercier Press, 1999), 79. 54. Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Ceol na nUsal: Sean Ó Riada and the Search for a Native Irish Art Music (Cork: Mercier Press, 2004), 2. 55. Fanny Feehan, "Suggested Links between Eastern and Celtic Music," in The Celtic Consciousness, ed. Robert O'Driscoll (New York: George Braziller, 1982), 334.

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism observed."56 Or perhaps the opposite is true; the approach to ornamentation and interpretation of melody is one of the most significant differences between Irish and Indian music. As Feehan admits,

the Indian quarter tone seems more predictable than those heard from a traditional Irish singer in Connemara. This would seem to suggest that raga is a con- sciously acquired means of communication whereas the singer of an Irish slow air will, within a short space of time, produce elaborate ornamentation entirely as the spirit moves him or her.57

In this presentation of the fundamental difference between Irish traditional music and Indian classical music, the Orientalist specter of Ó Riada looms large. Both Irish music and Indian classical music use ornamentation and melodic variation, but in Indian classical music the theoretical frame for improvisation is explicit, elaborate, and built upon completely different cycles of time and rhythm. Despite the frequent scholarly assumption that melody and the use of ornamentation provide significant resemblances between Irish and Eastern music, detailed and sustained comparisons are few and far between.58 Feehan concedes that speculation on the Asian origin of Irish music surfaces from time to time and that "what is often posited depends on the predisposition of the enquirer."59 More recently, Lillis Ó Laoire has described a trend to compare Irish music in this manner as "insistent eroticization," which "deliberately removes" it "from the real, and places it in one hermetic, ahistorical, timeless, category, rendering it mysterious, eastern and non-European." Ó Laoire argues that these claims are highly exaggerated and despite "affinities of approach," cannot be read as proof of common origin. This pursuit, he asserts, is an attempt to bestow a quality of superiority on the tradition, implicating it "in the discourse of Orientalism, however inadvertently."60 In this regard, Ó Laoire may be seen to be directly critiquing Ó Riada who essentially performed this musical sleight of hand in Our Musical Heritage. Shady origins allow for the perpetuation of the myth. A musical performance, or ideas about the emotionality of music, will often trump the logic of other discussion-based formats. The main problem in many arguments suggesting such exotic links with Irish or Celtic music, as Feehan contends, is that most scholars only possess "a super-

56. Feehan, 338. 57. Feehan, 334. 58. Feehan, 338. 59. Feehan, 333. 60. Lillis Ó Laoire, "Seán-nós Singing and Exoticism," Journal of Music in Ireland , 3, 2 (January- February 2003), http://www.thejmi.com/article/126.

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism ficial knowledge" of the music to which they are drawing comparisons.61 Despite musical evidence that suggests that "modern Celtic music . . . has no historical whatsoever in the music of the ancient Celts," a subtext persists in both scholarly and musical discussions around Celtic-Indian musical historical connections.62 Attempting to substantiate an ancient musical link between Ireland and India does seem to present a tautological impasse. Robert O'Driscoll sympathizes with the dilemma when he describes how "in seeking 'evidence', one is perhaps seeking the impossible. Music, by its very nature, is an evanescent art."63 And that, of course, is precisely the point. Such links can and may be drawn, through historical and archaeological evidence, through works of the imagination, and through performance practice, in particular - where these days, Irish Orientalism seems to manifest itself in particularly compelling ways.64 As a final example, we consider Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin s "At the Still Point of the Turning World' (1992), a piece that connects the composer with Edward Bunting (who collected the tune that is the basis of the composition) by way of Ó Riada. Ó Súilleabháin has compared the noncyclical tunes of Bunting's collection with the improvisational model of North Indian classical music, arguing that Bunting's manuscripts are evidence that the harping tradition in ancient court life "was not harmonically based at all but which found its logic in the melodic line itself."65 This assertion is based on the modal nature of Indian classical music, where the music is improvised around a dominant tonic center, a conventional relationship of structurally important notes that does not change. The melodic line in Indian classical music, although improvised, follows a set of aesthetic rules that informs the performer and creates the character of the raga (which is more than a scale or mode but less than a rendered composition in the Hindustani classical music tradition). Ó Riadas ideas inspired Ó Súilleabháin

61. See Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, "The Creative Processes in Irish Traditional Dance Music," Irish Musical Studies 1: Musicology in Irelandy ed. Gerard Gillen and Harry White (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990), 117-30. 62. See: Ó hAllmhurain, 11; Chapman, "Thoughts on Celtic Music" (1994); James Porter, "Locating Celtic Music (and Song)" in Western Folklore , 57, 4 (Autumn 1998), 205-24; Lois Kuter, "Celtic Mu- sic" in Garland Encyclopedia of Music: Europe, ed. Timothy Rice, James Porter, and Chris Goertzen (New York: Garland, 2000), where the author draws attention to the fact that invoking Celtic identity through musical form is not particularly predicated on material fact or on identifiable styles. Kuter, 320. 63. O'Driscoll, xii. 64. The idea of Irish-Indian shared heritage is also posited in musical practice in the genre of world music and global new age pop. Tim Taylor has explored and critiqued how Asian-British singer Sheila Chandra "uses folk and traditional musics as an instrument against modernity/postmodernity" and in such combinations "constructs Irish and Islamic vocals as monoliths." Tim Taylor, Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (New York: Routledge, 1997), 150-51. 65. Ó Súilleabhánn, "Around the House," 79.

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism to compose a piece based on Buntings transcription of "The Lamentations of Youth." Ó Súilleabháin s composition explicitly draws upon Indian classical music theory and compositional musical techniques. As with Indian classical music, there is a gradual exposing the contours of the melodic materials that make up "Lamentation of Youth." In addition, there is a use of native instrumenta- tion; the tanpura provides a drone on the recording of the piece, undergird- ing the Irish lament and creating a sense of timelessness.66 Modally, although reminiscent of Yaman , the scale used in Indian raga, "At the Still Point" is more composition than improvisation, and it does not follow the grammar of Indian classical ragas.67 Nonetheless, Ó Súilleabháin continues to frame this and other Indian-influenced compositions in terms of performances and discussions of compositional intentions and processes.68 Moreover, he offers narratives that fluidly connect Irish music aesthetics with those of Hindustani classical music, alongside suggestions of linguistic, spiritual and mystical sympathies.69 In Ireland, the impetus for drawing upon Oriental culture has usually been to distance Ireland from its colonizers and to reinvigorate or re- imagine a native cultural form. Orientalism is generally defined as a unifying trope - a set of ideas and interpretations that engages with colonial and postcolonial perspectives, which play out in particular ways in the Irish context.70 As David Lloyd notes in relation to postcolonial nations, "culture is all the nation has to distinguish it."71 Focusing on music in particular offers a unique perspective on re- imaging Irish cultural identity in the wake of postcolonial studies. As Said asserts, "one of the strengths of postcolonial analysis is that it widens, instead of narrows, the inter-

66. For an explanation of a raga (and talas or rhythmic cycles), see Byron and Massey, 110-23. 67. Ó Súilleabháin says of the piece's title that it "comes from the T. S. Eliot poem Four Quartets which seeks to articulate that moment which is one of passive alertness, 'a white light still and mov- ing'. It is the moment in Irish tradition when access is gained to the fairy fort (at the exact point of midnight, for example). It is also in that state of concentrated listening that we begin to hear the music within us." CD liner notes, Gaiseadh, 199). The poem, then, might be interpreted as functioning in the same way that certain pictures and narratives have associations with particular compositions and rags in the Indian tradition 68. For another example of Irish-Indian influenced compositions, see Ó Súilleabháin's collabo- ration "(It Must be More) Crispy" with Irish percussionist Mel Mercier, which uses Indian tabla (drum) rhythms. This work is also featured on Gaiseadh/Flowing (1992). 69. Both authors have interviewed Ó Súilleabháin on a number of separate occasions over a period of sixteen years. He has repeatedly made connections between Irish and India musics, languages, and spiritual matrices. 70. It is interesting to note that some music scholars have attempted to construct more regional flavors of Orientalism. See, for example, Philip Bohlman and Ruth Davis, "Mizrakh, Jewish Music and the Journey to the East" in Music and Orientalism in the British Empire , 1780S-1940S , ed. Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 95-126, which deals with "English" (as distinct from British) Orientalism. 71. Lloyd, 89.

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism pretive perspectives, which is another way of saying liberates instead of further constricting and colonizing the mind."72 Music has had, and continues to have, an integral role to play in the shaping of Irish cultural identity through subversive recontextualizations of dominant Orientalist tropes; it is worth noting that Said himself engaged with the study of music as a "trangressive act."73 Music can, perhaps, subvert and recontextualize our understanding of Irishness in a way that no other art form can. But this is not without political dangers. As Ó Súilleabháin wrote in his study of O Riada, "it is this ability of music ... to encode connections, that links its intelligence with the intelligence at the heart of politics and at the heart of identity itself."74 And yet, such seductive ideas may elide structural inequalities found in "real" Irish-Indian encounters and intercultural exchanges, therefore inviting ques- tions on the ramifications of the aesthetic colonization of music. The concept of hybridiztion provides one possible way around this chal- lenge, as it extends the notion of bounded music traditions and their meaning in a given culture. Homi Bhabha argues that all traditions emerge through hybrid processes, not through pure and unbroken lineages, and further, that the "unset- tling" advantage of this position is that "it makes you increasingly aware of the construction of culture and the invention of tradition."75 Said seems to hold a similar position, pointing out that cultures continue through engagement and that "survival ... is about the connection between things" and not about discrete, pure entities.76 Joseph Lennon, too, celebrates hybridity in relation to Irish Ori- entalist writing, insisting that such writings demonstrate "triadic structures in which a hybridity is immediately foregrounded."77 It is an argument that easily maps onto Irish music. It might be possible to recalibrate Irish Orientalism to include a quest for intercultural sympathies - though admittedly, such a quest may be Utopian. It might be, too, that the real reverberations of Irish- Indian musical sympathies lie in the future rather than the past, in further attempts at encounters and exchanges that are more aware of power relations and less influenced by historical imaginings underpinned by cultural-nationalist agendas. In terms of what music has to offer both Irish Orientalism and Irish Studies more broadly, further research into these areas from a musical perspective may require a more performance and practice-based method that integrates with the musicological, the historic, and the discursive, in an acknowledgement of musics transgressive

72. Said, Ireland and Postcolonial Theory , 179. 73. Edward Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Colombia University Press, 1991), 71. 74. Ó Súilleabháin, Ceol na nUsal , 27. 75. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 247. 76. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993), 408. 77. Lennon, 167.

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:29:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Irish Music Orientalism and subversive potential and its power to reflect, reshape, and even "predict" society.78 Such research may also represent a modest attempt to go some way in overcoming the gap between myth and history in Irish cultural narratives. The end result of that attempt may be a new appreciation as to why that should even matter, especially in the twenty-first century. These are all debates for another day. At the very least, we need open up a dialogue between those with a vested interest in Irish Orientalism, Irish musics, and Irish Studies more broadly. Such a dialogue, we hope, would begin to test the veracity and efficacy of the term "Trish Music Orientalism."

UNIVERSITY OF LIMERICK

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78. See Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

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