Sequels of Colonialism: Edward Bunting's Ancient Irish Music (Produced from Rtf of Original Submission)
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Final version published as: Davis, L. (2001). Sequels of colonialism: Edward Bunting’s ancient irish music. Nineteenth‐ Century Contexts, 23(1), 29–57. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08905490108583532. Sequels of Colonialism: Edward Bunting's Ancient Irish Music (produced from rtf of original submission) In 1792, Doctor James MacDonnell advertised a competition designed to revive interest in the ancient harping tradition of Ireland. His advertisement for the event, which was to be held July 11-13 in Belfast, was published in almost all the Irish newspapers and suggests an intimate relationship between harp music and national identity: "when it is considered how intimately the spirit and character of a people are connected with their national poetry and music, it is presumed that the Irish patriot and politician will not deam it an object unworthy of his patronage and protection" (Ancient Music [1840] 63). The festival was organized by MacDonnell, Robert Bradshaw, Henry Joy, and Thomas Russell, and it attracted ten harpers. MacDonnell employed a young local organist, nineteen year-old Edward Bunting, to copy down the compositions of the harpers engaged in the competition. Working from his manuscript notes, and from material gathered during his travels around Ireland years after the festival, Bunting went on to publish three successive collections of Irish tunes arranged for piano-forte in 1796, 1809 and 1840. Bunting provided materials for the kind of collective fiction-making that Benedict Anderson considers crucial to the development of national identity. In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Anderson examines nationalism not in relation to "self-consciously held political ideologies," but to "the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which - as well as against which - it came into being" (12). But Bunting's work also registers the ambivalence which Homi K. Bhabha, elaborating on Anderson's thesis, describes in Nation and Narration as "haunt[ing] the idea of the nation, the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it" (1). In his essay, "DissemiNation" in that volume, Bhabha comments further on the ambiguity he sees as inherent in imagining the nation: the narrative and psychological force that nationness brings to bear on cultural production and political projection is the effect of the ambivalence of the 'nation' as a narrative strategy. As an apparatus of symbolic power, it produces a continual slippage of categories, like sexuality, class affiliation, territorial paranoia, or 'cultural difference' in the act of writing the nation. (292) This ambiguity is especially complicated in Ireland, which has been subject to a peculiar kind of colonial rule and where the attempt to define and disseminate the national "spirit and character" has always occurred by way of a complex series of mediations. As Terry Eagleton remarks, "the discourse of the colonial is always rhetoric which overhears itself in the ears of the other, shaping itself accordingly . So it was that the Irish came to direct their own speech and actions at the British (mis)understanding of them, in ways that then introduced division and ambiguity into their own language" (143). In Ireland, then, the slippages between categories within the nation inter-relate with slippages between categories in the larger British colonial sphere. In this discussion, I argue that the three editions of Bunting's music of Ireland offer multiple, sometimes contradictory, interpretations of the Irish nation, interpretations which, although presented as a project of cultural nationalism, often reflect nationalist practices shared by, even derived from, characteristic forms of British imperial ideology. Despite this fact, however, and regardless of Bunting's possible intentions, I suggest that the sequelization of the Ancient Irish Music performs an important intervention into the politics of colonial domination in Ireland. Bunting's work both represents the fracturing process of colonialism and renegotiates its terms, as each edition corrects and transforms the perspective of the previous edition. Brian Boydell comments that Bunting's three volumes are the culmination of "a new stimulus [which] produced a remarkable increase in the number of publications of traditional Irish music" after about 1780. The incentive for Bunting, according to Boydell, was "the growing sense of national consciousness that marked the closing decades of the century" (603). Janet Harbison also notes the alteration in national consciousness occurring at the end of the century: "The atmosphere in Ireland approaching the year 1792 was one of national euphoria" (113). She attributes this euphoria to the fact that Ireland was experiencing developments in transportation, trade and manufacture. Of equal, if not more importance, was the fact that it enjoyed its own Parliament under the leadership of Henry Grattan. This new national self-determination was accompanied by increased interest in native Irish culture on the part of the Anglo- Irish Ascendancy. Earlier in the century, Catholics such as Charles O'Conor had sought to promote their political interests in reform by presenting a civilized history of the Gaelic people. For their part, the Anglo-Irish turned their attention to antiquarian research into traditional Gaelic culture as a way of creating a connection with the native tradition. Joep Leerson remarks that "The adoption and central canonization of a Gaelic cultural affiliation and a Gaelic-oriented self-awareness . was to remain central to the Anglo- Irish sense of national identity" (376). Bunting's 1796 A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music (published in London and Dublin) demonstrates the ambiguities that often accompanied such antiquarian research. The title page proclaims the novelty of the project, announcing that the collection contains "Admired Airs" which have been "never before published" (See Figure 1). It draws attention to the tunes as a direct line to antiquity: some of the tunes are compositions of "Conolan and Carolan" which have been "Collected from the Harpers in the different Provinces of IRELAND," explains Bunting. The 1796 Ancient Irish Music provides a positive image of the native Irish people; in fact it suggests their historical superiority in the musical sphere. The Preface begins with the assertion, "It is an extraordinary fact, that although Ireland has, from a remote antiquity, been celebrated for its cultivation of Music, and admitted to be one of the parent countries of that delightful art, the present is the first general collection of its national airs" (i). Bunting distinguishes his project from those of his musical predecessors by claiming that he attempts to compile a larger corpus of material. The Preface provides historical examples of the praise of Irish music by writers like Powell, Selden, Caradoc, and Giraldus Cambrensis. Bunting notes with relish the fact that even though Giraldus was "probably not free from the prejudices that were then entertained against the Irish," he nevertheless pronounced that the skill of the Irish in music is "beyond all comparison superior to that of any nation I have seen" (ii). Most importantly, Bunting claims a connection between Ireland and the originary moment of notation in Britain, as he argues that the piece that Charles Burney identifies as the "first piece of Music ever set in score in Great Britain" is in fact identical with an Irish tune, "Ta an samradh teacht," or "Summer is coming" (iv). Ireland is indeed, according to Bunting, the "parent" of British music. Bunting is eager to emphasize the purity of his project. In order to stress the tunes' authenticity as embodiments of native Irish culture, they are given titles in Gaelic script; English translations follow in much smaller script (See Figure 2). Asserting that he was "particularly cautioned against adding a single note to the old melodies, which would seem, from inferences that will afterwards be drawn, to have been preserved pure, and handed down unalloyed, thro' a long succession of ages" (i), Bunting presents himself acting in accordance with a tradition which has kept the music intact throughout the centuries. He notes that the old musicians "seem never to have ventured to make the slightest innovation in [a tune] during its descent" (ii). His proof for this assertion is the uniformity of playing throughout the island: "harpers collected from parts far distant from one another, & taught by different masters, always played the same tune on the same key, with the same kind of expression, and without a single variation in any essential passage, or even in any note" (ii). It is of utmost importance to Bunting that the tunes are seen as uncorrupted reliques of an Irish past which can serve as a connection to the present. In the process of making that connection, however, Bunting renders native Irish culture essentially homogeneous and static. Characterized as "without variation" even across geographical distance and associated with a continuous oral tradition, native music is figured in opposition to modernity. Bunting's choice of the word "Ancient" in his title for the collection (even though many of them were composed by Carolan who had died only sixty years previously) further suggests the music's separation from the present era. And by identifying what is "Ancient," Bunting's collection also works to define modernity. Ironically, Bunting seeks to capture the anti-modernity of the native music within a thoroughly modern medium as he shifts the music from a context of oral transmission to the realm of print culture. In addition, he adapts the traditional music of the harp to the piano-forte, capitalizing on the immense popularity of that recently introduced instrument in order to encourage interest in his project. Michael Chanan and John Shepherd discuss the radical difference between oral and printed music. Chanan observes, "the development of notation has the effect of shaping musical materials to satisfy its own demands, thereby marginalizing and excluding from its syntax whatever it is unable to capture" (77).