National University of Ireland, Galway Centre for Irish Studies Third Galway Conference of Irish Studies 2019 “What is it to dwell?”: Home(s) in Irish Studies 7-8 June 2019 Book of Abstracts Panel 1: Room G010 Notes from Abroad and Soundscapes of Home Chair: Dr. Méabh Ní Fhuartháin Waifs, Strays, and Straw Turkeys: Musical Ruminations on ‘Home’ in Irish-American Chicago Dr. Aileen Dillane (University of Limerick) Abstract: Chicago-born fiddler Liz Carroll (1956-), a first-generation Irish-American, recalls coming ‘home’ to Ireland as a child to play traditional music and how, on one occasion, she was encouraged to play ‘Turkey in the Straw’ as it was deemed more representative of where it was she actually dwelt (Dillane 2009). Many years on, Carroll would come to appreciate that ‘home’ could indeed be found in this tune; a musical rendering of her multi-ethnic America, belonging to a genre that inspired new ways of composing and rendering the self (Carroll 2000; 2002). But the tune could also become meaningful because it was found in Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melodies (Chicago 1922), the final music collection by Cork-born emigrant, Francis (Chief) O’Neill, a key figure in Irish music who exerted considerable influence on Carroll. In contrast to O’Neill’s highly celebrated Music of Ireland (1903) and 1001 Melodies (1907), both of which sought to capture the rich repertoire of Ireland/home, largely collected from Irish emigrants in Chicago (Carolan 1997), Waifs and Strays suggests a different agenda. Homing in on “Turkey in the Straw” and O’Neill’s rationale for its inclusion, this paper traces the ways in which the melody traverses space, time, and traditions, morphing and changing, shedding old and accruing new meanings, and in that process revealing a fragile and contingent notion of home. How music dwells in us, configures home in the diasporic sphere, and brings with it home truths about identity and belonging is explored in this particular ‘coon air’. Biography: Dr. Aileen Dillane is an ethnomusicologist and course director of the MA in Irish Music Studies at the Irish World Academy, University of Limerick. She teaches and publishes on Irish traditional and popular musics. Aileen is co-editor of Songs of Social Protest (2018) and Public and Political Discourses of Migration: International Perspectives (2016), along with three other music essay collections (2011, 2015, 2018). She is a series editor for Popular Musics Matter: Social, Cultural and Political Interventions (Rowman & Littlefield) and deputy editor of Ethnomusicology Ireland. Aileen is currently completing a monograph on Irish/Irish-American music making in Chicago. She plays flute and piano with the All-Ireland winning Templeglantine Ceilí Band. 1 | P a g e A woman’s place is in the home: music-making and the domestic space Dr. Verena Commins (National University of Ireland, Galway) Abstract: The Willie Clancy Summer School experienced extraordinary growth in the number of attending students during the 1980s and 1990s. This expansion rapidly outstripped the supply of conventional teaching spaces in the small rural town of Miltown Malbay, Co Clare. A unique response to this development was the utilisation of domestic houses for Irish traditional music classes as local people rose to the occasion by making available places and spaces for transmission in their homes. Reconceptualising this as a process of re-traditionalisation, Irish traditional music is effectively returned to the domestic setting from which it is first imagined to emerge. The domestic space, a space in which women are conceptually embedded by the constitution, is also a space inhabited by women in the marginalia of Irish traditional music transmission narratives. References such as ‘learned from his mother’ or ‘learned a share of his music from his concertina-playing mother and grandmother’, infer domesticity as they interject the narrative biographies of musicians. This paper interrogates concepts of ‘home’ at the Willie Clancy Summer School, reflecting on the extent to which its enactment, and re-traditionalising use of domestic space, disrupts and/or confirms established gender narratives in Irish traditional music transmission and practice. Biography: Dr Verena Commins is Lecturer in Irish Music Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway. She has an interdisciplinary background spanning rural studies, ethnomusicology and an Irish Studies PhD entitled ‘Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy: Transmission, Performance and Commemoration of Irish Traditional Music, 1973-2012’ Her teaching and research centre on concepts of re-traditionalisation, festival, commemoration and authenticity in the appraisal of Irish traditional music contexts in Ireland and the diaspora. She is currently Academic Coordinator of customised Irish Studies programmes at NUI Galway and co-founder of Comhrá Ceoil, an Irish music and dance studies research cluster, at NUI Galway which convened the 2019 Symposium on Women and Traditional / Folk Music. She is co-editor of the special issue journal Éire-Ireland Notaí/Notes: Music and Ireland. 54:1 Spring/Summer 2019. “That man … has made LPs”: Music and Performing “Home” in the Novel and Film of Brooklyn Chris McCann (National University of Ireland, Galway) Abstract: The concept of diaspora stresses the links between emigrant communities and home place(s). This is complicated by the “volumetric void” (Casey 2008) of space, which physically enforces displacement. In Irish diaspora cultural production, music aptly addresses these ideas in complex sonic, spatial, and metaphysical terms. This is achieved by “revers[ing] the passage of ordinary time” (Ó Laoire 2005) and by creating “trajectories … across space” (Stokes 1997) through music. This paper explores the relative stability and instability of tropes and representations of “home” in Irish music, literature, and film. It assesses the extent to which music can truly recover a sense of “home” disrupted by emigration, especially where familiar performance space and audience is vital to musical embodiment of place. It also looks at the 2 | P a g e way emigrants utilise place as symbolism in Irish folk song and sean-nós, which carries “inordinate burdens” of both regional and wider cultural identity (Williams & Ó Laoire 2011). Framed by comparative examples from contemporary Irish music and fiction, the paper focuses on Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (2009) and its subsequent film version. In both novel and film, a sean-nós performance situates Irish emigrants in a state of flux between home and away, presence and absence. The crucial stylistic differences between the novel and film illuminate how the transmission and consumption of music in the diaspora is affected by conceptualisations of space. The presentation incorporates film, recorded and live music to demonstrate how both present and absent places affects music’s ability to (re)create and perform “home”. Biography: Chris is a Doctoral candidate in English at the National University of Ireland Galway. His research analyses the role of music as a device for the creation of social hierarchy within Irish prose literature of the twentieth century. This also ties into his interest in the role of place and space in Irish musical and literary production. His research interests are in word and music studies, and the coalescence of visual and aural art forms in prose literature. Chris’s MA thesis, entitled Singing Exile: Music in Irish Emigration Literature, was completed at The University of Notre Dame Fremantle in Western Australia in early 2017. Panel 2: Room G010 Inscribing Homes through History Chair: Patrick Mahoney “The loveliest flower that blooms amid our country’s ruins:” the Family and National Regeneration in the Irish People. Patrick Bethel (Marquette University) Abstract: This paper examines the role of the family and of the home in the rhetoric of the Irish People newspaper, published from 1864-1866 as an ideological mouthpiece for the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The editors of the newspaper portrayed the Irish family as an idyllic space that produced strong men and virtuous women, and central to this vision was the home, generally portrayed as that of a small tenant farmer, which allowed the family a self-sufficient living and enabled their moral uplift. In the Irish People, the editors advanced two arguments regarding the Irish family and the Irish home. The first of these was that both were in the process of being destroyed by the forces of English colonial rule at the time of writing. The result of English rule was portrayed as the economically motivated destruction of both homes and families, which resulted in the personal degradation of Irish individuals and the broader degradation of the Irish nation. The second argument advanced was that a specific category of Irishmen deserved much of the blame for these degradations; those individuals dedicated to constitutional politics. According to the Irish People, constitutional politics were doomed to fail due to the innately unjust nature of British rule. Furthermore, they were held to have the further negative impact of convincing Irish men to not act in a masculine fashion in the furtherance of nationalist 3 | P a g e ambitions, but rather to submit to British rule, an act portrayed as innately feminine in nature. Only through the embrace of physical force as the mechanism for the achievement of Irish independence, according to these authors, could Irish men re-discover their lost manhood, and redeem first their