Traditional Music and Irish Society

These essays investigate the relation of traditional music to Irish modernity. The author integrates a survey of the early sources of Irish music with recent work on Irish social history in the eighteenth century to explore the question of the antiquity of the tradition and the class locations of its origins and he argues that the formation of Irish traditional music occurred alongside the economic and political modernization of European society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dowling concludes with an assessment of the current state of traditional music and cultural negotiation in Northern Ireland.

Martin Dowling is a fiddle player and historian. He was educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he performs and teaches Irish traditional music regularly in Europe and the United States. He is currently Lecturer in Irish Traditional Music at Queen's University of Belfast, UK.

Introduction: Modernity and Tradition; 1: The Eighteenth-Century Inheritance; 2: Foundations of a Modern Tradition; 3: Music in the Revival: The Feis Ceoil, The Gaelic League, and the Pipers; 4: James Joyce and Traditional Song; 5: Traditional Music and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland