Search

The last decade has witnessed a revival of interest in the subject of Irish modernism, with publications such as The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (2014) edited by Joe Cleary; a special ed...

‘Ecomusicology’ is a developing field that looks to explore the interface between modern eco-theory and a range of historical and contemporary musical phenomena. Generated as it is by a country in which ideas of space/place and ideas of music feature particularly strongly, it is likely that Irish cultural history will resonate powerfully in relation to an ecomusicological perspective. The early work of Van Morrison is rooted in the hippie counter-culture of the 1960s, one principal strand of which concerned environmental despoliation and the need for some form of re-enchantment with nature. By contrast, the ‘Celtic Music’ phenomenon of the 1990s was brought to its artistic (and financial) apogee by the Donegal singer Enya. Drawing on techniques initially developed by family members in Clannad, Enya evinced a form of mystical Celticism which, even as it harked back to earlier versions, sang to a quasi-environmentalist discourse embedded within the contemporary style known as ‘New Age’. The essay will conclude with a brief description of the other areas of Irish music that would be amenable to an ecomusicological audit.

This chapter examines the emergence of betrayal as a central theme in James Joyce’s work and tracks its influence on subsequent Irish fiction. It explains how Joyce saw betrayal everywhere he looked: in Irish history, in the novel as a form, and in his own life. Already apparent in his earliest writings, Joyce’s major work represents a relentless dissection of the anatomy of betrayal in all its shapes and degrees. This obsession, moreover, was to have a lively afterlife in subsequent Irish literary discourse as generations of writers, from Frank O’Connor and Elizabeth Bowen to Bernard MacLaverty and Anne Enright, returned to this theme time and again until, following the economic and ethical crises of the early twenty-first century, society at large learned to speak the Joycean language of betrayal.

In three major book-length contributions to the field during the 1960s and 1970s, leading folklorist Stan Hugill developed a peculiar understanding of the role of Ireland and Irish music in the international shanty tradition. Born on the Wirral peninsula, 15 miles from Liverpool, Hugill was deeply influenced by the port's experience as a hub for the Irish diaspora. This article will examine Hugill's characterisation of 'Irish' elements (lyrical, musical and performative) within selected examples, and will suggest that this representation of Irish music as central to the shanty repertoire engages with a range of insights emerging from Liverpool's status as a key location within the spatial imagination of the Atlantic archipelago. © 2017 International Maritime Economic History Association.

Practically everyone who knew Joyce observed his enduring love for music, as well as the fundamental role that it played in his life. Many of these reminiscences have been preserved, either in formal memoirs or in interview with researchers. This chapter provides a survey of that material in order to approach an understanding of Joyce as an artist for whom music came to represent a fundamental social and subjective experience—a key mode of connection between his own life, his art and the people that he wanted to represent in his work.

The sea features constantly throughout the Joycean oeuvre, metamorphosing from a predominantly negative presence in the early work to a generally positive one in the final two novels. The shanty is a musical form born of the sea, emerging from the matrix of nineteenth-century maritime capitalism. That the form was known to Joyce in some of its aspects (in particular its bawdiness) is evident from references in his letters and his imaginative writing. This chapter speculates as to the Irish contribution to a form of ‘shanty aesthetics’, and its relation to the experimental ‘modernist’ style developed by Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

To speak about music in the late nineteenth century is to speak about Wagner. The late German composer was particularly influential in the field of literature, where his example was widely embraced by a wide range of writers; so much so, that it became possible to think about ‘literary Wagnerism’ as a powerful and wide-ranging discourse in itself. Wagner also represents the principal point of contact between James Joyce and George Moore—probably the most important Irish prose writer of the late nineteenth century. This chapter considers the influence of Moore’s Wagnerism on Joyce’s evolving imagination.

Stephen Dedalus is one of the most fully drawn of all modern literary characters—a young man attempting to cope with his family’s declining social status, and to construct a viable literary aesthetic from the fragments of his education and his curtailed experience in provincial Dublin. There’s also the issue of his guilt regarding the death of his mother, and his own body’s urgent sexual requirements. Stephen’s career through Dublin over the course of two novels is sound-tracked by a range of songs, musical memories and by the city’s rich sonic signature. This chapter tracks the development of Joyce’s fictional avatar in musical and sonic terms—from his appearance as ‘baby tuckoo’ in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to his disappearance into the Dublin night at the end of Ulysses.

The Dublin of Joyce’s childhood and student days was a noisy place, an auditory space caught between the deadening destructive energies of the past and the ruthless constructive energies of the future. One of Joyce’s signal achievements was to orchestrate the sounds of the city into a complex symphony of the everyday: music, song and speech, certainly, but also the great variety of noises contributing to the soundscape of the modern metropolis. The result is an impression of Dublin as a living, breathing urban milieu—a place where people confront the rigours (and the rewards) of modern city living on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis. This chapter explores that ‘symphony’ in relation to the chapter in which the noisy city, in all its overlapping complexity, is most fully essayed.

This chapter is comprised of ten sections, each considering a different musical issue bearing upon Joyce’s musical imagination. They are: (1) Three Lives (Eamonn Ceannt, Ina Boyle and John McCormack); (2) Music and/as Language (issues relating to music and human evolution); (3) Listening to the Novel (the impact of music on fiction after the late nineteenth century); (4) Real People (some of the historical persons incorporated into Joyce’s work); (5) Aesthetics (debates concerning aestheticism, decadence, realism and modernism in the 1890s and 1900s); (6) Joyce as Composer? (the state of music in the Ireland of Joyce’s youth); (7) Joyce’s Missing Music (the absence of Turlough O’Carolan and Irish traditional music from Joyce’s musical reservoir); (8) Popular Music (Joyce’s love of music hall); (9) Playback Technology (the rise of the record player and its impact on modern musical practices) and (10) Space and Place (the locations where Joyce’s music is made and heard).

The ‘Joyce’ industry has been one of the most successful academic ventures of the modern era, second only to Shakespeare. The role and representation of music in Joyce’s life and work has been an active subfield within that critical industry from the outset. For over a century, critics have been producing versions of ‘musical Joyce’ with reference to a range of theoretical models and critical philosophies: formalism, cultural materialism, structuralism, post-structuralism and so forth. The aim of this chapter is to describe the evolution of ‘musical Joyce’ in respect of this ongoing critical history.

Both Stephen Dedalus and his creator were fond of ‘echo’ as a metaphor to describe various emotional responses and socio-cultural conditions. The idea of the echo drew Joyce towards the idea of repetition—in particular, repetition as a quasi-musical property that is ubiquitous throughout human and natural history. This chapter considers the early deployment of echo and repetition in the Chamber Music cycle, and its implication for Joyce’s mature work.

Man 1:Forty years, wha’?Man 2:I beg your pardon?Man 1:No, I was just saying: forty years, wha’?Man 2:I’m sorry: to what are you referring?Man 1:Forty years! Since, you know … Connolly and Pearse … ...

During the heightened cultural activity of the Celtic Revival, the moral ownership and utilisation of Ireland's literary remains became an important cultural issue. At the same time, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish writers were concerned to ‘retell’ ancient stories in ways which explored their relevance to the modern world. One of the most retold tales from the period was the story of Deirdre and the Sons of Usnach. The story of Deirdre broaches one of the most ubiquitous of human experiences – betrayal – and it does so in relation to both political and interpersonal behaviour. This essay examines two dramatic treatments from the early years of the century: W.B. Yeats's one-act Deirdre (1907) and J.M. Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows, unfinished at the time of his death and finally published in 1910. This essay looks to account for the particular ways in which each author inflects the legend in terms of their own concerns, and in particular how both Yeats and Synge engaged with a discours...

Dublin is a complex, multi-faceted city-region which has in turn generated a complex, multi-faceted culture traversing a wide array of genres and narratives. Literary Dublin is widely known and celebrated; but the popular arts – cinema and music, for example – are likewise implicated in the imaginative representation of the city. Of these, the latter possesses an especially rich genealogy: a reservoir of images and associations accumulated over an extended period of time, itself based on an older ballad tradition in which the city functioned as an imaginative spatial resource for a diverse array of discourses (class, gender, nation, community, profession, etc.). Given the city’s continuing centrality to the economic, cultural and political organisation of Ireland as a whole, it is likely that Dublin’s significance will only grow as the country endeavours to come to terms with the extinction of the Celtic Tiger.

by Sean Crosso, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008, 302 pp., £34.99, ISBN 1-84718-569-X by John O'Flynn, Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate, 2009, 239 pp., £55.00, ISBN 978-0-7546-5714-9 by ...