Irish Scene And Sound

The signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998, marked the beginning of a new era of peace and stability in Northern Ireland. As the public has overwhelmingly rejected a return to the violence of the Troubles (1968–1998), loyalist and republican groups have sought other outlets to continue their struggle. Music has long been used to celebrate cultural identity in the North of Ireland: from street parades to football chants, and from folk festivals to YouTube videos, music facilitates the continuation of pre-Agreement identity narratives in a “post-conflict” era. Sounding Dissent draws on original in-depth interviews with Irish republican musicians, contemporary audiences, and former paramilitaries, as well as diverse historical and archival material, including songbooks, prison records, and newspaper articles, to understand the history of political violence in Ireland. The book examines the hagiographic potential of rebel songs to memorialize a pantheon of republican martyrs, and demonstrates how musical performance and political song not only articulate experiences and memories of oppression and violence, but play a central role in the reproduction of conflict and exclusion in times of peace.

From products we use to clothes we wear, and spaces we inhabit, we rely on colour to provide visual appeal, data codes and meaning. Color and Design addresses how we understand and experience colour, and through specific examples explores how colour is used in a spectrum of design-based disciplines including apparel design, graphic design, interior design, and product design. Through highly engaging contributions from a wide range of international scholars and practitioners, the book explores colour as an individual and cultural phenomenon, as a pragmatic device for communication, and as a valuable marketing tool. Color and Design provides a comprehensive overview for scholars and an accessible text for students on a range of courses within design, fashion, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology and visual and material culture. Its exploration of colour in marketing as well as design makes this book an invaluable resource for professional designers. It will also allow practitioners to understand how and why colour is so extensively varied and offers such enormous potential to communicate.

Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology and musicology of 20th- and 21st-century Irish popular music. The volume consists of essays by leading scholars in the field and covers the major figures, styles and social contexts of popular music in Ireland. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Irish popular music. The book is organized into three thematic sections: Music Industries and Historiographies, Roots and Routes and Scenes and Networks. The volume also includes a coda by Gerry Smyth, one of the most published authors on Irish popular music.

"Sounds Irish, Acts Global critically examines both the history of Ireland's popular music industry as well as the current music scene in the country. This book is of interest to business students as well as popular music scholars in addition to non-academic readers"--

Irish music enjoyed popularity across Europe and North America in the second half of the twentieth century. Regional circumstances created a unique reception for such music in the English Midlands. This book is a musical ethnography of Birmingham, 1950–2010. Initially establishing geographical and chronological parameters, the book cites Birmingham’s location at the hub of a road and communications network as key to the development of Irish music across a series of increasingly visible, public sites: Birmingham’s branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann was established in the domestic space of an amateur musician; Birmingham’s folk clubs encouraged a blend of Irish music with socialist politics, from which the Dublin singer Luke Kelly honed his trade; Irish solidarity was fostered in Birmingham’s churches. Each of these examples begins with a performance at Birmingham Town Hall in order to show how a single venue also provides musical representations that are mutable over time. The culmination is Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Parade. This, the largest Irish procession outside Dublin and New York, manifests an incoherent blend of sounds. The audio montage, nevertheless, creates a coherent metanarrative: one in which the local community has conquered a number of challenges (most especially that of the IRA bombings of the area) and has moved Irish music from private arenas to the centre of this large civic event.

This book brings together important material from a range of sources and highlights how government organizations, musicians, academics and commercial companies are concerned with, and seek to use, a particular notion of Irish musical identity. Rooting the study in the context of the recent history of popular, traditional and classical music in Ireland, as well as providing an overview of aspects of the national field of music production and consumption, O'Flynn goes on to argue that the relationship between Irish identity and Irish music emerges as a contested site of meaning. His analysis exposes the negotiation and articulation of civic, ethnic and economic ideas within a shifting hegemony of national musical culture, and finds inconsistencies between and among symbolic constructions of Irish music and observed patterns in the domestic field. More specifically, O'Flynn illustrates how settings, genres, social groups and values can influence individual identifications or negations of Irishness in music. While the apprehension of intra-musical elements leads to perceptions of music that sounds Irish, style and authenticity emerge as critical articulatory principles in the identification of music that feels Irish. The celebratory and homogenizing discourse associated with the international success of some Irish musical forms is not reflected in the opinions of the people interviewed by O'Flynn; at the same time, an insider/outsider dialectic of national identity is found in various forms of discourse about Irish music. Performers and composers discussed include Bill Whelan (Riverdance), Sinead O'Connor, The Corrs, Altan, U2, Martin Hayes, Dolores Keane and Gerald Barry.