Music And The Irish Literary Imagination

This new reading of Irish literature identifies, for the first time, the formative influence of music in Irish writing over the past 200 years. Although this influence has long been acknowledged in studies of Shaw and Joyce, White explores music as an abiding preoccupation in the work of Moore, Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Friel, and Heaney.

Harry White examines the influence of music in the development of the Irish literary imagination from 1800 to the present day. He identifies music as a preoccupation which originated in the poetry of Thomas Moore early in the nineteenth century. He argues that this preoccupation decisively influenced Moore's attempt to translate the 'meaning' of Irish music into verse, and that it also informed Moore's considerable impact on the development of European musical romanticism, as in the music of Berlioz and Schumann. White then examines how this preoccupation was later recovered by W.B. Yeats, whose poetry is imbued with music as a rival presence to language. In its readings of Yeats, Synge, Shaw and Joyce, the book argues that this striking musical awareness had a profound influence on the Irish literary imagination, to the extent that poetry, fiction and drama could function as correlatives of musical genres. Although Yeats insisted on the synonymous condition of speech and song in his poetry, Synge, Shaw and Joyce explicitly identified opera in particular as a generic prototype for their own work. Synge's formal musical training and early inclinations as a composer, Shaw's perception of himself as the natural successor to Wagner, and Joyce's no less striking absorption of a host of musical techniques in his fiction are advanced in this study as formative (rather than incidental) elements in the development of modern Irish writing. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination also considers Beckett's emancipation from the oppressive condition of words in general (and Joyce in particular) through the agency of music, and argues that the strong presence of Mendelssohn, Chopin and Janácek in the works of Brian Friel is correspondingly essential to Friel's dramatisation of Irish experience in the aftermath of Beckett. The book closes with a reading of Seamus Heaney, in which the poet's own preoccupation with the currency of established literary forms is enlisted to illuminate Heaney's abiding sense of poetry as music.

Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces offers a fresh perspective on the Irish writer James Joyce’s much-noted obsession with music. This book provides an overview of a century-old critical tradition focused on Joyce and music, as well as six in-depth case studies which revisit material from the writer’s career in the light of new and emerging theories. Considering both Irish cultural history and the European art music tradition, the book combines approaches from cultural musicology, critical theory, sound studies and Irish studies. Chapters explore Joyce’s use of repetition, his response to literary Wagnerism, the role and status of music in the aesthetic and political debates of the fin de siècle, music and cultural nationalism, ubiquitous urban sound and ‘shanty aesthetics’. Gerry Smyth revitalizes Joyce’s work in relation to the ‘noisy’ world in which the author wrote (and his audience read) his work.

The contributions to this Festschrift, honouring the distinguished Irish musicologist Harry White on his sixtieth birthday, have wide repercussions and span a broad timeframe. But for all its variety, this volume is built around two axes: on the one hand, attention is focussed on the history of music and literature in Ireland and the British Isles, and on the other, topics of the German and Austrian musical past. In both cases it reflects the particular interest of a scholar, whose playful, sometimes unconventional way of approaching his subject is so refreshing and time and again leads to innovative, surprising insights. It also reflects a scholar, who – for all the broadening of his perspectives that has taken place over the years – has always adhered to the strands of his scholarly preoccupations that have become dear to him: the music of the 'Austro-Italian Baroque', and Irish musical culture first and foremost. An international cast of authors announces the sustaining influence of Harry White's wide-ranging research. Professor Dr Thomas Hochradner Chair of the Department of Musicology University of Music and Dramatic Arts Mozarteum Salzburg

Irish music holds pride of place among the cultural attributes defining Ireland, and its role in shaping national identity is undisputed. To question these certainties which tend to convey a restrictive notion of a so-called Irish music, the first Irish music studies conference in France, which took place at the université de Caen Basse-Normandie on September 10th-12th, 2008, brought together Irish studies scholars, musicologists and musicians from Ireland and from France. Proceeding from this conference, this collection of essays places itself in the context of the fairly recent development of music studies as an area of scholarship within Irish studies. After an introductory essay by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, head of the Irish World Music Academy and chair of Culture Ireland, other articles look at issues such as (re-)defining, instrumentalising, performing, staging and listening to Irish music. In this volume, studies of form, setting, repertoire, political and ideological exploitation and government policy sit alongside explorations of music motifs and themes in literature and on the stage.

Music and Irish Identity represents the latest stage in a life-long project for Gerry Smyth, focusing here on the ways in which music engages with particular aspects of Irish identity. The nature of popular music and the Irish identity it supposedly articulates have both undergone profound change in recent years: the first as a result of technological and wider industrial changes in the organisation and dissemination of music as seen, for example, with digital platforms such as YouTube, Spotify and iTunes. A second factor has been Ireland’s spectacular fall from economic grace after the demise of the "Celtic Tiger", and the ensuing crisis of national identity. Smyth argues that if, as the stereotypical association would have it, the Irish have always been a musical race, then that association needs re-examination in the light of developments in relation to both cultural practice and political identity. This book contributes to that process through a series of related case studies that are both scholarly and accessible. Some of the principal ideas broached in the text include the (re-)establishment of music as a key object of Irish cultural studies; the theoretical limitations of traditional musicology; the development of new methodologies specifically designed to address the demands of Irish music in all its aspects; and the impact of economic austerity on musical negotiations of Irish identity. The book will be of seminal importance to all those interested in popular music, cultural studies and the wider fate of Ireland in the twenty-first century.

Featuring new essays by international literary scholars, the two-volume Companion to Irish Literature encompasses the full breadth of Ireland's literary tradition from the Middle Ages to the present day. Covers an unprecedented historical range of Irish literature Arranged in two volumes covering Irish literature from the medieval period to 1900, and its development through the twentieth century to the present day Presents a re-visioning of twentieth-century Irish literature and a collection of the most up-to-date scholarship in the field as a whole Includes a substantial number of women writers from the eighteenth century to the present day Includes essays on leading contemporary authors, including Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Roddy Doyle, and Emma Donoghue Introduces readers to the wide range of current approaches to studying Irish literature

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.