4. Music of the folk

If folk music made it possible to imagine world music, it did so from a European perspective. ‘Music of the folk’ examines what concepts of folk and nationality meant to Hungarian composers Bartók and Kodály and explores the global success of folk-inspired Celtic music. Musical pioneers often straddled two cultures, such as Leadbelly, who performed both rural Southern blues and more sophisticated fusion. Leadbelly’s story and others were documented by the Lomax family of folk musician scholars. The spread of polka across the world suggests that there is a place for folk music within world music, contradicting claims that the idea of world music encourages homogenization.

“It’s never too late”: Adult students and music learning in one online and offline convergent community music school

This study is the third and final part of a longitudinal ethnographic investigation of music learning and teaching of the Online Academy of Irish Music (OAIM), an Irish music “school” situated in both online ( www.oaim.ie ) and offline (Doolin, County Clare, Ireland) contexts. We first examined the online OAIM through teacher narratives in 2011. In the second part of the study, we explored the OAIM through students’ perspectives at the OAIM’s first offline Irish flute summer school retreat week in July 2013. In this third part and final part of the study, we attended the OAIM’s offline tin whistle school week in October 2015 in Ennis, Ireland. The purpose of this part of the study was to continue our investigation of adult music learners who learned Celtic music through the OAIM, as it has continued to evolve as an online and offline convergent community music school. Findings indicate that the adult participants benefited from learning music through a combination of aural/oral, observational, and written notation in both online and offline contexts, but had differing perspectives as to what worked for them and what did not. As an online and offline convergent school, the OAIM offers an intriguing model of music learning and teaching for school music contexts and community music schools.

‘Gardens All Wet With Rain’: Pastoralism in the Music of Van Morrison

‘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.

Sound and Vision: All Roads Lead to Santiago

This chapter examine the interaction of roots and routes, tradition and mobility, in contemporary Galician audiovisual culture, focusing on the cultural resignification of the ancient pilgrim’s Road to Saint James (Camino de Santiago) in the global age, and the transformation of Santiago de Compostela into a global theme park of Galicianness. It examines several audiovisual productions by Chano Piñeiro, The Chieftains, and Carlos Núñez that metaphorically travel in time and space, where experimentation with cinema and Celtic music merges old and modern forms and transcends spatiotemporal barriers, repositioning Galician culture on the global map.

Melody’s Polyrhythmic Polysemic Possibilities

This chapter examines the musical repertoires collected by William Sidney Mount in order to understand early minstrelsy's melodic imagination and polyrhythmic style as well as its creole synthesis. It situates Mount's melodic repertoire within the wider context of contemporaneous rhythm and dance repertoires, including the ongoing resources represented by Anglo-Celtic music and dance; the newer dance-types of the polka, quadrille, and cotillion; and the already-creolized tunes explicitly associated with blackface minstrelsy and New York comic theatricals. The chapter suggests that the black–white exchange of the creole synthesis can be traced in movement vocabularies and that the creole synthesis was as present a factor in dance musicians' tune repertoires as it was in dance rhythms. The contents of Mount's musical collection and recollections provide evidence that he was a major participant in social and dance music making.