The Invisible Art review – a mosaic of music brought to light

Essay collection tracking 100 years of classical music, Ireland’s most neglected artform

The Invisible Art: A Century of Music in Ireland, 1916-2016
The Invisible Art: A Century of Music in Ireland, 1916-2016
Author: Edited by Michael Dervan
ISBN-13: 978-1-84840-574-5
Publisher: New Island
Guideline Price: €29.95

“In Ireland,” Axel Klein writes in his contribution to this remarkable book, “music, ‘the universal language’, was more often than not perceived as a force of separation rather than unification. It seems that for many Irish politicians [In the 1930s] and large parts of the population, classical music was simply not an Irish art.”

It is not a provocation to add at the outset that nor is it today: the dislocated (and strikingly impoverished) reception history which Michael Dervan, music critic of The Irish Times, identifies in his rueful introduction to The Invisible Art (a title which makes the general argument unmistakably clear) is one which extends to the present moment. But this lively, alert and generous compendium of essays on music in Ireland over the past century is anything but a doleful litany of complaint. Instead, its 20 contributors – composers, musicians, journalists and (perhaps notably) musicologists – closely engage with the mosaic of Irish musical culture and brilliantly attest to the plurality of its sounding forms. The book does not shirk its obligation to countenance the difficult (and often disheartening) circumstances in which this mosaic has emerged (Klein quotes an official government communication from the 1930s which describes symphony concerts as "a Victorian form of educational recreation" irrelevant to the ambitions and duties of the new state). But nor does it dampen the imaginative zest (and even prestige) of the Irish musical imagination despite the indifference (or worse) which has often eclipsed it.

Six sections

Following Dervan’s introduction,

The Invisible Art

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is divided into six sections: “1916-1922” (a thoughtful and stately survey by Joseph Ryan of the mixed fortunes of music in the turbulent and transitional circumstances which produced the Irish Free State, and two shorter essays by Ita Beausang and David Byers on the composers Ina Boyle and Norman Hay respectively); “1923-1951” (Axel Klein’s compelling assessment in “No state for music” and a reflective piece by Michael Murphy drawn from interviews with John Kinsella and Seóirse Bodley); “1952-1969” (a deeply-felt reading of Irish compositional and infrastructural development during a heady phase of creative surge by Kevin O’Connell, which is complemented by two recollections by Jane O’Leary and Hilary Bracefield of their mixed experience of Irish contemporary music and concert life from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s); “1970-1989” (a period of “growth and consolidation” incisively surveyed by Mark Fitzgerald, who crisply reminds us of how much was to change in this period, and not only in the emergence of a “radical new generation of composers”: “In 1970, there was no National Concert Hall and no Contemporary Music Centre”; and more personal reminiscences by Proinnsías Ó Duinn on his experiences as a conductor during the same period, and by David Harrington, leader of the Kronos Quartet, on his early encounters with composer Kevin Volans); “1990-2000” (an assessment by Michael Dungan of Irish music “in the time of the Celtic Tiger” which gives [due] prominence to Gerald Barry and Raymond Deane, and also takes in, among many others, Deirdre Gribben, John Buckley, Stephen Gardner and Donncha Dennehy).

This section also includes essays by Andrew Johnstone (on Bill Whelan and Shaun Davey), John Schaefer ("In search of the Irish Philip Glass or Meredith Monk"), Joanna MacGregor (on her work with Dennehy in the late 1990s and early 2000s), Barbara Hannigan (who sang the part of Gabi in Barry's opera The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant) and Martin Adams (on the development of musicology in Ireland).

Persuasive reading

The final section, “2001-2016” combines a genuinely persuasive reading of contemporary Irish music by Liam Cagney (which enlists the [Irish] literary revival as a meaningful paradigm for what Irish composers are doing now) with Jennifer Walshe’s characteristically stimulating “notes on being an Irish composer”, and two interviews with composers Andrew Hamilton and Ann Cleare by Dervan and Carol McGonnell respectively. The book is rounded out by an impressive bibliography and an appendix which lists the festival programme for Composing the Island: A Century of Music in Ireland, 1916-2016, with which this publication is closely associated. In this respect, the structure and contents of

The Invisible Art

lend it the impression of an exhibition catalogue, and a very rich and deeply-informed one at that.

It is magnificently designed and produced, and it must surely count as by far the most handsomely illustrated volume on music in Ireland to have appeared to date. (Caitríona Ní Dhunáin, the book’s illustration researcher, together with Dervan himself and designer Fidelma Slattery, all deserve highest praise and congratulations on this account). I suspect that many readers of this book will linger fondly over its vivid and deeply evocative sequence of photographs and reproductions, several of which were unknown to me before I sat down to review it. One of these, in which Igor Stravinsky is seen in conversation with Éamon de Valera during the composer’s visit to Dublin in 1963, deliciously summons the strangely clandestine condition of music in Ireland during the past century, hovering as it did between cultural chauvinism and the claims of European modernism.

Uncertain presence

This uncertain presence is an abiding theme throughout the appraisals, essays, interviews and remembrances which collectively and individually illuminate the felt life of Irish music (and of music in Ireland) with such flair and conviction.

The Invisible Art

is for the general reader. Nevertheless, its admixture of specialised research (the book is often generous to the literature which precedes it), spirited (but not rancourous) judgement and an occasionally volatile and tense expression of artistic self-awareness (as in Walshe’s essay) promotes an authenticity in relation to its subject which will speak to anyone interested in the deeply divided and vexed question as to what Irish music might be.

It hardly needs to be remarked that much of the music in this book has not only remained invisible to cultural history, but inaudible to Irish audiences. A work such as Roger Doyle's Babel (1999) might in any other circumstance by now enjoy the status it deserves as a classic of musical postmodernism (Irish or otherwise), but the silence which literally and figuratively surrounds so much Irish music betokens a degree of cultural and educational indifference unrivalled elsewhere in Europe. This book steps nimbly from the darkness and gloom of such musical neglect, even as it makes the darkness itself visible. Its own evaluations suggest the emergence of an Irish canon of 20th and early 21st-century music (from Stanford to Barry, as it were) and the promise of a commensurate critical and historical engagement. It deserves an ardent reception.

Harry White is Professor of Music at UCD and a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He is general editor (with Barra Boydell) of The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland