LET's be clear on one thing: this is not just a book about traditional music. It is a book about time, and as time is only understood subjectively, it is a book about a complex set of human relationships with time. This is what traditional music is, as Carson tells it: "Each time the song is sung, our notions of it change and we are changed by it," he writes, of a rendition of As I Roved Out. "The words are old. They have been, worn into shape by many ears and mouths, and have been contemplated often. But every time is new because the time is new, and there is no time like now. Blue smoke revives the moving air."
Ciaran Carson is best known as a distinguished Belfast poet: his latest collection, First Language, won the T.S. Eliot Award, while Belfast Confetti won an Irish Times Literary Award. But he is also an accomplished player of the flute, and counts the field of Traditional Arts as part of his dominions along with that of literature, in his work with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. This dual identity as an artist allows him to turn an analytical eye on the music, as again and again he shows its essence to be that shared with other folk traditions, of constant variety within a fixed framework: "no two stanzas of any Irish song have exactly the same music, for that must yield to the words, and if the music persists the same throughout the song it is an infallible sign that it is not the work of a traditional singer. The same rule was observed in playing dance music . . ."
If traditional music is a web of peoples' relationships with time, then in probing its mysteries one may shake out secrets such as how we remember and what we choose to tell how we make shapes out of time. Carson's probing shakes out nuggets which are gloriously odd. He numbers 24 names for a particular jig, including Maureen Playboy, Love Among The Roses, The Brown Red Girl and Boil The Kettle Early: "The tune is not a story," he explains,
"but stories might lie behind the tune." He quotes Breandan Breathnach's strange finding in Ceol Rince na hEireann that in the names of Irish dance tunes, "Boys and girls as well as maids invariably precede the place name; lasses always follow it" - what extraordinary mental loop does this expose?
Carson even attempts to find a history for the greatest expression in Hiberno English, namely "cat melodeon". This, he suggests, is a conjunction of the Irish "cat marbh" or "cat mara", a "dead cat" or a "sea cat", which means a mischief or calamity, with the tendency of piano accordion players (who often refer to their instruments as melodeons) to play two notes at once. Enjoy, as he settles a score with the instrument: "`You're either on the bus or off the bus'. Many cat melodeonists are off it."
In counterpoint to the body of relationships with time represented by traditional music, he evokes the odd manner, both mythologising and eclectic, in which his own imagination works to make of time, a life. Music threads through his friendships, his loved affairs, his relationship with his parents; his mother dug him out of a Sallisbury Street Folk Club with the scream: "Sacred Mother of God, come you out of there, Ciaran!"
He didn't gnaw on the flute in his cradle; at first he strummed along Joan Baez and mimicked the English folk revival - this was the Sixties, after all. The passion and attack of Irish music ensnared him later. While this mixture of influences is evoked, the book makes of itself a time capsule, and is a work of nostalgia for the Sixties and Seventies, for youth. It doesn't throw guacamole along with eggs and bacon on to the musician's breakfast plate, and it doesn't dip into the melting pot of influences that is today's traditional music.
That is its (necessary) limitation. Because it is a love story between a man and music, and a love story's shape in time depends on closure for its effect.