Irish music has been in a state of civil war for 200 years. Or so argues Harry White in his controversial new book, The Keeper's Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770-1970. The way nationalism developed in this country forced Irish music into two opposing camps: "Irish" and "Art", he writes, and what was Irish had to be traditional, so that original music in the European tradition was almost silenced. He shows this war in microcosm in the career of Sean O Riada.

In this extract he explains how O Riada's aspirations to being a national composer plunged him into artistic crisis and finished his career as a composer of original music.

What have I learned? Very broadly, that there are in this small Island two nations: the Irish (or Gaelic) nation, and the Pale. The Irish nation, tiny as it is at the moment, has a long, professional literary and musical tradition. The Pale, on the other hand, has a tradition of amateurishness . . . Three hundred years of this Pale amateurishness, are, however, ultimately boring. It has about the same relevance for the Irish nation as would a column about bee-keeping in a tricyclists' monthly journal.

Sean O Riada to Charles Acton, Irish Times, July 27th, 1971

Your analysis of our state suggests to me a difference of opinion between us analogous to the difference between the Westernisers and the Panslavophiles in nineteenth-century Russia. And I am avowedly, in that context, a Westerniser. I do not accept that Hercules (among O Riada's compositions in the "European art" tradition) is foreign, I do not accept that Ireland should be the one country of Europe whose composers cannot contribute to the art of the Western world without being deracinated . . . If Ireland was artistically part of Europe in the Middle Ages, why would you cut her off now?

Music critic Charles Acton to Sean O Riada, Irish Times, August 2nd, 1971

The crisis which I have sought to describe here was for the most part occluded by the acclaim which greeted O Riada during his brief lifetime. Expressions of genuine dissent were rare. This is what makes Charles Acton's abiding note of concern throughout O Riada's career so remarkable: as someone who had witnessed and reviewed the premiere of virtually every significant original composition by O Riada, he was better placed than most to observe the downward curve towards self-indulgence and silence which ended with the composer's death in October 1971. The famous exchange of open letters conducted between O Riada and Acton, occasioned by the latter's scathing notice of a "one-man show" given by the composer in July of that year, sharply apostrophises the conflict of interests which ultimately paralysed O Riada's movement as an artist. On one side of this exchange, Acton (clearly unaware of O Riada's illness) urged that he recover the discipline necessary to the realisation of his great promise as a composer of international significance. On the other side, O Riada defensively repudiated this ambition: it belonged to the Pale, from which he had defiantly exiled himself. Death cut short this debate, and Acton's obituary concluded that, although O Riada had shown the promise to be "our first great composer" . . . the width of his activity, his zest for actual life threatened the realisation of this promise, a continued anxiety to many of his friends. As a result, and of his life being so tragically cut short in his prime, this promise cannot now be fulfilled.

Such plain speaking appears in retrospect more courageous than the grandiloquent laments with which Irish literati greeted O Riada's decease, laments which ranked his achievement alongside that of Yeats and Joyce and which simultaneously projected him as a martyr to the cause of high culture in Ireland. These exaggerations tend to overshadow the truth of Acton's assessment, namely that O Riada both possessed and failed to realise the potential of definitive and memorable musical achievement, by which Irish art music for the first time might rank in comparison with Irish literature.

But a second, more fundamental truth clearly attends O Riada's life and work. However tantalising the prospect of a "great Irish composer", it was one which for O Riada was doomed to remain a mirage in the desert. The more nearly he encountered the ethnic tradition, the more difficult it became - as his career makes self-evident - to integrate that tradition within the language of the European aesthetic. With the exception of the late mass settings - in which composition becomes a vestigial activity - O Riada eschewed precisely this combination of ethnic repertory and international vocabulary in his original works. It is difficult not to conclude that such a combination would have represented an act of "colonial" (mis-)appropriation absolutely inimical to his instincts as a composer. The political condition of being Irish, when added to the then unstable notion of a "great composer", produced an aesthetic complexity which proved untenable. To take on the loss of a unifying aesthetic in Europe and the polarised condition of music in Ireland was simply too much to bear. Having forced the recognition of this crisis, O Riada took refuge instead in fertile, culturally apposite representations of a very small stock of traditional melody.

These representations, together with the film scores, earned for O Riada a degree of cultural recognition never afforded before or since to an Irish composer. His influence was such that the perception of music in Ireland as an original art form was almost wholly contained by his work with Ceoltoiri Cualann in particular. It was a perception which endured in the virtuoso finesse and bravura of The Chieftains and more recently in the reanimation of O Riada's productive cult of musical personality so effectively espoused by Micheal O Suilleabhain. In both cases, the concept of original composition is virtually indistinguishable from more or less successful adaptations of the O Riada model; which is to say that "original composition" is a meaningless term, other than to describe the variation and novel deportment of the traditional repertory itself. Those composers who, meanwhile, engage with Irish music other than the tradition are remaindered, in Raymond Deane's memorable phrase, to "the honour of non-existence".

The significance of O Riada, then, is not that he was the "greatest Irish composer of the 20th century" but that he silenced the claim of original art music as a tenable voice in the Irish cultural matrix: he silenced it, too, in its address upon the Irish mind. In its stead, he advanced the claim not of original composition but of the ethnic repertory itself. The eager reception of this claim in a country dominated by verbal art forms is itself part of the cultural history of music in Ireland. So, too, is the indifference to European music - with certain notable exceptions - which has proved pervasive in Ireland almost to the end of the 20th century. It would be absurd to lay this indifference at O Riada's door, but neither can one ignore the pivotal role which his endorsement of the ethnic repertory has played in the general reception of music in Ireland in the 25 years since his death. O Riada's huge gifts forced a degree of recognition and repudiation which profoundly affected not only his own ability (and inability) to compose, but the understanding of music in the cultural fabric of modern Ireland.

Other composers, no less committed to authenticity of voice and style, exercised minimal influence on the reception of music in Ireland as an essential mode of artistic and cultural discourse. O Riada, for better and for worse, was to determine the significance of music in Irish culture to a degree unprecedented in two centuries. The crisis enacted in his own life and works, together with its resolution, defined the terms of that discourse in the 1970s and beyond.

The Keeper's Recital: Music And Cultural History in Ireland, 1770-1970 by Harry White, is a Field Day Monograph published by Cork University Press.

Harry White is professor of music at University College, Dublin.