From The Keeper's Recital

Harry White on a musical tradition split in two:

The neglect of music in the reanimation of ideas which have so transformed our comprehension of the Irish mind within the past 20 years must rank as an outstanding failure of Irish cultural history . . . The popular conception of [Thomas] Moore's achievement - attested by his reputation as a darling of the Victorian drawing-room - should not be allowed to occlude the influence which the Melodies exerted in the growth of a sectarian culture in Ireland.

Irish music [in the late nineteenth century] was thus preserved in two senses: it was collected in the interests of furthering a sectarian culture and it was safeguarded from the intrusions of an Anglicised polity. This argument depends on the advocations of the Gaelic League and the ["]Irish Ireland["] policy which it came powerfully to evince.

The principal function of music in the Celtic revival [was] as a symbol of the literary imagination itself . . . On one side, the revival proclaimed music as a finite resource from the past; on the other side, this symbol of a dying culture was given new life as a literary trope of immense expressive fecundity. Between these alternatives, Irish music itself was silent, or struggled to over- come centuries of aesthetic impoverishment.

It is fair to say that those most intimately concerned with the revival of music at the turn of the century shared in large measure the cultural separatism which [Douglas] Hyde so vigorously espoused . . . `The more we foster modern music the more we help to silence our own' was (Irish Folk Song Society member) Richard Henebry's formulaic response to the prospect of contemporary developments, even within the sphere of traditional music itself.