The familiar in danger of breeding contempt

TRADITION AT THE CROSSROADS: PART 2:  MUCH IS OFTEN made of the purity of traditional music, and yet, in reality, it has tasted all manner of influences on its travels north, south, east and west of this island. It bears witness to its kinship with Appalachian music, and has influenced everyone from the Everly Brothers to Dylan and Johnny Cash, and yet, on home turf, traditional music leans towards the conservative, where the familiar may be in danger of breeding contempt - not only among some of its most talented practitioners but among a listening public alienated by what it perceives to be repetitious and anodyne.

Could this be the fault of our music education system's failure to dig beyond the surface of the music perhaps? Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Dublin fiddler and piper, suspects that this may be so.

"There seems to be this idea of sticking by the rules," he says. "It's as if there's an accepted code of practice. If you look at the teaching of maths, the first thing you learn is the numbers, one to 10. Then you hammer that on the head, and you say you have to forget all that because there's this thing called a decimal point. If you look at the whole of mathematical education, you're asked to continually reassess your position with regard to your perception of the whole scheme of things. You're continually renewing your perception of things really.

"I think that needs to happen in anything. In the traditional music education system, you never get to the point where they tell you there's a decimal point. They leave you with the one, two, three - but never tell you that there are notes in between.

"I think it's because we've had no culture of reassessment of our musical education," Ó Raghallaigh suggests. "That's my impression anyway, and we need to have the tools in place to continually develop and reassess what we are doing and hearing, over time. I think what we need to do is to promote a culture of investigation into our own perception of the music. The impact of that lack of a culture of inquiry is twofold, I think, because if people are curious and continually seek to refine and refresh their knowledge, to delve deeper, we end up with a much richer understanding of the tradition, and that feeds back into the tradition rather than letting it die and never appearing again. It's just a process of enrichment by inquiry, I guess."

A more fertile educational environment can only have a positive impact on the evolution of traditional music, Ó Raghallaigh insists.

"A very deep understanding of what went before automatically feeds into a much richer possible future, rather than a sterile belief that 'this is what it is, and it can be nothing else'. Obviously, there's no room for growth or passion there," he says.

MICK BRODERICK, bouzouki player with Slide, believes that, despite traditional music's marginal position, there is an eclectic audience primed to enjoy it again, just as Planxty and The Bothy Band lured fans from all corners back in their heyday - but, he suggests, they don't have a reason to.

"I really believe that if something was genuinely groundbreaking, that people would respond to it," Broderick says. "I think there was a formula that was hit on by the likes of The Bothy Band and Planxty, that is all too easy for bands to slot into, to get work and go touring. If you're a rock band, it's not that easy: you don't have a repertoire of tunes or songs, you have to come up with it all yourself. A trad band can take the tunes and play them, so that from an audience's point of view abroad or at home, all the boxes are ticked. So you just get a collection of instruments together: guitar, bouzouki, fiddle, pipes, whatever you want, and away you go. You have a certain amount of guaranteed success abroad, and you can sustain yourself as a band by just doing the creative minimum."

Broderick suspects that musicians fall into the trap of viewing themselves as "traditional musicians", rather than simply as "musicians".

"For me, I think I need to start considering myself as a musician first, and not necessarily or exclusively a 'trad musician'," he says. "That's the key for me. I need to spend time figuring out what I want to say in the music, and discover what gets me excited, and not so much what's going to please others, or what's expected of me. I think any musical arrangement is a combination of vision, ability, imagination and effort, and they're all needed in equal measure. In traditional music, I think there's far too much emphasis on ability and, when it comes to group arrangement, not enough on imagination or vision or effort."

Broderick makes probably the most astringent assessment of traditional music, which he views as more than a little jaded.

"It's a long time since I paid in to a trad gig myself," he admits, "because I don't think I'm going to get anything new. It's not worth the Luas ride into town. It's funny, because if Andy Irvine's in town, or if Lunny has something new going on, I know that I'm going to be excited by that and I also know that I'm not going to be excited by 90 per cent of the rest of what's around."

NIAMH PARSONS, perceived widely as a singer of English songs, finds audiences in England are more open to an eclectic repertoire than those on her home turf. Spending some time touring in the UK, she sees first-hand how new ground is being broken in traditional and folk music in England and Scotland, but not in Ireland.

"If you listen to the likes of Mike McGoldrick , you'll hear it," she says. "I think they're much freer in their mind, musically. They don't have the same weight of the tradition that Irish people seem to have - 'oh, you can't do this, or you couldn't do that'. In Ireland, new ground was broken by Planxty, The Bothy Band and Moving Hearts, but nothing has been broken since."

Éamonn de Barra, of Slide, pulls few punches when it comes to diagnosing the canker that's leeching the life force from Irish traditional music these days.

"Money has become the driving force of the modern session, which has had a transforming effect on it," he says. "The sessions as we knew them are all but gone and have been replaced by the less alluring 'gig', due in part to the emergence of the thriving tourist industry and hefty rents and mortgages for publicans.

"What all of this means, really, is that the current generation of traditional musicians can no longer put off the inevitable, and that is: those who have been bearing the torch for the past 30 years deserve that it be taken off them with the same pride as they lit it. All of their efforts to create opportunities and a viable way of life for the troubadours of today must be honoured, and soon. Get the fingers out and the heads down."

The third and final part of this series, next Friday, will explore the role of the Arts Council and of the traditional arts in shaping our identity in a changing socio-economic landscape.

"If Andy Irvine's in town, or if Lunny has something new going on, I know that I'm going to be excited by that and I also know that I'm not going to be excited by 90 per cent of the rest of what's around