A knock to the traditional notion of tradition

CultureShock:A new book about song on Tory Island debunks the myth that tradition is simply passed on unchanged, impervious to outside influence

In Lillis Ó Laoire's brilliant new book, On a Rock in the Middle of the Ocean: Songs and Singers in Tory Island, there are fascinating accounts of the way a tradition is constructed. Ó Laoire's subject is a fundamental one: why people sing. And in teasing it out he pores over the meanings that songs have in their personal and communal contexts. Based around his own long-term observations and the experiences of three island singers - Teresa McClafferty, Éamonn Mac Ruairí and Séamas Ó Dúgáin - his study both illuminates the development of a rich tradition and raises questions about its future.

One of Ó Laoire's subjects is the way songs are acquired. It is not a question that most of us tend to ask when we think of "tradition". Traditional cultures are imagined as an anonymous process through which a body of work is handed on intact from one generation to the next. In reality, traditions are shaped and reshaped by the people who bear them. They make choices. Ó Laoire found that most of the songs sung on Tory are, in part, traditional in the old sense - they were learned informally.

But the learning was not necessarily at grandmother's knee. Songs were acquired in the home, at dances, but also from books and newspapers, from the radio and from visitors to the island.

Ó Laoire glosses a wonderfully multi-layered word that is used in this context on Tory. The word "ceap" is usually used in Irish to mean either "composing" or "thinking". But on Tory it also means two other things: stopping a stray animal from escaping (a herder might stand in a gap in a fence to ceap a cow that's wandering off from the herd); and, rather marvellously, the ability of television aerials to receive signals. Talking about his own ability to acquire new songs, Ó Dúgáin laments his declining powers: "I'm not as good now as I was. When the head was young, it was capturing (ag ceapadh) every sort [ of song]."

It is a delightfully rich use of language, in which the singer's brain is simultaneously an organ of thought, a herder of straying cultural memories and an aerial picking up signals from the ether. And it contains a stirring rebuke to romantic notions of tradition. The intellectual, the physical and the electronic are all part of the process. And all of them are driven by another word that features heavily in Ó Laoire's discussions with the singers: dúil (desire). They talk of songs almost as they might talk of lovers, as forces that instil a lust for possession. Like sexual desire, this lust is no great respecter of boundaries. In the book, Teresa McClafferty talks of a song she heard as a teenager from another young woman: "I took a fancy to the song. I said to her 'Sing it for me again, for God's sake. I have a great fancy for that song (tá dúil iontach agam san amhrán sin)'."

What's striking is that the song is not some ancient lament, but a Tin Pan Alley concoction of Irish sentiment, called There's a Dear Spot in Ireland, written in New York in 1878. Ó Laoire points to it to show that "a living culture operates without regard to conventions of 'purity' thought up by cultural nationalists, and that its carriers make distinct and assured choices about what it is they like. If a particular artefact is being transmitted from person to person, which is not 'traditional' in the sense that it is a hoary survival from the ancient past, it will be assimilated if individuals find it interesting and valuable."

In one way, Ó Laoire's detailed and subtle analysis of how such a culture relates to people's lives seems to have quite cheerful implications for the future. It reminds us that, even in a tight and remote culture such as that of Tory, songs are acquired from all sorts of places and for no better or worse reason than that people like them. Notions of purity and authenticity are thus neither here nor there. But it also raises a different kind of anxiety. If a tradition is driven by desire, it is also potentially as contrary - and as ephemeral - as sexual attraction can be. No amount of persuasion can make one person fancy another or a singer fancy a song.

Both of these considerations seem to be at play in a project that will get a public outing on Tory on the weekend of July 13th to 15th, as part of the Earagail Arts Festival. Conceived and run by Una Campbell, who has run the adventurous An Gailearaí in Ceardlann na gCroisbhealach, Falcarragh, Co Donegal, for the last eight years, the Sean-Nós Nua project involves, as the poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh told me, teenagers on Tory "reaffirming their past and realigning it to the present". They are "attuning their ancient singing tradition to the high-tech wizardry of the studio, engineering it into the present, you might say. It's hip-hopping the sean-nós, exploring its expressive possibilities in a new voice; bringing a little rap artistry to Gaelic."

Which, if tradition is understood in the open way that Ó Laoire so movingly explores in his book, sounds like a very traditional way of going on.