The Keeper's Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland 1770-1970 by Harry White Field Day/Cork 227pp, £14.95
Dear Harp of My Country: The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore by James Flannery Wolfhound 175pp, £15.99
In 1898 the leader of the English Liberal Party, Sir William Harcourt, was astonished to see a delegation from the Dublin Feis Ceoil at the Welsh Eisteddfod. In dismay he cried: "Is there an Irish question in music also?" In a sense, there could be nothing else, as both these books ably demonstrate. The long perspective taken by Harry White, Professor of Music at UCD, in his magisterial study shows us that after the mid-18th century, "traditional" Irish music and the music of the European mainstream no longer shared the same roots, and parted company for a variety of social and aesthetic reasons that quickly became political.
Thereafter, attempts have been made by musicians and those whose lives are surrounded and infused by music, either to reintegrate the two traditions or to keep them resolutely apart. The musical history of Ireland has thus been an allegory of the "battle of two civilisations" which generations have witnessed in the wider cultural sphere, to say nothing of the political and religious.
White makes the crucial point that whereas writers in Irish recognised the need to adopt - and adapt - the dominant English language as their means of survival, and thus created an Anglo-Irish or Hiberno-English literature, music had no such fortune. Thus, despite the fact that it was pressed into service as a vehicle for cultural nationalism, its subservience to the demands of the text meant that it never emerged as a dynamic agent in its own right. Sean O Riada was the chief victim of this divergence in our own time, but White identifies Thomas Moore as the fulcrum on which the fortunes of Irish music swung in relation to the European tradition: "he not only politicised the ethnic repertory: he also ensured that it would predominate in all considerations of music as a modern art form in Ireland."
Moore's use of research by Bunting and others has been shadowed by the question of whether, by taking Irish songs into the English drawing room, he was betraying Ireland itself. The scholar/ singer James Flannery, accompanied by harpist Janet Harbison on the two CDs that come with his book, demonstrates that if the 19th-century musical trappings are stripped away, Moore's text and music have an integrity which represents a continuity with the preceding mind-set.
Harry White explores the place of music in Irish cultural history through Carolan, Bunting and Moore, Thomas Davis, Douglas Hyde, the Cecilian movement for reform of church music, and the Literary Revival. He underlines the effective absence of music from cultural discourse because it failed to achieve translation - it wasn't carried across the gap between the polarised mind-sets of Planter and Gael. His thesis is a cogent demonstration of what J.S. Kelly, editor of Yeats's letters, said many years ago: "The developing objective reality of a nation is forever moving out of range of the subjective imagination that tries to encompass it." And James Flannery, one of the greatest exponents of the plays of Yeats, understands this well when he recognises that in the case of both Moore and Yeats, their work was denied a role in providing emergent Ireland with a link back into the past because it was assumed that they were working from an agenda which was not Gael-friendly.
Subjecting everything to a nationalist agenda, which did not have to wait for partition to be irredentist also, removes the capacity for self-criticism and for self-reliance. Aloys Fleischmann said in the 1930s that if an Irish composer wrote without genuflecting to the corpus of traditional music he would be excoriated, regarded as a traitor. It is not of course the only reason why we do not have an Irish tradition of writing in the "classical" genre, but it explains sufficiently why Irish composers until very recently have been inhibited in their conceptions of what "Irish" might be.
There is in fact no "modern art form" in music in Ireland today. Only a handful of composers (such as Gerald Barry, John Buckley or Raymond Deane) have the courage to write on a sufficiently large scale and without reference to "Irish" ideas or themes to make the essential translation into world-music. Traditional music is held by its custodians in a condition of stasis, as an intelligencer merely of the past, while the consideration of music per se is a minimal and peripheral aspect of our teaching institutions. In Seamus Deane's words, "the enforced intimacy between literature and politics was unique and tragic in Ireland". For literature, read music.
Richard Pine is the editor of Music in Ireland 1848-1998