Pocket Guide to Irish Traditional Music (Appletree Pocket Guides) [Paperback]

If you want to learn a lot from a little book, an hour or two reading these 72 pages can inform you about the instruments, styles, vocal approaches, and the song tradition. About half of the contents are devoted to the different instruments, and what Carson observes about them is that none are really products originally from the simple rural folk; the heraldic harp itself more a sign of aristocratic patronage before and after the coming of the English. Carson, with the concision that he brings to his prose and poetry, lets his own opinions spice the broth, for rather than a bland recital of facts, the knowledge that he has gained (although a bit self-effaced here in these pages; see his in-depth "Last Night's Fun" for much more depth) as a flautist for many years earns for him the merit of a practitioner as well as a scholar of the genre. Although not here mentioned, for many years Carson was Traditional Arts officer for the North of Ireland. He is, again not told of here, a native Irish speaker born in 1950 from Belfast. (I believe he claims not to have spoken English until the age of ten. His accounts of his hometown, such as his verse collections and his prose-poems in "The Star Factory," offer more if typically oblique descriptions worth the effort to find, "hear," and contemplate.) His ability to place himself into the music rather than staying at a distance as if an anthropologist to analyze it, adds veracity and heart to his reports from its playing (and its variable, often far more subtle than is assumed, moods). My only wish is that this pocket-sized Appletree Guide were longer; barring that, with updated discography and a new edition to tell of how Irish music and especially dance has continued to evolve in the twenty years since its publication.

Carson considers from various perspectives the problem encountered by those expecting that Irish music is resolutely indigenous and stubbornly autochthonous (although neither term's used by him); he sensibly puts into the category of trad whatever it will hold and from whomever brings it, but this category is decididly neither folk nor Celtic music. A particularly insightful approach shows--if too briefly, but I suppose the dimunitive format of this book limits severely its scope--how technology influenced 20c music. For instance, when Michael Coleman's fiddling was heard on vinyl in the 20s, it devastated many players and caused others to mimic his dazzling style rather than continue in their own native "dialect" with its own quirks and distinction. Similarly, Seán Ó Riada's spirited incorporation of an ensemble delivery of traditional tunes in the 50s, broadcast through RTÉ, would change the way musicians conceived of their own tradition.

But, as Carson notes, his own revival of the traditional tunes carried its own contradictions: the classical style influenced Ó Riada's orchestral approach even as he disdained the role of not-traditional music; he threw out the piano and the drums for the harpischord (thinking it could imitate the sound of the harp) and the bodhrán (Carson has sage advice for those who dare to think they can join a seisiún merely by carrying one into a pub); he valued the sean-nós singing yet employed the tenor Seán Ó Sé. Carson also scowls upon such as Horslips who in his opinion "bastardised" the pure drop. Carson writes movingly conveying the impact of hearing unaccompanied vocals from a Conamara pub, and knowingly about the need for respect and etiquette when paying liquid-rendered homage to the players when one is in the pub listening to such intimate music. Such details give this account a "lived-in" sense rather than the transmission of a musicological monograph.

Patrick Kavanagh's comment about the parochial representing truth and the provincial the Received Standard applies well as Carson employs it to the recognition of regional and local styles of singing and playing. Carson emphasizes how the Irish tradition is elastic and can incorporate many influences, paradoxically perhaps to purists, while remaining at its best respectful of the legacy that the younger build upon from their forebears who kept tunes alive with far less of an interest than has been the case in the past four decades or so--thanks in no small part to those who listened with fresh ears how Ó Riada, the Chieftains, and then perhaps Planxty or De Danaan interpreted and stimulated a music that earlier in the century some feared would lapse into dormancy under the assault of the Anglo-American media flooding in to the island.

Despite the homogenizing influence of renowned players and vocalists who by their being made available on record can then be heard by a far greater, and if musicians understandably impressionable, audience, Carson in his own understated-- although at times petulant or waspish if in an enjoyably erudite-- manner condenses decades of experience into this primer. As he puts it in characteristically measured fashion: "The song is the way it is sung; since there is no absolute melody, one is free to interpret it as one wishes; the song is the totality of the effects that may be deployed at any one time." (50) In the patterns of music, not the score or The Book of Capt. O'Neill should direct the player, but the musician or singer's own spirit. This ancient yet ever new outpouring breaks forth, channeled by the tradition even though in every playing, like the course of water, its direction each time meanders and wanders however it may, beyond the control of our reason or our technologies.

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