Marginalised and Emerging Identities: The Traditional Voice in Irish Contemporary Music

Over the past three decades, the relationship between Irish traditional music and contemporary ‘art’ or classical music has been extensively documented and critiqued by musicologists and ethnomusicologists alike. The predominant focus of this scholarship, has more often than not, been in the realm of instrumental music. With the exc eption of a small body of research dealing specifically with hybrid forms of vocal music and the wider global and European contexts of Irish musical culture, such as the works of Susan Motherway (2013) and John O’Flynn (2009) for example, discussions about what the traditional music/contemporary art music relationship might mean for Irish cultural identity have, as consequence, also been limited to instrumental music. The longstanding European modernist idea that an independent instrumental art music is the sole marker of a highly developed musical culture has contributed to this discursive limitation, and has held influence (whether consciously or not) over Irish musicology. The fact that Irish musical culture has struggled to gain the same strong foothold as its literary equivalent within the field of Irish studies (White, 1998, 2008, 2014; Smyth, 2010) has also served to sideline discussions of Irish musical identity within broader cross - disciplinary contexts in the past. As a result, collaborations involv ing vocal music, particularly between sean nós and contemporary music (a relatively recent musical development that has gained momentum over the past decade) have been largely overlooked, as have discussions surrounding what collaborations between these tw o genres might mean for previous conceptions of Irish musical identity.