Policing Space and Defying the Mainstream: Gender and the Creation of a Traditional Music Public Sphere in Twentieth-Century Ireland

Whether in Ireland or elsewhere, most people first encounter Irish traditional music in public spaces such as pub sessions or concerts, or through the recorded traces of music-making produced for a listening public.1For those who become more involved in the scene as players, dancers, or avid listeners, festivals, schools, non-profit organisations, archives, and other instruments of the public sphere of Irish traditional music shape perceptions of the genre’s style, history, and participants. But while public and semi-public music-making has been a vital part of the transnational Irish traditional music scene for at least a century, the genre’s self-understanding still relies on its associations with a domestic, private past. In this article, I locate the roots of this contradiction in the historiographical problems presented by the 1935 Public Dance Halls Act—a piece of legislation that has had profound effects on musical practice and discourse in Ireland.2I examine the ways this law and the frequent retrospective overemphasis of its effects have contributed to the idealisation of Irish traditional music as rooted in a domestic, rural, and lower-class past. Combined with social and governmental restrictions on the activities of women during most of the twentieth century, this alignment of domesticity with imagined “authenticity” has shaped the reception of women’s public Irish traditional musical performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.