PB+J wrote: ↑Sun Oct 09, 2022 4:03 pm
No offense taken and thank you. I've read O Grada's work in depth--it's cited a lot in my book on O'Neill. There's a great deal of uncertainty in death figures regarding the famine. It's very very bad, but it's also hard to sort out famine deaths from deaths due to disease and absence due to emigration, especially since records--census, birth and marriage an baptism deaths, are quite poor in many counties
My only real experiences on mood changes in society aren't very conclusive, but they are also surprising. So for example in Spain in the late 80's was buoyant and natural, real and spontaneous. Then the 90's was tenser and faster moving. Then 2000 and Euro was almost a clash, a different gear and smoothed confused. Then GFC and it was sort of rarified, a bit manic and tense, then a slow empty depressed . That then went on to more organised, presentation, official.
These are minor changes compared to a famine, or to colonisation, or to industrial revolution though, and yet the cultural reality shifted drastically at each, including performing arts. Ironically, the liveliest authentic was when relatively poor out of those, when everything was much simpler also.
Historically, there are long events like dancing mania, which are unexplained but thought brought on by social stress, possibly the plague.
O'Neill's nostalgia, would that be from changes during the famine, or from leaving Ireland, or even simply a product of his enthusiasm for traditional music and of wanting to transmit the best of his experience ? For example, I remember flamenco in Seville in the early 90's and that street scene much dissappeared, and I feel a nostalgia for that. However when I visit the same neighbourhood now, I don't feel nostalgia, I feel reassured but also dissapointed...maybe it will all be back sometime ? Nostalgia can also be considered part of traditional music, as far as I know has always been a theme.
The following doesn't need any introduction
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3JrG95HhL2k
and here it is progress/"progress" that is displacing the older, more difficult but fuller life. However it is nostalgia that also carries the music and tradition through that.
I suppose we should not confuse nostalgic commentary from historic fact, but at the same time it would not be fair to deny what was meant, because surely O'Neill knew what he was trying to share with his portrayal and I don't think it was invention (and not saying you do either)
That the flute was most popular of instruments, seems likely (apart from whistle maybe, and I count fifes as flutes also).
That discarded conical flutes were picked up by locals. Though there is a fair amount of commentary (and proof) to this effect later, I don't see it as locals just being handed aristocratic flutes, say in the 1850's, and all deciding to learn how to play from that. I think they would have been taken up by existing players of flutes (and maybe whistles). A simple example of why I think that, is that now where there is no flute tradition in a local society, people just don't buy flutes even though they are readily available.
For sure new instruments would have brought a new life or different presentation to the music, but that would not have been out of nowhere, more likely a direction that also added to popularity of flute. People living in Ireland would have much more of a feel for how things were than myself, but outside perspectives are good for certain details as well.
For the famine, they are important but at the same time I think you just get to a point where to use numbers ends up being something of an injustice. I have read accounts of other famines, it isn't bedside reading. I always get the impression of there being a kind of "learned helplessness" at play, things don't work as they are supposed to (or have been adjusted/disrupted too much) and no-one knows what to do, even though from outside or in hindsight answers seem obvious. We forget how people react to that kind of circumstance, how reason and thinking decline rapidly with lack of orientation, with lack of energy. Most of us don't know, wouldn't know how to handle that, have no experience of that. I was previously going to link a first hand account essay by a violinist who was amongst first drafted in WW1, before being wounded and moving to America, he explained how his character and mindset changes, and amongst his (well educated) companions also, under duress (including lack of supplies). There isn't much I could say about it all, really.