The flute and Irish history

[TxWhistler]

This thread needs to be renamed. I clicked on it expecting to read about an Olwell flute but 97 percent of this isn't even a 32nd cousin to the title topic.

[GreenWood]

This thread needs to be renamed. I clicked on it expecting to read about an Olwell flute but 97 percent of this isn't even a 32nd cousin to the title topic.

Would you consider the following a prescient proposition of a reply ?


"As we wish to be equally liberal with our old subscribers, to all who renew before Jan. 1st we will send a...a...not a horse and wagon because they would not go into the post office, so we'll say a penny whistle or...well you'll know what when it comes."

From Gleanings in Bee Culture vol. 2 and 3 October 1874.

You will notice the cryptic use of Olwell in its older form and the apparently casual association of whistling.

I must say though that I share your concern over the misleading title of the thread, and that though it was not itself misleading it has become misled by the likes of myself and various others who I will not name.

[Nanohedron]

This thread needs to be renamed. I clicked on it expecting to read about an Olwell flute but 97 percent of this isn't even a 32nd cousin to the title topic.

The OP and its relevant content can always be split from its considerable drift, as well, and in this case quite cleanly. Either way, any candidates for a new name?

[GreenWood]

david_h

I don't disagree with you on that, my view of learned helplessness is "You lot move off, you have a crop that will feed you now over there" the crop fails and people starve, or beg for food from those that displaced them.

A New History of Ireland: Ireland under the Union, II ..., Volume 6,Parte 2 is on music @ Pg506 available as exerpts.

Gives a broader setting.

Most search results direct to nationalistic themes, which though a reality do not fully explain what occurred to traditional music and music playing in 19th century.

Reading of O'Neill, he is from a modest background but not a complete peasant...

(peasant meaning country folk... it deserves a book, you have along the lines of "The Modern book of Composure and Manner" or "How to be an Aristocrat", so why not "The Compleat Peasant" ? I say that to make people think... but I think the answer is that country folk are mostly unpretentious)

...and his family are traditional local society, patrons of local music. It follows that he would want to protect and maintain that world, so I don't read him as advocacy, and am more inclined to believe lay views, whether romanticised or not, than prepared official account (I'm not sure which you meant to refer to from previous conversation as advocacy, and do not ask).


Equally, I am outsider and I know that just to have someone British commenting on Ireland or Irish history will raise some hackles. There are other articles, some on religious change after the famine for example. Also a much broader view on related history, that would reframes all of these events, is possible. I prefer to tread lightly. On the other hand I know Irish who are not happy with their country as is, and so I would not feel I was doing injustice by moving that conversation forward.

I think if no one Irish has documented the changes to music during the 19th century more fully, then it is because there is resistance to that from one echelon or another. To write it all from outside is not particularly convincing, but I think it is fair to try to gain understanding.

[Nanohedron]

Well, I gone and done it. This topic is split from the original. Starts out with a bit of a hiccup, but I think we can say it is what it is. Have fun, folks.

[Terry McGee]

Thanks, Nano. Hummpphh, praties not included in the title? (Just kidding!)

Now, PB&J, I've been meaning to ask you what's promoting your researching and writing? (Perhaps you've mentioned it elsewhere and I've missed it, in which case just point me to it.)

[Nanohedron]

Hummpphh, praties not included in the title?

I thought it best that prating not be included in the title.

[GreenWood]

What I am understanding so far is quite a mixed picture. Working from the question of if O'Neill only imagined a previous more musical period of traditional playing, and parallel to that if there was a significant level of local instrument making, before the famine.

It does appear that there was much traditional music being played before the famine, and it does appear that instrument making and ownership was common enough to the rural community.

The sequence looks like this, very roughly :

Various old or ancient tunes and styles survived the various assaults on music in Ireland up to 1800, and traditional forms of music were still common then.

There was a distinction in society, language and music between urban centers and rural population. The urbanites adopted newer forms and influence earlier.


Band playing was introduced likely from French revolutionary returnees, and British influence. The temperance movement took up the format along with O'Connell's Land League.

The famine saw the dispersal of many rural population settings for music. Loss of language and continuity around that time saw older Irish language songs being forgotten, or only kept as melodies.


The church reorganised itself around 1850, and the population became "devout". Festivities were altered or abandoned, temperance was a background to that, because traditional music was associated with revelry it was shunned. Alternatively, no more celebrations of that nature saw lack of demand for traditional musicians.

(That is then the time of Petrie, or the time O'Neill returns to Ireland to find it becoming a traditional music wasteland compared to his memories.)

New music is written that is often nationalistic in theme. Older tunes are collected by the above. Traditional music remains somewhat sidelined as far as to broader public, or becomes assimilated into presentable formats.

It continues like that into 20th century.


.......................


That appears to be the base picture, but there is a lot of detail missing. Particularly, no author so far clearly defines level of responsibility or a main reason, sort of rolling all these events into one, likely because they are all interrelated somehow and overlap each other.

And that is the question I ask, because I like the older music, and it seems almost like it was abolished, surviving mostly as collected melodies, derived melodies and new related tunes. The spirit of the music survived, enough of the playing and meaning has carried through to us one way or another I think, probably as much from independent playing during that time, as public presence ? Those in Ireland would have a much better sense of this I think.


There is a lot of information and well presented in

Flowing Tides
HISTORY AND MEMORY IN AN IRISH SOUNDSCAPE
Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin

but I would say to be careful to parse the actual information from offerred interpretation, because in places that differs much from some other sources. That can be as subtle as leading to one conclusion without offering other, or siding on wider economic interpretations. I don't say that as criticism, just that it is not complete enough to draw strong conclusions. The above comes across to me as researched but "presentable".

A New of Ireland: Ireland under the HistoryUnion, II ..., Volume 6,Parte 2 is on music @ Pg506 available as exerpts

Has additional information, a slightly different approach, but I could not read enough of it.

The Great Famine in Songs

https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/277#ftn4

provides some more information.


The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-75
Emmet Larkin

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1870344

I read before this first, before where it is cited by Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin who appears to sort of avoid various important implications offerred as far as older music is concerned.

[Mr.Gumby]

There is a lot of information and well presented in

Flowing Tides
HISTORY AND MEMORY IN AN IRISH SOUNDSCAPE
Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin

Ó'hAllmhurain's soundscape deals with a specific, limited area: Clare. I'd be careful to extrapolate that to Ireland as a whole. In some areas specific circumstances shaped the local traditions. See also 'Music in a breeze of wind' for a look on West Clare.

[pancelticpiper]

As Ben alluded to many pages ago we would be well to take our blinders off and realise that the flute was an extremely popular instrument in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and America as well as Ireland.

Flutes of cocus with zero to four nickel keys were quite inexpensive and common, still being listed in the 1890 Sears catalogue for example.

They occupied a place more or less like cheap guitars do today- if somebody had an instrument in the house it was likely a flute.

Fluteplayers were the Rock Stars of their day, in the 19th century filling huge venues.

A character in Dickens carries a flute in his pocket. Flutes are seen in many camp photos taken in the American Civil War.

The situation O Neill describes would be familiar to English and Americans of that time as well.

[PB+J]

Thanks, Nano. Hummpphh, praties not included in the title? (Just kidding!)

Now, PB&J, I've been meaning to ask you what's promoting your researching and writing? (Perhaps you've mentioned it elsewhere and I've missed it, in which case just point me to it.)

Terry I have two ancestors, one born in Donegal, who were listed as "colored" in 1884, in Virginia, the state where I now live, and this makes me a black person by law in Virginia, which is comical and the law is no longer enforced. See the image attached--he's the second line. I'm trying to tell the story of why this might have happened, without it just being a story of my particular family, which is no more or less interesting than anyone else's. The book is going to be about the relationship between genealogy and state power. It will have to deal with this horrible monster of a human being: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Plecker. He's not the person who classed my ancestors as colored though. It will end with an examination of how commercil DNa databases like Ancestry.com have absorbed records that used to belong to the State, and combined them with DNA. Ancestry's DNA test says I"m "96% Irish, 3% scottish and 1% Danish or Swedish, which i think is silly but it finds no African ancestry.

The book will have to get into the ways the Irish were regarded and also why there is little or no record of his family's existence in Donegal. I've been over to Madavagh, the townland he was said to be from, and I've done a good deal of research in various landlord papers in Dublin.

So I was noticing the really glaring accounts of poverty and then of course the catastrophe of the famine and thinking that at least from around 1830-1860, Ireland was in the midst of a really profound and jarring transition, where old social structures and practices were under extreme stress, and then thing got even worse, and so there's every reason to think of Irish music more as what they call in paleontology "punctuated equilibrium:" that is, evolution is not a steady state, it's periods of relative stasis punctuated by dramatic changes in response to catastrophe.

So O'Neill and his cohort were anxious to draw a line of unbroken continuity because they themselves were the product of the exact opposite--catastrophe and radical dislocation. I'm thinking about what an article on this might look like, but it's somewhat laid out in my book on O'Neill.

Sorry to go on so long!

[PB+J]

I'm asking people to consider the timeline carefully and to consider that the period from roughly 1830-1850 marked a really powerful disruption in the life of Ireland. I'm getting that from many sources, nearly all of them parliamentary reports or account of people traveling in Ireland or in london newspapers. These accounts are quite startling and don't leave much room for music making as an activity of what O'Neill called "the peasantry." The accounts of poverty--I've only quoted a few of them--are astounding.

Of course there was a small middle class in Dublin and Cork and there was relative affluence for those in the employ of the landed estates. The famine I think changes everything. It removes the "surplus population" through death and emigration and the crisis state of poverty is eased

O'Neill's recollections of Ireland are all from after the famine. His generation of musicians were all born after the famine. It's entirely plausible--but not necessarily proven--to suggest that what they were remembering was not an unbroken line of continuous tradition, but a society that had been profoundly altered. But they grew up in it: it was all they knew, and from Chicago they viewed it with nostalgia as if it represented a solid, unbroken tradition. I'm not insisting on this, I'm just laying out a possible case.

Oxford professor Charles Kingsley toured Ireland in 1860, when O'Neill was 12 years old. Of Mayo he wrote

"the country which I came through yesterday moves me even to tears. It is a land of ruins and of the dead. You cannot conceive to English eyes the first shock of ruined cottages; and when it goes on to whole hamlets, the effect is most depressing.

I suppose it had to be done, with poor-rates twenty shillings in the pound, and the people dying of starvation, and the cottier system had to be stopped; but what an amount of human misery each of those unroofed hamlets stands for! Still it had to be done"

this is the aftermath of catastrophe: this is not the world O'Neill remembers in West Clare, which was probably hit even harder by the famine than Mayo

But maybe he's not trustworthy, because he also wrote of the Irish people in Sligo:

"I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, he would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours ."

He also wrote "the differences of race are so great, that certain races, e.g., the Irish Celts, seem quite unfit for self-government"

Ireland, to put it bluntly, was an f'ed up place in the mid 19th century, and here Kingsley is one of the people who f'ed it up, trying to blame the state of things on the victims themselves.


I don't know if Peter Bowdoin Prentis, the County clerk who called my ancestor colored, thought he was a human chimpanzee or not.

[GreenWood]

Thanks Mr. Gumby, I will read that.

I agree and will keep that in mind, generalisation is pretty much counterproductive as far as understanding history is concerned. That is what makes history fascinating though, there are broad realities that exist and that are very relevant, for example the notion that an instrument was common or not in society as a whole, but once you get down to details like how one town faired or another, or what music was kept and which not and why, it gets much more complex but much closer as well.

I have some experience of how history is "constructed" in our modern setting, because there is much debate in the academic world over where the current approach is going, how it is set up. I say debate, but really it is often open conflict and despair at the loss of faculty and impartiality of more recent aspirants, and the reasons for that (for example entrenched supervision and control of funding, or advocacy if you prefer).

I'm a complete outsider, my limited contributions on another topic elsewhere were completely out of enthusiasm, and saw the attention of some very fine thinkers, they being dedicated to redressing various bias and poorly challenged presentation.

I don't know very much history though, just enough to get into trouble with. I would have to be in Ireland to get much further, because my proper understanding of anything always starts with contact with something of a previous age. Here it is flute and music, some memories from the Isle of Man, and then just a broader understanding of sorts of how people are, how countries and authorities work and so on.

Normally, I will find an object (say a tool or coin or construction) while out walking, and just start researching whatever is to be known, and expand from there until I feel I have understood something of it, am able to relate to what was at first a mystery. It is very rewarding, and what is more there are no intermediaries, because you have an object as left in a certain setting by someone centuries or more ago, as real (but for wear) as if it were left there yesterday. Even wear speaks of all that has happened since.

Like that you are able to look on the present as the future from the past, instead of the other way around. Like that you are before the present, and being before makes the present only a passing reality, as all that has happened up to it has been.

So I'm not sure what more I could add for Ireland, but try to search out details online that have been overlooked, or to challenge simplified versions of events with different contexts that give contrasting pictures. History cannot be more than occurred, it is not a conclusion and to see it as that is an invention or a construct made to suit our own wishes. What has occurred through time is vast, fortunate we are if we can find there that which we are able to relate to.

[david_h]

It's entirely plausible--but not necessarily proven--to suggest that what they were remembering was not an unbroken line of continuous tradition, but a society that had been profoundly altered. But they grew up in it: it was all they knew,

They had parents and maybe living grandparents. Where did his generation get the music from if not from older musicians? Printed collections?

[Mr.Gumby]

All good and well. But where are the 19th century flutes that were being played in the country? Did they all magically disappear? Some Irish made Kenna and Coyne flutes survive but these were not 'folk' instruments by any means. If local craftsmen were making flutes for the poorer strata of Irish society cheaper, perhaps more perishable, materials could have been used but even so, such items would have been cherished possessions, they would have been kept and passed on within families. Some would have survived at least. Yet, time and again players who grew up during the first half of the 20th century told the story there just weren't any flutes to be had. Even in times when music wasn't a particularly popular pursuit and demand was low, concert flutes of even half decent quality were extremely scarce. Uncles, first cousins twice removed, friends or fellow musicianers who emigrated to America or England picked up instruments in flea markets and junk shops there and sent them over. If the stories are to be believed, they were the source of flutes during the first nearly three quarters of the 20th century. The National museum of folklife in Castlebar, which has an extensive and wonderful collection of items relating to country life in Ireland has no flute in the collection. So what happened, where did they go?