Introduction: Locating Celtic music (and song)

Western Folklore, Fall 1998 by Porter, James

All that emotion alone can do in music the Celt has done; the very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish airs; but with all this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt, so eager for emotion, that he has not patience for science, effected in music, to be compared with what the less emotional German, steadily developing his musical feeling with the science of a Sebastian Bach or a Beethoven, has effected? (Arnold 1910:87-88)

Mas! elle est aussi condamnee ad disparaitre, cette emeraude des mers du couchant! Arthur ne reviendra pas de son ile enchantee, et Saint Patrice avait raison de dire ti Ossian: "Les heros que tu pleures sont morts; peu vent-ils renaitre? (Renan 1947-64, vol. 11:253)

We can smile at the antique rhetoric of nineteenth century Celtic enthusiasts, a rhetoric that linked Ossian and St. Patrick to King Arthur and a host of otherworldly characters who inhabit a magical, heroic past. Invoking the term "Celtic," of course, has always been questionable because the concept is riddled with linguistic, cultural and ideological implications. If that is so, what might the much more specific notion of "Celtic music" convey? Does such a thing exist, even as an abstract concept? Allowing for the moment that it does exist, even "music" in this context is not so simple, for in most European folk cultures the term signifies instrumental rather than vocal music. "Music" is often conceived in opposition to "song," and this is no different in the handful of cultures with which we will be dealing here. The first issue, then-supposing that the concept of "Celtic music" is a valid one-is its ambiguity of reference in comparison with "Celtic song," which would presumably allude to songs in a Celtic language. Older rural concepts contrasted music and song more readily than newer urban contexts, in which a healthy middle ground of song with instruments has developed, particularly since the eighteenth century. "Celtic music" justifiably applies to such practice as much as to solo or concerted instrumental music. And "Celtic music," as it is understood in today's urbanised world, can and does include song in popular usage.

As a consequence, the second issue involves a widespread conception of Celtic music which not only signifies different things to different peopleeven within the same country or culture area-but has an air of insubstantiality about it. Hence the "locating" as the title of this journal issue. But there is also the more complex issue of whether any music made by indigenous musicians in a country with a living Celtic language can be called "Celtic," whether "classical" or "popular" (e.g., Irish country-and-western). This issue has been raised elsewhere in regard to European folk music as a whole and is significant simply because it defies neat cultural categories (Porter 1978). It lies, however, beyond the scope of the present discussion, which of necessity confines itself to music that is "traditional" or is constructed in relation to a Celtic identity. The semiotic dimensions of the topic, and its conception both within and outside the communities which practise "Celtic music," are problems that form the rationale for this issue of Western Folklore.

THE CELTIC REVIVAL

The idea of a "Celtic" music-whether it signifies bards, bodhrans, The Chieftains, Enya, Jest noz, triple harps, Riverdance, Alan Stivell, the Tartan Amoebas, or U2-is deeply and indelibly involved with the Celtic Revival in literature and the arts. For those who imprinted that Revival on public consciousness we should first look to the nineteenth century scholars who took it up: Matthew Arnold's views on Celtic literature, for example, are well enough known and have often been subject to scrutiny (e.g., Bromwich 1964, Durkacz 1983, Nutt 1910). Ernest Renan's La Po&ie des Races Celtiques (1854), which Arnold absorbed, is less well known but essentially involves the same aims and ideas. Renan and Arnold constructed a version of the Celtic world they derived from Ossian and from Herder's theories on popular poetry, thereby giving a substantial push to the Celtic Revival which is still in evidence today (Chapman 1978, Lang 1897).1

Arnold in particular, poised as he was to influence public perception in Britain at the height of the nineteenth century Revival, tried to capture the essential qualities of Celtic artistic expression. He refers, in his Oxford Lectures of 1865-6, to something called the "Celtic temperament" and identifies sentiment as its distinguishing mark, employing the word in its French rather than English sense (Arnold 1910:83-88). He is full of praise, too, for style and technique in Celtic literature. Drawing, however, on vague generalities from contemporary philology and ethnology, and determined to maintain the hegemony of English in his imperial Britain, Arnold makes heavy weather of ethnic characteristics. His comparison of peoples, for instance, involves generalizations that are now difficult to sustain (cf. Howes 1996). If there are distinguishing features of "Celtic" (as opposed, say, to Germanic or Slavic) cultural expression, we can ask: at what level are these to be found: spiritual or artistic content? logic of organization? the creation of extended structures?