Anthony McCann and Lillis Ó Laoire

(This article appears in full in the book Global Pop, Local Language, edited by Harris M. Berger and Michael T. Carroll, which is to be available from The University Press of Mississippi (272 pp., August 2003, ISBN 1578065356) or through Amazon.com. Excerpt posted with permission.)

At the present time, whatever might fit under the rubric of "Irish culture" is receiving widespread publicity, and perhaps more recognition in international contexts than ever before. The discourses and social dynamics of development, consumerism, and tourism have become dominant forces in everyday life as Ireland has become "the place to be." Cultural "phenomena" such as the dance stage show Riverdance and Frank McCourt's best-selling novel Angela's Ashes have boosted this highly responsive climate for the commercial exploitation of Irish-related cultural marketables. The media-driven spectacle of celebration and "wonderlust" has not been without detractors. Crowley and McLaughlin have drawn attention, for example, to exclusions and misrepresentations that could easily go unnoticed amidst the clamor. Nevertheless, now at last, it seems to many, Ireland can identify itself as other than not-English as it takes pride of place within the European and global economies. The binary opposition of Irish and English is not so easily dismantled, however. Its long pedigree continues to color and structure life in Ireland. This is particularly the case in regard to the attitude of many towards language.

Speakers of the Irish language find themselves in a somewhat paradoxical situation. Within the bounds of the 1937 Irish Constitution, the Irish language is the "national" and "first official language." English is recognized as the "second official language." This in no way reflects the hegemonic status of the English language as the primary vernacular of Irish life, either at the time the Constitution was drafted or now. The complexities of Irish language practices in Ireland call for in-depth exploration that is beyond the scope of this paper. However, it can be said that the horizon of understandings and expectations that encompasses Irish and English languages in Ireland has been deeply influenced by a radical discursive separation that, as Leersen would suggest, perhaps stretches back to the seventeenth century (173-186).

In this paper, we are not concerned with the interrogation of the term "language choice" as such. Rather, we explore this discursive operation of binary opposition, presented as a "choice of languages." The practice of what is commonly referred to as "traditional" or "unaccompanied" singing in Ireland is often represented as if singers have before them the "choice" of two radically-distinct and symbolically-disparate linguistic traditions. We might call this a "two-traditions hypothesis". To summarize broadly, on the one hand, there is a Gaelic singing tradition; ancient in lineage, personal in character, lyrical in content, more ornamented in delivery, more authentic in essence. On the other lies an English language tradition, more recent in origin, more practical in character, more literal in content, more plain in delivery, less Irish in essence. In this paper we explore the major ideological forces contributing to this opposition, in particular focusing on the gradual enclosure of unaccompanied singing in the Irish language within discourses of authenticity and otherness, which coalesce in the construction and perpetuation of the rubric of sean-nós.

Drawing on our experience of ethnography and participant-observation fieldwork, we argue that the perception and representation of Irish and English language song traditions as radically separate prevents and indeed suppresses adequate understandings of the practices or experiences of singers themselves. Indeed, it will be argued that the simplistic nature of the binary opposition accomplishes two things of note. First, it encourages structuralist and deterministic approaches to songs and texts and foregrounds a reified view of "tradition," thereby concealing important questions of social context and personal meaning. Second, as we have already noted, it leads us to understand the experiences of people who sing in terms of an either/or language choice between distinct, alternative entities. Considering these experiences in terms of "choice" leads us down theoretical roads that are inadequate to deal with the complexities disclosed by our research.

In response to the inadequacies of the two-traditions hypothesis, we celebrate the complexities of singers' experiences and make a plea for a methodological particularism. To be precise, we suggest the principles of social interactionism in order to work towards a clearer representation of the specificities of locally-negotiated meanings. Invoking social interactionism may bring us closer to an understanding of the subtleties of the personal interactions of people who sing. To highlight the inadequacies of the two-traditions hypothesis, we briefly look at the lives of three singers, Elizabeth Cronin, Róisín White (Vallely), and Teresa McClafferty, whose experiences as singers disclose the nuances of social interaction. The complexity of their experience challenges the continuing representation of a strict dichotomy of Irish and English language song traditions and reasserts the importance, authority, and priority of personal experiences, as singers maneuver amidst fundamentally quotidian considerations of courtesy, decency, friendship, and hospitality-values explicitly underlined by the dynamics of contexts for singing. We move, then, from generalization to particularism, from choice to expectation, from entrenched binarism to personalized, situational negotiation.

The two-traditions hypothesis is widely accepted as a valid representation of song, singing, and the experiences of singers in Irish life. Our paper attempts to challenge that validity, to unsettle the status quo, and to prompt a different approach to the subject. By doing this, we hope to contribute to what Shore and Wright refer to as an "anthropology of the present." As Carrier argues, the issue is not that people reduce things to essences or establish dichotomies that lead to errors and misconceptions. Rather, it is that such reductions "become so entrenched that it becomes difficult to stand back from them and consider whether they help or hinder scholars in the pursuit of the questions that confront them" (8).

The Binary Opposition of Irish and English Languages

The dominant ideological strains of cultural nationalism in Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries posited a binary opposition of Gaelic and English language worlds. This opposition has been explored in detail by O'Leary, particularly in relation to literature. In 1893, the Gaelic League was founded to preserve and extend the use of the Irish language. Scholars such as Ó Tuama and MacDonagh have shown that the Gaelic League explicitly viewed the true spirit of Ireland as the neglected and despised Irish-speaking one, to be found only among the poorest communities where the Irish language survived as an everyday vernacular. The world of the Irish-speaking Gael, then, was predominantly characterized as spiritual (and specifically Catholic), Irish-speaking, and rural, while the world of the English-speaking Gall was portrayed as secular, decadent (Anglicized and modern), and urban. The relationship was further complicated by the common attribution by cultural nationalists of the decline of the Irish language to systematic anglicization, enacted by the British administration over hundreds of years of colonization. This is clearly outlined in the entrenched political polarization that pervades every aspect of a Northern Irish life, as has been noted by McCoy (118). Couched in a simplistic binary of oppressor and oppressed, the Irish language contributed forcefully to an ideology of "national parallelism" in which Ireland was systematically portrayed as radically separate from the nefarious, socially decadent influences of modern English-speaking Britain. The work of Chapman and Ó Giolláin has shown that this binary opposition was informed, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, by anti-Enlightenment romantic nationalism, in particular by the works of German writers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder, and by a pervasive "Celticism" influenced by the writings of Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold, among others. Together, these ideological supports legitimized the identification of the Irish language with the "personality" of the Irish nation, while also allowing the essential qualities of this "Celtic" language to be idealized as exotic, ancient, pure, sensitive, spiritual, feminine, imaginative, poetic, passionate, and impractical (Ó Giolláin 26).

The Myth of the West

One of the most powerful themes elevated by the Gaelic Revival, the Gaelic League, and Irish cultural nationalism, and one which underpins the dichotomy of Gaelic and English languages, is the Myth of the West. Scholars such as Gibbons, Nash, Byrne, Edmondson, and Fahy have shown how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the West of Ireland became representative of an essentialized, "true" Irish identity. For others it became a "new frontier," drawing forth the act of "discovery." The West of Ireland proved a paragon of discursive closure, holding out the promise of a true language, folklore, and way of life. The West, generally, was also implicated in a process of marked temporal closure, achieving something of a transcendent value, "outside time, separated from normal temporal development" (Nash 187). It provided a model example for prevalent attitudes of cultural anachronism, critiqued by Chakrabarty, whereby the West was not quite of the present, but magically peripheral, and contrasted with a mechanistic and rational urbanity redolent of colonial bureaucracies (Byrne, Edmondson, and Fahy 236). As noted by Ó Giolláin, such reification was undoubtedly exacerbated by the enormity of the social distance between the urban middle-class enthusiasts of the Gaelic Revival and the people in the West to whom they looked for spiritual nourishment. Where "Ireland" and "Irishness" had served (and continues to serve) as the convenient and primitive "other" of colonial discourses, the West, and for some reason Connemara in particular, became something of an "internal other," a powerful symbolic manifestation of Ireland as not-England. As well as the foregrounded issues of language, folklore, and way of life, the West was at the furthest remove from the cultural influences of anglicization, with a landscape in stark contrast to any that might be considered "English." The West became for the Gaelic Revival "a physical location for unpolluted Irishness" (Byrne, Edmondson, and Fahy 236).

The Gaeltacht

A crucial element in the persistence of the Myth of the West as an exotic other is the symbolic, geographical, and legislative construction of the Gaeltacht, now most commonly understood as the areas in which Gaelic is deemed to be used as an everyday vernacular. The concept Gaeltacht itself needs some glossing. The first mention of the word in Ireland seems to be in a seventeenth century poem, although its polar opposite, Galltacht, from Gall "a foreigner," is attested to from at least the sixteenth century in Ireland. As documented by Ó Torna, it is clear that, in contexts such as this, Gaeltacht does not represent a particular location, but rather a group of people, the Gaeil, the "Gaels"-Irish or Scottish speakers of Gaelic and subscribers to a Gaelic world view. By the nineteenth century, the concept of the Gaels had become a convenient "other" for metropolitan culture, located at some distance from the urban "centers" in wild romantic locations. The term was appropriated by the revivalists to represent this other in a sympathetic way, emphasizing the western location of the people and its importance as a container of pure, simple, cultural richness. In 1926, this spatial demarcation became enshrined in law, with districts where more than 80 percent of the people spoke Irish defined as fíor-Ghaeltacht ("true/pure Gaeltacht") whereas those with between 25 and 79 percent became designated breac-Ghaeltacht ("speckled/partial Gaeltacht"). Subsequently, as Johnson has noted, the often extreme living conditions in these areas could be conveniently ignored by some, since the "other" had been reified to represent the quintessential spiritual core of the nation. So, the Gaeltacht was imagined as an idyllic location of neatly-thatched, white-washed cottages, set against a romantic, mountainous landscape, where storytelling, singing, music, dancing, and other "traditions" were to be found in a state of linguistic purity, an image, indeed, which has stubbornly endured despite all the changes of the twentieth century. The construction, constitution, and enclosure of the Gaeltacht were perhaps the most visible political realization of the linguistic dichotomy of Gaelic and English.

We have seen, then, how a binary opposition between the Irish and English languages was established in the discourses of Irish cultural nationalism. This opposition was reinforced in four major ways: first, the influence of the philosophies of romantic nationalism; second, the rise of Celticism; third, the Myth of the West; and fourth, the constitution of the Gaeltacht. The radical cultural and linguistic separation between Gaelic and English was carried over into the way in which song was conceptualized. This is hardly surprising. Embodying both music and language, song in Gaelic was seen as something of a romantic synthesis within the cultural nationalist matrix of Irish identity.

The "Two Traditions" Hypothesis

It is often the case that something is defined in terms of something else, that which is not itself. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke refers to this as contextual or dialectical definition and notes that this is at the heart of the very idea of definition (24). Many scholars have critiqued the process whereby "cultures," "traditions," or "societies" are presented as closed systems, essentialized, and reduced to a timeless essence. A key example is Said's Orientalism. Carrier acknowledges that in the process of dialectical definition, infinite complexities are reduced to the construction of an abstract, generalized entity; such an entity is then further reduced to a set of core features that are understood to express the essence of that entity, but only as it stands in contrast to its other (3). This is the key process in the construction of the two-traditions hypothesis. Proponents of the two-traditions hypothesis construct an image of a Gaelic song tradition that is absolutely different and separate from an English language counterpart. The Gaelic song tradition is constructed primarily as not-English (language). To speak of a "song tradition" at all is usually to assume, albeit often implicitly, the persistence of a continuously existing entity which remains, in its essence, more or less identical through time. This entity is understood to undergo changes conceived as being more or less analogous to the changes that individual human beings experience. In many ways, then, supporters of the two-traditions hypothesis seek to outline the distinct and distinctive "personality" of a Gaelic song tradition as not-English.

A recent and illustrative statement of the two-traditions hypothesis can be found in Liam Mac Con Iomaire's definition of sean-nós in the encyclopedic Companion to Irish Traditional Music, in which he holds that "while there are similarities between traditional singing in English and traditional singing in Irish, they are two different traditions and are generally celebrated as such. The songs in Irish reflect an outlook on life and a view of the world that is quite different to the songs in English" (336). The binary opposition is clearly established, the two traditions are presented as radically distinct, undoubtedly separate. Such an opposition is more developed in O'Rourke's description of Gaelic song:

In these songs, it seemed to me, they think differently, they look on the world with different eyes and minds, they fall in love differently - or at least express themselves differently about it; they grieve differently, they pray and curse differently. And they do all these things eloquently, imaginatively, impressively, attractively - more so, I thought, than in the [English language] world with which I was already familiar (13-14).

In this passage, Irish speakers are constructed as an exotic other, a "they" whose proper medium of communication is song. We find an emotional, anti-rational, artistic, Gaelic world view contrasted with a practical, rational, unimaginative English language one. Highly redolent of the binary oppositions of cultural nationalism and Celticism mentioned earlier, this view reinforces the simplistic opposition of Gaelic and English language song traditions.

Gaelic song is understood to occupy the dominant pole of the binary opposition in its role as privileged "other." This dominance is consistent with Jacques Derrida's observations on the relations of power within binary operations. As Derrida points out, there are very few neutral binary oppositions. The binary privilege, for example, is sometimes deployed within the two-traditions hypothesis is to explain English language song in terms of Gaelic language loss. O'Sullivan, for example, writes, "We now turn to our popular songs in English, and here we come across an astonishing contrast. They differ enormously from their Irish counterparts, and the difference is indicative of the profound effect of the loss of their language on the psychology and character of the Irish people" (5). English language songs, then, are understood as degenerate in relation to Gaelic song. This is reflected by O'Boyle, who presents the texts of English language songs as the malformed attempts of a people to express themselves in a language not their own: "As for songs written in English by the Irish country folk themselves, it must be admitted that they are of much less merit than the Gaelic songs. They represent the attempt of people to express themselves in a language they knew imperfectly and had only recently acquired" (14). The two-traditions hypothesis, then, establishes a binary opposition between Gaelic and English language song traditions in Ireland. Each strand is constructed as an entity or "tradition" in itself, with a distinct and distinctive personality. Privilege is then asserted for the essential features of the Gaelic song tradition. Perhaps the most crucial element in the persistence of the two-traditions binary, though, is the social construction and maintenance of the discourse of sean-nós.

"Sean-nós"

Gaelic song served as a powerful unifying symbol of language, literature, and lore for Gaelic revivalists and Irish cultural nationalists at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the epitome of Ireland as not-England. The term sean-nós, which literally means "old style," has facilitated discourses of authenticity and identity which consolidate the privileged place of the Gaelic song tradition in the two-traditions hypothesis. It is in and through the discourse of sean-nós that the "personality" of Gaelic song can be seen most clearly.

Over the years, sean-nós has been reduced to a set of core features that together are understood to express the essence of the Gaelic song tradition. Two factors in particular have contributed to the development, elaboration, and deployment of these core features. First, the adjudications of the annual Oireachtas competitive festival, the most important forum for unaccompanied singing in Gaelic today, have entrenched the radical separation of Irish and English language singing. Singers from the region of Connemara and the western islands have in the past been deemed by judges to be the possessors of the true and authentic art of sean-nós, and this perspective was, we suggest, profoundly influenced by the Myth of the West and the exoticization of the Western Gaeltacht. That the judges hold this view is reflected in the overwhelming number of national winners from Connemara and the islands, and in the highly prescriptive pronouncements of adjudicators. Second, the analyses of academic scholarship have sought to delimit and define the essential features of sean-nós. All the while reflecting and reinforcing the judging decisions of the Oireachtas, scholars have focused on elements of pitch, timbre, dynamic, and language in attempts to justify the position of sean-nós as a truly authentic Irish high-art form. The two-traditions hypothesis is deeply implicated in these moves, as illustrated by a curious but recurring orientalizing strategy. We will be followed by a brief illustration of how the "festival culture" of traditional singing in Ireland is broadly constructed along the lines of the two-traditions hypothesis, festivals predominantly specializing in one or the other language "tradition."

An tOireachtas

Singing competitions provide the most high-profile and popular outlets for those who sing in the Irish language. An tOireachtas offers a weekend of unaccompanied singing which is unrivalled for the intensity of the experience. For many the highlight of the singing year, this national competition has achieved the highest recognition of any among the singers themselves. No competition for singing in English has achieved anything like the same recognition. Like all competitions, the Oireachtas has often caused heated argument and bitter dispute over adjudications which are often perceived to be idiosyncratic and biased. This would be an issue in any such competition in Ireland, whatever the language community, but the complicated politics of an tOireachtas are made even more complex by the issue of sean-nós.

The establishment of the national Oireachtas festival in 1897, under the auspices of the Gaelic League, institutionalized the dominant lines of force that constituted the Irish cultural nationalist vision. Ó Súilleabháin (11-22) has documented that the stated aims of the festival were to develop literature in the Irish language and to promote other Irish language cultural expressions. Gaelic singing, and what was considered a proper and National expression of it, was a symbolically central but highly contested domain at the early Oireachtas competitions. Many thought, for example, that harmonized versions of Gaelic songs for choral performance should be acceptable. Others, however, felt that this choral style was redolent of foreign influence and, moreover, that it was anathema to the Gaelic song tradition and should be completely disallowed. These people instead favored the unaccompanied, solo monophonic style used by country singers, holding it up as the pinnacle of aesthetic achievement among Irish-speaking people, to which all singers of songs in Irish should aspire (95-113). Thus, the focus of debate over what was or was not considered "authentic" shifted to "the old Irish style" or, as expressed in Irish, sean-nós. Ó Súilleabháin records the gradual changeover from the term "old Irish style" used in English to the term "sean-nós," as found in the directive issued for the 1911 Oireachtas competitions: Ní éistfear ach le hamhránaíocht ar an sean-nós ["Only sean-nós singing will be listened to"](111). It is interesting to note that the phrasing of the term here, ar an sean-nós ("on/in the old style") is adjectival. Increasingly, however, the label sean-nós achieved the status of a proper noun. What was included within the bounds of the label would remain pure and unadulterated, and implicitly, if not explicitly, not-English. This is in contrast to the entry requirements for the instrumental music competitions, which were open to all who could play. By 1924, the last Oireachtas before a fifteen-year hiatus, the term "sean-nós" was commonly used to delimit and partition elements of song considered more than ordinarily authentic. The term thus became a powerful, pivotal focus following the re-establishment of the Oireachtas festival in 1939, and although it is not without its critics (for example, Carson), sean-nós has remained the central label with which people refer to song and singing in the Irish language.

The renewed Oireachtas lent a new impetus to discourses of separation and bifurcation. Adjudication became increasingly meticulous, as the areas of uniqueness and distinction accorded to sean-nós singing style were refined. Attention focused on aspects of language, so that rhyme and prosody were maintained in accordance with older literary conventions and the melodic embellishments common to the style were analyzed and reified. A strict dichotomy between Gaelic and English languages was enforced in the sean-nós competitions, with entry being restricted to people from Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking regions. Furthermore, the Gaelic-speaking part of Connemara (the coastal south) and the Aran Islands began increasingly to provide the lion's share of the winners. As noted by Shields, these styles were identified by adjudicators as more authentic because of the ornate melodic decoration favored by competitors from the region. This development was facilitated, we argue, partly because of the prowess and talent of those competitors and partly because of the dominance of the myth-making discourses concerning the West and Connemara in particular. Adjudication had a tendency to become very severe. One example of the most salient moment of such impossible standards in the history of Oireachtas competitions is the 1967 prize winner's competition, in which the first prize was deliberately not awarded, ostensibly because the required standard had not been reached. Later, in the 1970s, Northern singers complained that their claims to being authentic traditional singers had been denounced publicly by adjudicators. This may be partly attributed to the perceived unacceptability of the Northern dialect and also to the comparative scarcity of embellishment found in Northern singing.

It is noteworthy that some of the Oireachtas adjudicators have also written scholarly works on sean-nós style. This combination of adjudication and scholarship originated in the early Gaelic League days and continues until today. In probably the best known of these works, Ó Canainn engages in a detailed musical analysis of sean-nós style. He discusses the various kinds of ornamentation used by singers, distinguishing between ornamentation and variation as stylistic devices and further categorizing various types such as melismatic and intervallic ornamentation, and melismatic, intervallic, and rhythmic variation. Seán Ó Riada, discussed in more detail below, was a musician, composer, and academic for whom the sean-nós grand prix was re-named after his early and tragic death in 1971; he also contributed to this debate, and many of his insights profoundly influenced Ó Canainn. Detached formalist analysis became the hallmark of scholarship and adjudication, together further advancing the idea that sean-nós was an esoteric and rarified "high" art form. Its need of a corresponding "low" form (i.e., English language singing) as an antithetical reference point was crucial to the development of such discourse.

The Oriental Hypothesis

The two-traditions hypothesis is further reinforced in characterizations of sean-nós by the curious but recurring suggestion that the cultural forms of Irish music are not European in origin but are, in fact, more closely linked to the classical traditions of the Orient. Ó Riada, for example, argues that Irish music is not European in the least but is instead "closer to some [albeit unidentified] forms of Oriental music" (20). He further claims that to understand Irish music, we must forget about European music: "Its standards are not Irish standards; its style is not Irish style; its forms are not Irish forms" (20). Similarly, in a brief survey of justifications for the possible "Asian origin of Irish music," Fanny Feehan similarly argues on the basis of a rudimentary comparative musicology that Irish music, and the experience of Irish singers and musicians, is not European. Instead, she suggests "links between the music of North and South India, Persia, North Africa, Spain and Ireland" (335). "I have seen and heard enough," she writes, "to be convinced that there are links and even if some proof is lacking the suggestions remain tantalising" (335).

If claims for the "Oriental" origins of Irish music are to have any rhetorical weight, however, proving the links between "non-European" or "non-Western" musical forms and sean-nós is crucial. The Gaelic lineage of sean-nós is the sine qua non of this orientalizing assembly of associations. What is considered sean-nós is regularly characterized as the most authentic survival of the Irish musical tradition, "the key which opens every lock" (Ó Canainn 49) or even "the basis of all traditional Irish music" (Quinn 16). If there are cultural links anywhere, the argument goes, they would be found in sean-nós. This is clearly a concern in the work of Ó Riada: "In approaching our vocal music, that style of singing traditional songs which is called in Irish the 'sean-nós' - the 'old style' - it is best to listen as if we were listening to music for the first time, with a child's new mind; or to think of Indian music rather than European" (23). Feehan writes of Moroccan singers, "It ... has seemed to me for many years now, that the same combination of embroidery and ornamentation of the melody-line, in addition to the introspective attitude of the performer, might have been experienced in Connemara, Ring, or in one of the now ruined cottages in the Comeragh Mountains or Nire Valley" (333).

The most extensive attempt to draw such links has been Bob Quinn's "Atlantean" thesis. In homage to Ó Riada's orientalist suggestions, Quinn uses the high-art form of sean-nós of the West Galway region as the starting point for an explanatory narrative of comparative inquiry that posits a shared maritime culture along the Atlantic coasts of Europe, if not also for the cultures of North Africa and the Mediterranean. These assertions strongly echo eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarian arguments that advanced Ireland's claims to a great and ancient Gaelic civilization. Leersen draws particular attention to the Phoenician model championed by Charles Vallancey in the late eighteenth century:

The presupposition was that ancient Ireland had had a native tradition of high civility, which was now lost owing to the violent destruction and wholesale ruin that was brought upon the country in modern times. In the opposition between civility and barbarism, the Anglocentric view saw the Irish as savages and the English presence as a source of civility; the Phoenician hypothesis turned the tables, and predicated civility on the native Gaels while bracketing the English presence with the Viking spoliations, seeing them as violent disruptions (74).

A similar logic of reversal and opposition arguably informs the orientalization of "Irish music" and, in particular, sean-nós. Though not obviously stated, there is a strong, implicit anti-English subtext to these arguments. Significantly, English language song is always silently omitted from the general category of "Irish music" when orientalization is at stake. By a process of occlusion and exclusion, the two-traditions hypothesis is categorically asserted, the essential primacy of the Gaelic song tradition upheld. These representational strategies also undoubtedly spring from an underlying, implicit opposition between non-Western and Western societies (Carrier 5). Sean-nós is clearly identified as non-European and non-Western. Thus, sean-nós can be recognized not merely as simple, European "folksong" but as a complex and ancient Gaelic art-form of classical high-civility, equal in status to the European Art tradition, but radically separate from it. English language singing, in contrast, is represented as vulgar and European, or, as an adjudicator once disparagingly remarked to an assembly of both Gaelic and Anglophone singers, "a very poor second to singing in Irish."

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The "Two Traditions" Hypothesis: Implications for Analysis

We have established that discourses and practices of song, singing, and singers in Ireland are often structured by the dominance and persistence of the two-traditions hypothesis. As we have seen, this process starts with an a priori assumption that there are entities which might be considered "song traditions." Such thinking leads, on the one hand, to the conceptual closure of a Gaelic Song Tradition as the paragon of authenticity and Irish identity, and on the other, to a barely developed conceptualization of an English song tradition that is defined within the binary opposition as the degenerate other of the Gaelic tradition, if not omitted from analyses altogether. We argue, however, that the "choice of languages" approach implied by the two-traditions hypothesis provides an inadequate explanatory framework in the face of the complexity and multiplicity of singers' experiences. There is no either/or answer that can suffice where the experiences of singers are concerned. Our own experiences as singers and our ethnographic fieldwork clearly show that the situation is more complicated than that. In response to the two-traditions hypothesis, we believe that part of our task is to restore complexity to the explanatory analysis of song and singing in Ireland. By simplifying the interconnections at stake, attention is diverted from the politics of representation, away from issues of meaning and the socially-situated dynamics of discourse and expectation. We seek to redirect attention to the need for particularism so that less simplistic, less generalized, less partial accounts of singers' experiences might come to light. More specifically, we suggest that the study of singers and singing in Ireland might be guided by the theoretical orientation of social interactionism.

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