Orientalism in Irish Music: A Critical Perspective
In a review of Joseph Lennon's Irish Orientalism, Nicholas Allen praised the author for opening up "new perspectives on a discourse" that remain relevant for "the new century," adding that the "phenomenon of Irish orientalism needs further examination . . . and critical attention" from multiple disciplinary angles. One such perspective surely comes from music. Examining Irish music through the lens of Orientalism, and broadening discussions of Irish Orientalism to include music, has much to contribute to Irish Studies more widely—particularly since Irish music has long been central to debates about different registers of Irish identity across the centuries.
Edward Said's foundational work Orientalism argues that nations define themselves by appropriating from others, and that the Orient is one of Europe's "deepest and most recurring images of the Other . . . a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes [and] remarkable experiences." These concepts are familiar ground for anyone reading about Irish music and its ties to landscape and memory. Yet Said also warns that the Orient is an invention "with no corresponding reality," a construction built on myths that "has helped to define Europe as its contrasting image, idea, personality [and] experience." If Orientalism is a myth-building enterprise, how does it function in the realm of Irish music? And does its operation there differ from what occurs in other artistic and cultural domains?
A powerful musical example of Orientalism appears in a Danish documentary featuring the celebrated Irish composer, musician, and scholar Seán Ó Riada (1931–1971). In the film, Ó Riada tells the interviewer that "Ireland has a highly developed traditional music, very complex, very sophisticated, but it's more Oriental than Western," then compares it with various Oriental traditions, including Indian classical music. During the interview, Ó Riada not only recreates the Orient through sound but also uses the Orient to validate ancient Irish cultural practices, which he explicitly positions in opposition to Europe.
This "perceived otherness" has long shaped Irish cultural identity, a point John O'Flynn makes in The Irishness of Irish Music (2009). But Ó Riada takes matters further by harnessing alterity as a double Otherness, thereby reinforcing the distinctiveness of ancient Irish musical heritage. His reference to Irish-Indian sonic connections may rest upon colonial sympathies and cultural links between Ireland and India stretching back to the nineteenth century and earlier. Yet can these old ties account for the Indian-inspired music Orientalism that maintains an ongoing presence in contemporary Irish "musicking"?
Among current performers and composers working in this vein, we find the traditional group Trúir, which uses an Indian drone instrument, the tanpura, to accompany newly composed sean-nós songs. Irish traditional and jazz musicians under Ronan Guilfoyle have toured, collaborated, and recorded with South Indian musicians in his ensemble Khanda. The Ó Snodaigh brothers from the Irish group Kíla were recently filmed on a trip to India for the documentary Cheoil Chuairt, broadcast on TG4, where they met and played with various Indian musicians. Their interactions unmistakably suggested connections between their Irish culture and the "ancient" one they encountered. Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, founder-director of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, composed "At the Still Point of the Turning World," which incorporates Indian musical sounds, instruments, and compositional techniques.
In light of these and other examples, a working definition of "Irish Music Orientalism" might be the adoption, adaptation, and application of perceived Irish-Oriental cultural sympathies—both real and imagined—through music making and its surrounding discourses. Musically, this manifests as the appropriation of broad attributes and musical indicators that have stereotypically signified, or come to be associated with, the Orient.
What is at stake in these musical collaborations and elaborations? And what can be gained by critically examining Irish culture through music from a postcolonialist perspective, as Orientalist critique implies? As David Lloyd argues, "the study of one given [postcolonial] site may be profoundly suggestive for the understanding of another" because of "multiple and very specific local and historical [and, in the case of Ireland, colonial] conditions within which universalizing tendencies reside." This "deflection" of colonial logic is uniquely exemplified by how Irish artists have drawn upon Orientalist imagery from the Empire. Rather than accepting such imagery wholesale, many Irish collectors, composers, and performers have inverted it through subversive poetic and musical reimaginings. In other cases, certain British Orientalist forms have persisted yet remain compelling or worthy of study in an Irish Music Studies context precisely because of Ireland's relationship with the Empire.
It is therefore worth reiterating Lloyd's insistence that although Ireland has undergone and continues, in part, to undergo colonialism, its manifestation in quite specific cultural forms in Ireland is due to "multiple and different social imaginaries at work." This rings particularly true for music, which must grapple with the very real challenge of studying and adapting other music cultures while engaging in the more equalizing phenomenon of intercultural exchange—without reifying essentialist binaries of East versus West. In Ó Riada's comments, for example, he both creates East and West as equals (where Ireland is West) while simultaneously relocating Ireland within an Orientalist musical geography (where Ireland is Other). In doing so, Ó Riada drew upon an older idea of Ireland as connected to the Orient, not just one based on sounds and musical structures.
Lennon's study describes how a tradition of Irish contact—both real and imagined—with what is commonly termed "the Orient" has existed from the ninth century up to the present day. Links between Celtic and Oriental cultures, he observes, "existed independently in native Irish and Gaelic culture as far back as Irish writing extends." The exact processes by which Oriental sympathies, whether real or imagined, have developed within Irish traditional music have been sparsely documented. Likewise, little attention has been given to Irish Orientalism in Western art music in Ireland. Yet, in the first collections of Irish folk music from the late eighteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Indo-Celtic origin legends not only persisted but were also adapted into the practices of musicians, playing a distinct role in the emergence and construction of Irish cultural identity.
Imperial British texts—which included images of the barbaric Scythians as ancestors of the Celts and often appeared in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century depictions of the Irish—had long compared Ireland with Oriental cultures in order to, as Lennon writes, "textually barbarize Ireland." This typically assumed construction reflects what postcolonial studies calls the "positional superiority" of the West over the East. Within the Irish Music Oriental aesthetic, however, the reverse is true: music serves as a prime example to demonstrate the noble, and arguably Oriental, antiquity of Irish culture, leading to claims such as Joseph Cooper Walker's declaration in Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786) that "music was cultivated in Ireland when melody was scarcely known in other countries." India—rather than being denigrated as the barbaric and sensuous Other—has held imaginative and allegorical power for Irish writers and intellectuals, including composers and musicians.
Although music's particular role in the actual and imagined encounters between Ireland and India remains largely unexplored, even a quick glance across Western art music traditions and Irish tune collecting by Irish antiquarians reveals references to India and the Orient in Irish music. More interestingly, these references are not necessarily based on material connections and encounters but often, rather, on imagined ones. In 1786, Walker asserted that "Irish music is, in some degree, distinguished from the music of every other nation, by an insinuating sweetness, which forces its way inextricably to the heart, and there diffuses ecstatic delight, that thrills through every fiber of the frame, and agitates or tranquilizes the soul." In many early collections spurred by Revivalist impulses, writers ascribed mystical and neo-classical attributes to the ancient music of Ireland that found a mirror in the musical systems of the Near East and, especially, the Indian classical tradition. These writers believed that Irish music was infused with sensuous characteristics of the Orient in terms of emotion and passion. The use of minor scales, flattened sixths, and other accidentals (pitches outside expected scales) were held up as musical and emotional indicators of the ancient Eastern origins of Irish music. This, in turn, had the effect of further distinguishing Irish music from the formality, logic, and tonality of Europe and, by extension, of the British Empire.
In the nineteenth century, George Petrie expresses the romantic and subtly political imagining of Irish-Indian musical affinity in his 1855 Collection of the. Petrie discusses three separate lullabies that bear a striking resemblance to similar melodies from India. In his reflections on the air "Seo Hú Leo," he describes "its strong affinity to the lullaby tunes of the Hindostan and Persia." Petrie seems to base this comparison on the use of a minor/modal key and the somewhat melancholic or plaintive mood of the piece, which he takes as evidence of an Eastern rather than Western aesthetic. For Petrie, "such affinity with Eastern melody is not confined to the nurse tunes of Ireland, but that it will no less be found in the ancient funeral caoines, as well as in the ploughman's tunes, and other airs of occupation—airs simple indeed in construction, but always touching in expression." He also contends that the mythological nature of the song, relating to the Tuatha Dé Dannan, provides further evidence of Asian links.
As it is connected with "a fairy legend," Petrie asserts that "this affinity must be regarded with interest by those who trace such superstitions to an Eastern origin." Interestingly, this is the same George Petrie who had dismantled the myth of Irish round towers being built by "colonizing Oriental Phoenicians," arguing instead that they were the product of the Normans. This different treatment of musical material—as a repository for Indian connections and Orientalist imaginings—versus archaeological materials appears repeatedly in the writing of early antiquarians. The inconsistency points to the peculiar characteristic of music as a medium that seemingly evades logical scrutiny by appealing directly to the emotions. This presumption of a heightened emotional and non-logical dimension to music is likewise a discussion with older origins that continues to persist today.
The national instrument of Ireland, the harp, would also become implicated in this discussion. The harp came to be seen as evidence of an ancient and noble past and represented an "intense nostalgic longing for a misplaced identity." It is hardly surprising then, that the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792 and the subsequent publication of Bunting's materials up to 1840 both served as important points when Irish Orientalism was introduced into the realm of music theorizing.
Bunting's collection claims that several melodies represent something of the old harp tradition of Gaelic court life and, as such, are remnants of an ancient high culture. These examples have gone on to inspire practical application and re-interpretation of Orientalist ideas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—an interpretation also encouraged by studies of linguistic and sonic links between Sanskrit and old Irish. Joan Rimmer, a scholar of the harp, has suggested that the Irish word for harp, cruit, can be linked etymologically with the Indo-European root ker, meaning bent or curved. One type of tune in particular, the "Hindoostani Air" that was widely included in nineteenth-century British and Irish parlor music, provides an excellent example of this kind of imagined musical affinity, as Gerry Farrell remarks in Indian Music and the West (1997).
Translation across musical cultures alters material as it crosses divides, with one system’s logic absorbed into another’s paradigms and structural demands. Farrell argues persuasively that the “Hindustani Air” in the history of Indian music and the West truly exemplifies how music bridged cultures, an aesthetic sphere operating beyond wider political and economic structures.
The “Hindustani Air” captures a particular Orientalist commodification and cultural mistranslation, viewed through the colonizer’s gaze rather than heard through their actual ears. Farrell also notes that the instrumental melodies adapted, transformed, and often paired with English lyrics were frequently taken from folk tunes accompanying sensuous, rhythmically “strange and convoluted” Indian dance performances, rather than from high-art traditions.
Such folk tunes were reshaped for the “genteel bourgeois listening pleasures” of Western audiences within collections of “Hindustani Airs.”
Several works by Irish composers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries display Orientalist influence without necessarily embodying authentic Oriental sounds. These include Charles Villiers Stanford’s “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan” (1881); Wellington Guernsey’s (1824–1903) “The Hindoo Widow” (1878), set to words by H. Forbes White; James Lynam Molloy’s “Dinah Doe. The Golden-Haired Darkey: Indian pastorale from ‘My Aunt’s Secret’” (1867), with lyrics by F. C. Burnand; Michele Esposito’s “Oriental Suite” op. 55 for orchestra (1900); and Hamilton Harty’s (1879–1941) “Orientale” for oboe and piano (1898) and “Fantasy Scenes (from an Eastern Romance)” for orchestra (1919). Such pieces reveal a British and Irish imagining of the East—especially India—drawn from circulating stories, ideas, and musical tropes of Otherness. It is crucial to see these composers not only as subjects of Empire but also as distinctly Irish Orientalists. Each warrants further examination to situate them within both an Irish-inflected British Orientalism and a broader “Irish” Orientalism. The music they produced largely aimed not at faithfully recreating Eastern sounds and modes, but at creating and mediating the Orient through Western musical languages and approaches.
Other Irish composers of the period engaged more directly with the Indian world. Thomas O’Brien Butler’s (1861–1915) Irish-language opera Muirgheis (1903) was composed while he lived in Kashmir, India. He also dedicated his song “My Little Red Colleen (Mo Cailín Beag Ruadh)” (1904) to “His Highness Rajendrah Singh, Maharajah of Patiala G.C.S.I.” The degree to which “authentic” sounds permeate these works remains a topic for another discussion; what is clear is that Irish composers had experiences of being “there,” and their works deserve closer attention in any sketch of an Irish Music Orientalism. The British composer Adela Maddison (1862–1929), who composed two songs on texts by Indian authors—one “National Hymn for India” (lyrics by K. N. Das Gupta, 1913) and another “If you would have it so” (lyrics by Rabindranath Tagore, 1914)—also spoke to an intimate encounter with India and a greater sense of reciprocity.
Generally, many scholars, including Lennon, view the period around the Celtic Revival as the most recognized moment of Irish Orientalism in literary terms. One well-known example involves the relationship between Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and Irish artists such as W. B. Yeats and James Cousins. Exotic images of the East—in both music and mythology—offered powerful symbols for poets and writers longing for an ancient, unbroken cultural heritage. Harry White has asserted that music’s impact on the Irish literary imagination can seem “more significant than the impact of music” itself. A Hiberno-Indian mythos provided a counterhegemonic force against shared colonial oppression, entering the stream of “Celtic” poetry indirectly through sensuous, sometimes musical, analogy.
James Cousins, an Irish poet who spent most of his adult life in Madras, firmly believed in “shared sensibilities between Celtic and Oriental peoples,” suggesting that “the Aryan-influence intermingled with the Indian . . . so subtly that poets found their inmost nature expressed in Indian modes.” Though not a musician, Cousins felt compelled to recommend an All-India music conference based on an Irish model, championing it “for those who have at heart the fostering of the musical art as one of the highest expressions of the Genius of India.” Central to his work was the concept of samadharsana, translated as “synthetic vision,” related to expanding consciousness—an example of the burgeoning post-nineteenth-century artistic globalized outlook understanding place “through metaphysical elaboration, mysticism and exoticism.” India, it seems, was viewed as a spiritual mentor to Europe.
Such connections between music and spirituality, through an Irish–Indian imagination, would persist through the twentieth century in various guises, especially in the work of Seán Ó Riada.
Ó Riada is often credited as the seminal agent provocateur regarding Indian Othering of Irish music. The Irish Traditional Music Archive defines Irish traditional music as “European music . . . in structure, rhythmic pattern, pitch arrangement [and] thematic content of songs,” adding that “it most closely resembles the traditional music of Western Europe.” Echoing his argument from a 1960s interview on Danish television, Ó Riada insists in his influential collection of lectures (1970) that “the first thing to note, obviously enough, is that Irish music is not European.” He extends his thesis further, proposing that “Irish music is not merely not European, it is quite remote from it. It is, indeed, closer to some forms of Oriental music.” He bases this assertion largely on a distinction between folk and classical music and on his own quest for a “native Irish art,” wherein traditional Irish music became equated with Oriental classical traditions, particularly India’s. In the 1962 television interview, Ó Riada stated:
> I would differentiate between folk and classical. When you say classical, you mean European classical. There is not a European classical tradition in this country. There is on the other hand a highly developed traditional music, which because it is aurally transmitted, must not be considered as folk music. For example, in the Orient you have music which is aurally transmitted but is still highly developed. . . . Here we also have highly developed traditional music, very complex, very sophisticated, but it’s more Oriental than Western . . . it’s improvised . . . very much like Indian rag.
This highlights Ó Riada’s general view, though it only touches on his perception of musical indicators of Oriental and Celtic influence, such as the use of improvisation. Although detailed evidence for Ó Riada’s theories of cross-cultural links is scarce, he does refer to the importance of instruments with an unfixed scale—like the fiddle and voice—due to their use of microtonal nuances; he singles out the drone’s importance and repeatedly returns to cyclical symbols. All these traits indeed resemble Indian classical music structures and associated philosophies.
And yet Ó Riada’s linking of the Oriental world and Irish traditional music rests more on asserting fundamental differences between European and a precolonial Irish culture than on clear musical commonalities. The primary artistic form he used for comparing Irish and Oriental music was the circle, as manifested in the cyclical nature of Irish art. Taken together, such connections among Irish, Orientalist, and Celtic art and music helped create an intellectually and emotionally seductive idea about the noble origins of Irish music. Though Ó Riada did not fully explore these connections in his lifetime, such ideas continue to resonate. This influence includes introducing ensemble playing based on an Eastern model, such as Arabic instrumental ensembles; developing new instruments, notably the bodhrán (Irish frame drum); and elevating the music from a “folk” tradition to the global concert stage.
The folk revival movement that began in the 1960s, in which Ó Riada played a key part, can also be linked to an uneasy expression of Ireland’s emerging postcolonial nationalism. This movement, along with many of Ó Riada’s ideas, has been critiqued as overtly romantic, culturally idealistic, and intrinsically nationalistic. Despite these misgivings, Ó Riada has inarguably exerted an enduring influence on musicians, scholars, and audiences alike. Many of his ideas have been taken up by modern musicians and applied in practice, most notably by his son, Peadar. In particular, the Irish harp tradition, through Ó Riada’s reinterpretation, became an important touchstone for representing Ireland’s indigenous, noble court music—seen as akin to the Indian tradition.
Ó Riada argued that Edward Bunting’s manuscripts from the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival provided evidence that Ireland’s ancient court harping tradition could be favorably compared with the modal improvisational model of North Indian classical court music. Earlier, Ó Riada had used a similar understanding of Indian music to reinvigorate medieval harp culture and introduced the harpsichord into his own playing as part of this. His student Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, who inherited his ideas, would later write that one could translate “the sitar into the harp, and the Maharaja into the Taoiseach or Chieftain of the Irish clan, and the equation was set.”
Various scholars have interrogated the idea of a connective tissue between Irish and Indian music. Musicologist Fanny Feehan compared the slow air “Marbhana Luimní” to Indian raga presentation formulations:
> Like the Indian, the Irish singer uses whatever pitch is convenient. As in some ragas the great Irish songs revolve around three or four notes which recur again and again. “Marbhana Luimní” was composed, we are told, about 1742, but it is conceivable that the tune which circles like a culture over a corpse round the notes E flat, F natural, G natural, B flat, G natural, F natural, and E flat could be transformed by changing the rhythm and altering the pitch upwards a tone; the result, with a little imagination, could approach a raga style.
To be sure, more than a little imagination is needed to hear a slow air rendition in raga style. Feehan argues that “it is in the interpretation of the melody, and chiefly with regard to ornamentation, that some of the most significant resemblances between Irish and Eastern music can be observed.” Perhaps the opposite is true; the approach to ornamentation and melodic interpretation may represent one of the most significant differences between Irish and Indian music. As Feehan admits:
> The Indian quarter tone seems more predictable than those heard from a traditional Irish singer in Connemara. This would seem to suggest that raga is a consciously acquired means of communication whereas the singer of an Irish slow air will, within a short space of time, produce elaborate ornamentation entirely as the spirit moves him or her.
In this presentation of the fundamental difference between Irish traditional music and Indian classical music, Ó Riada’s Orientalist specter looms large. Both Irish music and Indian classical music employ ornamentation and melodic variation, but Indian classical music’s theoretical frame for improvisation is explicit, elaborate, and built upon radically different cycles of time and rhythm. Despite the frequent scholarly assumption that melody and ornamentation provide significant resemblances between Irish and Eastern music, detailed and sustained comparisons remain rare.
Feehan concedes that speculation on Irish music’s Asian origin surfaces periodically and that “what is often posited depends on the predisposition of the enquirer.” More recently, Lillis Ó Laoire has described a tendency to compare
A charge which “deliberately removes” Irish music from reality and “places it in one hermetic, ahistorical, timeless, category, rendering it mysterious, eastern and non-European.” Ó Laoire rejects these claims as inflated, arguing that despite certain “affinities of approach,” they cannot prove a shared origin. He asserts that this line of pursuit tries to give the tradition an air of superiority, implicating it “in the discourse of Orientalism, however inadvertently.”
Here Ó Laoire can be understood as taking direct aim at Ó Riada, who effectively carried off that musical sleight of hand. Shady origins foster the perpetuation of the myth; a musical performance, or ideas about music’s emotional power, often override the logic found in more discursive formats.
According to Feehan, a central problem with arguments proposing exotic connections between Irish or Celtic music and other traditions is that most scholars have only “a superficial knowledge” of the music to which they draw parallels.
Even though musical evidence indicates that “modern Celtic music … has no historical whatsoever in the music of the ancient Celts,” a persistent subtext—in both academic and musical dialogues—upholds Celtic-Indian historical musical links.
Attempting to prove an ancient musical bond between Ireland and India appears to run into a tautological impasse. Robert O’Driscoll sympathizes with this bind, noting that “in seeking ‘evidence’, one is perhaps seeking the impossible. Music, by its very nature, is an evanescent art.” And that, of course, is precisely the point. Such links can be and are drawn, through historical and archaeological evidence, imaginative works, and especially performance practice—where Irish Orientalism has recently taken on especially compelling forms.
As a final case, consider Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin’s ‘At the Still Point of the Turning World’, a piece connecting the composer, via Ó Riada, to Edward Bunting—whose tune collection forms its basis. Ó Súilleabháin compared Bunting’s non-cyclical tunes to the improvisational model of North Indian classical music, proposing that Bunting’s manuscripts reveal how the ancient court harping tradition “was not harmonically based at all but which found its logic in the melodic line itself.” That argument rests on the modal organization of Indian classical music, where improvisation centers on a dominant tonic, a fixed hierarchy of structurally important notes. Though improvised, the melodic line follows aesthetic conventions that inform the performer and define the raga’s character—something more than a scale or mode yet less than a fully composed piece in the Hindustani tradition.
Ó Riada’s ideas spurred Ó Súilleabháin to craft a piece based on Bunting’s transcription of ‘The Lamentations of Youth’. The composition explicitly draws on Indian classical theory and techniques. Following Indian classical practice, it gradually unfolds the contours of the melodic material in ‘Lamentations of Youth’. The recording also uses native instrumentation: a tanpura provides the drone, supporting the Irish lament and evoking a sense of timelessness. Modally, though it suggests the scale of Yaman, a raga form, ‘At the Still Point’ leans more toward composition than improvisation and does not adhere to the grammar of classical Hindustani ragas. Nonetheless, Ó Súilleabháin repeatedly situates this and other Indian-inflected works in performances and in discussions about his compositional processes and intentions. He also advances narratives that fluidly link Irish musical aesthetics with Hindustani classical music, alongside references to linguistic, spiritual, and mystical affinities.
In Ireland, the move to draw on Oriental culture has generally served to distance the country from its colonizers and to revitalize or reimagine native cultural forms. Orientalism is usually conceived as a unifying trope—a collection of ideas and interpretations that engage colonial and postcolonial perspectives, which manifest uniquely in the Irish context. As David Lloyd remarks regarding postcolonial nations, “culture is all the nation has to distinguish it.” Focusing on music, in particular, offers a distinct vantage point for reimagining Irish cultural identity within postcolonial studies. As Said contends, “one of the strengths of postcolonial analysis is that it widens, instead of narrows, the interpretative perspectives, which is another way of saying liberates instead of further constricting and colonizing the mind.”
Music has played—and continues to play—an indispensable role in shaping Irish cultural identity through subversive recontextualizations of dominant Orientalist tropes. Notably, Said himself considered the study of music a “transgressive act.” Music can potentially subvert and reframe our understanding of Irishness in ways no other art form can achieve. Yet this carries political risks. As Ó Súilleabháin noted in his writings about Ó Riada: “it is this ability of music … to encode connections, that links its intelligence with the intelligence at the heart of politics and at the heart of identity itself.” At the same time, such alluring ideas may obscure structural inequalities present in real Irish-Indian encounters and intercultural negotiations, raising questions about the consequences of aesthetic colonization of music.
The concept of hybridization offers one possible path around this challenge, extending the notion of bounded musical traditions and their meanings within a culture. Homi Bhabha argues that all traditions emerge through hybrid processes, not through pure, unbroken lineages; further, the “unsettling” advantage of this perspective is that “it makes you increasingly aware of the construction of culture and the invention of tradition.” Said appears to hold a similar view, maintaining that cultures endure through engagement and that “survival … is about the connection between things,” rather than through discrete, pure entities. Joseph Lennon likewise celebrates hybridity in the context of Irish Orientalist writing, insisting that such writings reveal “triadic structures in which a hybridity is immediately foregrounded.” The argument maps readily onto Irish music.
It might be feasible to recalibrate Irish Orientalism toward a pursuit of intercultural sympathies—though arguably such a quest is utopian. It may also be that the real echoes of Irish-Indian musical affinities lie in the future, not in the past; in further efforts at encounter and exchange that are more conscious of power relations and less influenced by historical imaginings tied to cultural-nationalist agendas. As for what music can contribute to both Irish Orientalism and Irish Studies at large, further research in these areas from a musical perspective may demand a more performance- and practice-based method—one that integrates musicology, history, and discourse—while acknowledging music’s transgressive and subversive potential, along with its power to reflect, reshape, and even “predict” society. Such research might also represent a modest attempt to help bridge the gap between myth and history in Irish cultural narratives. The end result of that endeavor could be a renewed appreciation of why that gap even matters, especially in the twenty-first century. These are debates for another day. At minimum, we ought to open a dialogue among those invested in Irish Orientalism, Irish musics, and Irish Studies more broadly. That dialogue, we hope, would begin to test the veracity and efficacy of the term “Irish Music Orientalism.”