Irish music examined through outsider eyes: tradition, change, and global impact
Irish music through alien eyes
Over the last three decades, Irish music has travelled across the globe and, much like Irish literature in the twentieth century, has helped "put Ireland on the map". Festivals celebrating Celtic music now flourish in Tokyo and Buenos Aires. Riverdance shows and their many spin-offs run simultaneously on multiple continents, and each week hundreds of tourists crowd the two main pubs of Doolin in search of "the pure drop".
Drawing inspiration from a provocative remark by Conor Cruise O’Brien, this article aims to examine Irish music from the vantage point of an outsider: "There seems to be a curious delight in the feeling that the stranger knows far more than oneself and yet – being a stranger – understands nothing." By "outsider" we refer to someone economically, socially, and culturally detached from a community’s everyday life. Adopting this perspective allows us to raise questions that insiders—whether musicians or academics—might overlook.
O’Brien’s observation, which underscores the gap between knowing and understanding, might lead some to believe that only locals possess a deep grasp of cultural phenomena like traditional Irish music and its origins. That assumption is incorrect. In practice, very few traditional musicians in Ireland express strong interest in scholarly debates about jigs and reels. For that very reason, uncovering fresh interpretations of the Irish musical psyche is challenging, but an external perspective remains valuable: it holds no more authority than the insider’s, but certainly no less either.
Our approach, then, requires starting from the ground up: we must pose the familiar question of what Irish music is, but from a different angle. This is essential to understanding its global importance, for those who wish not merely to "know Ireland" but to truly grasp this fundamental—and largely under-investigated—aspect of its culture. Several layers of meaning surface when we talk about Irish music.
From a musicological standpoint, it has been claimed that "Irish music is not European." While this debate is extraordinarily fascinating—full of examples and counter-examples—the technical validity of that claim lies beyond the scope of this article. Its implications, however, will be examined later.
From a historical and sociological perspective, asking "what is Irish music?" remains the necessary starting point, as clichéd as that may sound. So we begin with one of the earliest academic attempts to define and analyze Irish music: Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin's seminal 1981 essay "Irish Music Defined." In that work, the perception of Irish music as a unified body passed down from the past was examined through the concepts of "creative reworking" (the music-making process, including the constant reshaping of traditions) and "music systems" (the audiences it serves).
Ó Súilleabháin convincingly demonstrated that "it is unlikely that there ever was only one music-system in Ireland at any one point in history." He showed that three music systems co-existed in seventeenth-century Ireland, linked to three distinct social groups: the medieval Gaelic aristocracy, the English-speaking Protestant ascendancy, and the Gaelic peasantry. The first system vanished in the eighteenth century; the other two interacted and later contributed to the emergence of jazz, country & western, and rock music in the twentieth century. Ó Súilleabháin’s aim was to explore Irish music’s ramifications in both space and time, offering a novel definition. Beyond a shrewd observation about classical musicians appropriating the word "music," his essay was probably the first written investigation to emphasize Irish music’s fragmented nature: "Irish music must be defined as encompassing all creative music-making in Ireland… it is becoming increasingly impracticable to talk of 'Irish Music' in its narrow tribal sense." At the time, however, before he became a respected professor, many observers—especially musicians—found this too irreverent to take seriously.
Almost three decades later, it seems appropriate to reassess Ó Súilleabháin’s conclusions in light of the dramatic changes that have occurred, both in Ireland’s domestic music scene and on the global economic stage. What has happened in the world of traditional Irish music since 1981?
The most visible shift is the trend toward group performance—an innovation that many have rejected, arguing that Irish music relies on intricate ornamentation that cannot be properly rendered or heard in a group context. This practice began mainly in the 1960s with Ceoltóirí Cualann and Seán Ó Riada (in the pre-Chieftains era). To judge by the sessions now held in pubs, it has developed into a new Irish ritual. One could argue that group-playing existed before the 1960s (in Céilí bands, for example), but those groups played the same melody in unison, unlike the Chieftains. And while hard-core enthusiasts still prefer solo music to group-playing, we are talking here about general trends, not tastes—and they clearly point toward new musical practices originating in jazz, and thus in the US: organized improvisation, an invisible hierarchy among players, and a down-to-earth nature.
The second transformation, closely linked to group playing, is a change of venue: from the kitchen to the pub. Before the 1960s, musicians were rarely seen in pubs, regardless of the region. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, only tourist areas experienced the new enthusiasm for music sessions; in less-visited counties like Offaly or Longford, music sessions did not become significant until the 1990s. Few musicians in the West today remember a time when there was no music in pubs. In this shift, music traveled from the private sphere to the public sphere, leaving the home for a business-oriented setting—thus taking its first step toward commodification. As a result, music in Ireland has progressively become, in the words of hundreds of traditional musicians, "music for the ears" rather than "music for the feet." If good musicianship once meant the ability to perform for demanding dancers, many musicians now play for their own enjoyment, without dancers in mind.
A third major change involves a move from rural to urban settings. Until the early Clannad recordings of the 1970s, Irish music was associated with rural areas, especially the Gaeltachtaí (Gaelic-speaking regions of Ireland). Other 1970s bands, like Planxty and the Bothy Band, show the early urbanization of the musical tradition, whether through the origins of their members, the venues they played, or the sheer energy of their performances. Today, in line with the global trend in Western societies, it's more common to see students forming trad bands in Dublin, English musicians from Manchester or Newcastle winning Fleadh Cheoil competitions, or New York Irish dancers working for Riverdance and similar productions. Again, the influence of the US can be seen in this urbanization of the music.
Transmission of the tradition has also undergone a dramatic change, from oral to media-based channels. Older musicians tend to say, "I learned this song from the singing/playing of [so-and-so]," whereas younger musicians readily cite other sources: "I heard this song on a CD… the radio… the internet." A limited, local, interpersonal tradition has been replaced by global exchange, effectively unlimited in scope.
Regarding the production of recordings, the first studios in Ireland were established in 1937 in Dublin, but a serious studio for traditional music did not appear until 1978 (Windmill Lane). In 1964, the first Chieftains album, recorded with very basic technology, sold only a few hundred copies. More recent productions by the same group sell millions and are recorded in the same studios used by U2 or symphony orchestras, utilizing between 50 and 70 separate tracks—one for each instrument—culminating in a final mix-down. From simple recordings to multi-track productions, the music-making process in Ireland has been reorganized and highly individualized.
In recent years, demand for Irish music in pubs seems to have declined, even in tourist areas like County Clare or County Kerry, for reasons not yet fully understood. On the other hand, there is a massive demand for Irish bands to go on tour or play at festivals worldwide (even for small groups and solo performers). Observing that a small country like Ireland cannot support its huge number of bands within its own limited venues, one sees that Irish music is moving from local pub music to global stage music—experiencing a new degree of commodification.
If we look at more minor changes since the early 1980s, several other aspects emerge. Regarding language, a slight evolution can be detected from sean-nós as Gaeilge to sean-nós in English. It has now become accepted, in many circles at least, that sean-nós can be sung in English and not exclusively in Irish. This development seems to sanction the full recognition of English as the language of Ireland—not just a second official language, as suggested by Article 8 of the Irish constitution. It also confirms the natural ability of Irish music to adapt to its time as a vehicle of Irish culture.
On the socio-political side, especially in Northern Ireland, we should also note a shift in patterns of identification with traditional Irish music, from non-denominational to predominantly Catholic. Although it was once shared equally between Catholic and Protestant communities, the last couple of decades have witnessed a stronger association with Catholics in the North, or at least a degree of rejection of traditional music by many Protestants. This may be partly due to its connection with the Gaelic language, which is also rejected by many Protestants. Alternatively, it might be a side effect of the influence in Northern Ireland of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, an organization officially non-political but headed since 1968 by Labhrás Ó Murchú, who is also a senator for Fianna Fáil—a party not very popular among Protestants. In other words, music has become an artificial means of division, primarily used by some Protestants seeking, a contrario, a cultural definition of their Irishness.
On a lighter note, the instrument typically used to represent Ireland in the media appears to have been replaced: around the 1990s, advertisements began using uilleann pipes instead of harps for anything meant to characterize Ireland on television (from ESB electricity ads to Kerry butter). Likewise, more international rock stars—Paul McCartney, Mike Oldfield, Mick Jagger—began to invite uilleann pipers to enrich their songs. A traditionally aristocratic instrument was thus replaced by a more popular one in symbolizing Ireland, both at home and abroad.
On the visible surface, several trends confirm a growing interest in the world of Irish music: the founding of the Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) in 1989; a wave of media interest in Ireland (Bringing it all Back Home, 1991; Riverdance at the Eurovision, 1994; River of Sound, 1995) and later internationally; and a rise in academic interest, beginning with the 1996 Crossroads Conference in Ireland and later on the international stage, though initially confined to English-speaking countries.
Notably, the economic question of ownership surfaced before other aspects of the public-music interface, perhaps suggesting that individual identity mattered more than group identity during the early years of the economic boom.
One should not, of course, conclude abruptly that these changes appeared out of nowhere during the 1980s, but the sheer volume of transformation over just a few decades is striking. In my view, the finest example of this changed attitude can be found in the liner notes of a 1995 album by the duo Lá Lugh, explaining their variation on a classic theme:
"While reworking an old song 'Níl sé ’na lá' or 'It is not yet day', the sentiments of this song came to mind. The song thus evolved to 'Tá sé ’na lá', It is the day, the time for many changes."
Music-making, like any human activity, is a process. When a tradition stops evolving, it ceases to be a tradition and becomes a conscious convention, ready to be abandoned as a museum piece. Every one of the changes mentioned above signals that the music is still alive: it has survived, it has adapted, while most rural traditions of the nineteenth century (costumes, eating habits, meeting occasions) have disappeared in the Western world. The reason it survived is that it has found new functions, much as classical music has developed a new role as film music. And those new functions are directly linked, as Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin noted in 1981, to "who listens to it?"
Our own interpretation of that question, over the last 40 years, is this: Irish people—both musicians and non-musicians—have completely renewed its significance as a means of social connection, especially in winter sessions; Irish music has acquired a new economic role, particularly in counties like Kerry, Clare, and Galway, as a straightforward way to attract tourists to pubs; it has been exported overseas, mainly to the US as a nostalgic ethnic bridge, and then to Europe as a reminder of romantic holidays.
Despite Julian Vignoles’s 1984 statement in the Crane Bag that "development and tradition are of course paradoxical," we should simply remember that, in terms of function, tradition is change. One quote should suffice to sum up the general trend since the 1990s—still applicable sixteen years after Niall Crumlish wrote in Hot Press:
"There is absolutely no doubt that additional wealth, and jobs, can be created in the music industry in Ireland… At the risk of being repetitious, music is one of this country's greatest natural resources. South Africa has its diamonds, the Middle-East its oil, France its food—we have our music… Irish bands, songwriters and artists have proven that they—that we—are very good at this thing. Without any kind of government strategy an enormous amount has been achieved. Much more can be."
Viewed from the outside, the history of Irish music as an industry might seem to have started in the 1990s. But on closer inspection, one should first look to the early 1960s, a period that saw the McPeakes and the Chieftains in Ireland and the Clancy Brothers in the United States, where they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1961—the most famous US variety program of all time.
Looking even further back, all Irish-music lovers know that the first wave of interest in Irish music started in the United States in the early twentieth century, with companies like Parlophone, HMV, and Columbia selling records by Patsy Touhey or James Morrison to the Irish-American diaspora. In other words, Irish music-making first became a product in the US and then spread back to Ireland, establishing prominent regional styles as the norm against which everything was measured for decades. The recordings by Michael Coleman, Paddy Killoran, and James Morrison are good examples of this pattern.
Looking at the Chieftains' forty-five-year career provides a clear picture of how Irish music evolved: from amateur beginnings to professional status, from small-town players to global stages, from selling a few hundred records to winning Grammys, from gigs in Wicklow to performing in China. This transformation didn't happen by accident—it was a calculated strategy orchestrated by Paddy Moloney, who started as a gentleman-piper and became a businessman-piper. True to the 1960s ethos, the Chieftains stayed amateur musicians for their first decade of recording (1964–1974). They turned professional only when they hired an American manager for their inaugural US tour. In 1975, Melody Maker voted them "band of the year," placing them ahead of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. The resulting world tour stretched eighteen months, covering mainland Europe, New Zealand, and Australia. Further milestones included performing mass with Pope John Paul II in Dublin's Phoenix Park in 1979 before one million people, and opening for the Rolling Stones in County Dublin in 1983. International recognition deepened with new recording contracts from Polydor and Island in 1975. After several Grammy nominations, the first major awards finally arrived in 1993 for An Irish Evening: Live at the Grand Opera House, featuring Nanci Griffith and Roger Daltrey. This album set the pattern for future Chieftains projects built on collaborations with an astonishing range of guests—Mick Jagger, Carlos Nuñez, Ziggy Marley, Van Morrison, the Corrs, Sting, Mark Knopfler, and many others.
In terms of global visibility, whatever detractors may claim, the Chieftains and the Clancy Brothers—and very likely Bill Whelan with Riverdance—have done far more to make Ireland recognised abroad than every Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) of the past forty or fifty years combined. Today, millions across the globe enjoy Irish music. For the world at large, music has put Ireland on the map far more effectively than Nobel prizes ever could, at least in the eyes of countless Irish people.
Returning to our original question of definition: if someone searches for recordings of Irish music in a shop, what label or category should they look under? The answer depends on the country, even the region; on the type and size of the store; on current fashion; on the owner’s age and personal tastes. One might need to check any of these sections: Celtic, traditional, folk, folklore, popular, national, ethnic, acoustic, typical, authentic, roots, world music, sometimes country music, and occasionally New Age or unplugged. This profusion of labels, the sheer impossibility of pinning down a constantly shifting reality, prompted the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music to observe in the 1980s:
> “Folk music revival always seems to be happening; in fact folk music never goes away: it just requires a new definition every decade or so.”
The second fundamental question that ought to guide future inquiry is simply: “why should we study Irish music?” The answer is less straightforward than it appears. An obvious reply is that music is everywhere in Ireland. Whether one focuses on economics, media studies, gender studies, language evolution and coexistence, or new technology, music permeates every aspect of life; more than in most countries, a complete understanding of Ireland demands an understanding of its music.
A second answer lies in the fact that Irish music is deeply charged with cultural, social, and political meaning. Consider again Seán Ó Riada's claim quoted earlier: “Irish music is not European.” We acknowledged that the musicological validity of this statement lies outside this article’s scope, but the implications embedded in such a position demand scrutiny. What does it tell us about the evolution of Irish society when, in the same 1962 radio programme, Ó Riada also argued that “our innate conservatism (...) has kept Irish music alive for us, its basic characteristics unchanged, with very little outside influence”? The language—‘untouched,’ ‘unwesternized,’ ‘unchanged,’ ‘little outside influence’—carries obvious social, cultural, and political connotations that lie at the core of any analysis of Irish society.
We are grappling here with an attempt to assert that Irish culture remains pure of foreign influences, always has been, and always will be. Again, we are not debating the factual accuracy of this claim, only what it reveals about Irish society of the 1960s: namely, the presentation of a unified cultural, social, and political front. And once more, opinions on this issue remain profoundly divided, which gives us every reason to bring academic views and analyses into confrontation with one another.
At this point, we must note again alongside Tom Munnelly that most musicians, unlike writers, have virtually no interest in studying their own art. Put differently, academic interest in Irish traditional music exerts almost no influence on how that music is created, and interaction between scholarship and practice is practically nonexistent.
If we seek an explanation for this puzzle, we might consider that academics too often examine art—including music—as an end result, as a fixed manifestation of culture at a specific moment, as a product rather than a process. When we say 'product' here, we are not simply referring to commercial goods. As noted earlier, the tendency to view tradition as something frozen in time also turns tradition away from being a dynamic process and into a static product. This tension between process and product is, I believe, one of the keys to understanding culture in Ireland. Whether these two perspectives are complementary or contradictory is a question for other forums, but the absorption of twentieth- and twenty-first-century values has triggered a deep identity crisis visible globally and, for our purposes, within Irish music specifically.
In Ireland, the search for the past—more so than in most countries—has been a search for identity, with music occupying a central role. Irish music has travelled the world with emigrants, adapted to a different kind of world—urban, industrial—and brought back numerous alterations in how people live and play music, and consequently in how they live their lives. Naturally, these changes have generated immense tension and disagreement, contributing to the social upheaval that has shaped Ireland since the 1960s.
Controversies—whether guitars are truly traditional, the “Planxty-is-not-traditional” dispute, or the Riverdance argument—are actually powerful illustrations of Irish society’s evolution. They reveal the intense fermentation of life within Irish society, and rather than showing Ireland at its worst, they should be seen as images of cultural change that make Ireland the passionate, intense country it is. Music acts as a mirror, again exposing the cultural and social fragmentation at work.
The same principle applies to the complicated issue of copyright: who owns music? If someone invents a tune and offers it freely to everyone without officially registering it under a name, that tune soon becomes community property. But under modern frameworks—and Ireland adopted these later than most European countries, with IMRO founded only in 1989—music belongs not to the collective but to individuals. This shift has been theorised in recent decades as the commodification of cultural processes—activities previously not thought of in economic terms, but primarily as active forces that bind communities together. In other words, music in Ireland and worldwide tends to lose its role as a binding cultural process and becomes instead a dividing cultural product designed for consumption.
An outsider’s view of Irish music reveals the forces currently at work in Irish society and shows its double function: the organic process it continues to be, alongside the product it has become (both as commercial commodity and as fixed tradition). It reinforces Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin's argument that a rigid conception of Irish music is unworkable, and points toward an increasing fragmentation of Irish society that cannot be as monolithic as some would like to imagine.
Revisiting Ó Súilleabháin’s tentative conclusions in light of nearly thirty years of change in Irish music has shown, through numerous examples, that there is no single Irish musical identity—and never was one—just as there is no single Irish cultural identity. Irish music can be played in many ways, just as there are many ways of being Irish. Ireland today is a European nation built on the diversity of its identities, entering the twenty-first century with a clear sense of its origins and history. It is a dynamic vision that must be consolidated if the country is to sustain the exceptional economic and cultural development of recent decades.
Looking beyond Ireland, we as human beings face two challenges, both aimed at “living together” better: a social challenge at the local level and an economic challenge at the global level. Within this human society, music can help create social bonds—what has been called “the binding ties of a communal culture”—for those who engage with it as a hobby or art, and for those who pursue it as a profession. Music, like any art form, can help us project a better image of ourselves, one that neighbours perceive as distinctive and positive.
Equally, it can help us understand others more deeply (not merely know about them), even if only partially and imperfectly, and help create a better world—which is, after all, what we as academics are supposed to contribute through our work. Many observers, particularly Mick Moloney, have noted that Irish music has spearheaded an Irish cultural renaissance since the 1970s. The reason is simple: as human beings, we need artists to constantly rethink and reshape the world, to help us understand it, and even to change it. If some believe the English invaded the world, the Irish have done so even more thoroughly—and more peacefully—through their music.