Getting to the Heart of the Music: Idealizing Musical Community and Irish Traditional Music Sessions

Authors

  • Helen O’Shea

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35561/JSMI02061

Keywords:

traditional music, session,

Abstract

The power of shared musical experience has inspired scholars to theorize collective musical performance as capable of producing an embodied, transcendent experience of an ideal society. Scholars who have written about the group performance of Irish traditional music demonstrate a similar understanding. Such models tend to idealize musical performance (as if it always produced a transcendent experience) and to elide the experiences of participants, representing them as harmonious (at one) and homogeneous (as one). Drawing on fieldwork conducted among musicians playing Irish traditional music in East Clare, this article considers the social and musical consequences of idealizing group performance and proposes a more nuanced understanding of musical community as a process of dialogue.

Author Biography

Helen O’Shea

Dr Helen O’Shea is a research fellow in the School of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her doctoral thesis, Foreign Bodies in the River of Sound: Seeking Identity and Irish Traditional Music (2005), investigated the discursive construction of Irish traditional music and the identifications of foreigners playing it. Her current research project is on learning Irish traditional music cross-culturally. [February 2007]

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Published

07-02-2007

How to Cite

O’Shea, H. (2007). Getting to the Heart of the Music: Idealizing Musical Community and Irish Traditional Music Sessions. Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 2, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.35561/JSMI02061

Issue

Section

Articles