A good deal of water has flowed under the bridge since James Ross published "A Classification of Gaelic Folk-Song" in 1957. 1 Ross's study was typical of a time when scholars favored a clinical and taxonomical approach to oral traditional culture, before modern theories about text, context, and genre began to raise good questions about the application of scientific methods to the analysis of cultural activity. The search for answers to these questions has greatly advanced the way ethnographers and ethnomusicologists understand culture, including the cultures of the Gael. 2 After six decades, it seems fitting to revisit Ross's classification system, and to examine whether the effort of constructing such a system is still worthwhile or not. In The Anthropology of Music, Alan Merriam (1964:209) suggests that we understand musical activity by considering the uses and functions that music serves within a given culture: In the study of human behavior we search constantly. .. not only for the descriptive facts about music, but, more important, for the meaning of music. We wish to know not only what a thing is, but, more significantly, what it does for people and how it does it. Merriam defines the uses of music as "the ways in which music is employed in human society. .. the habitual practice or customary exercise of music either as a thing in itself or in conjunction with other activities" (210), suggesting that the uses of music can be understood in terms of how musical activity is manifest in daily life-in what social contexts it occurs, and to what utilitarian purposes it is deployed. Function, on the other hand, "concerns the reasons for Oral Tradition, 32/1 (2018):71-140 1 I owe a deep debt of gratitude to a number of colleagues whose help and advice have sustained me in pursuing this rather tricky project. My thanks to the organizers of the 2012 Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig conference in Glasgow, who provided a platform for work-in-progress; to colleagues in Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, including Drs. John Shaw and William Lamb, both of whom were kind enough to comment upon a revised draft of this paper; to Dr. Cathlin Macaulay, Archivist of the School of Scottish Studies Archives, for offering guidance about the use of archive recordings; to Dr. Heather Sparling of Cape Breton University, who read and commented on an early draft; to Dr. Dòmhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart of the University of the Highlands and Islands, who provided help with the subject of Gaelic bawdry; and to Dr. John MacInnes, who has allowed me to pick his brains and mine his memory on occasions too numerous to count. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers assigned to read the original draft of this paper on behalf of Oral Tradition. Their queries, objections, and suggestions have, I hope, greatly strengthened the arguments advanced here, and saved me from many a clanger. Tapadh leibh uile.
The late Rev. William Matheson's lifelong fascination with the performance of Gaelic songs in so-called 'strophic' metres ultimately resulted in his recording seventeen such songs for the album Gaelic Bards and Minstrels, No. 16 in the Scottish Tradition series of recordings from the School of Scottish Studies Archive. Strophic metre, used largely for clan eulogy, elegy, and other praise-poetry in the period after the decline of the syllabic metres, is remarkable in that the final line of each stanza contrasts metrically and ornamentally with all of the preceding lines in that stanza. This article examines Matheson's sources, methodology, and performance; evaluates his rationale; and assesses the likely authenticity of his performances of six songs in which the number of lines varies from one stanza to the next.
Defining ‘tradition’ as something passed on within a community that provides a matrix for its understanding of past events and present choices, this essay discusses the evolution of Irish poetry and song since 1200. It explores the connections between vernacular poetry and various learned (literary) traditions, including bardic poetry (syllabic verse) and the later ‘poetic courts’ and ‘schools of poetry’, in terms of themes, verse structure, social context, and sung performance. It demonstrates that while some practices were bound to specific social contexts, the strand that most people today identify as ‘the Irish song tradition’ still employs centuries-old themes including panegyric and the Anglo-Norman ‘courtly love’ rhetoric, and displays prosodic features evidenced in Middle Irish bardic sources. Finally, we consider the emergence of ‘tradition’ as a concept, the impact since 1850 of song collecting and technology on repertoire and performance, and the implications of ‘authenticity’ for today’s definition of ‘tradition’.
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