Please join us this Thursday, April 2 for a presentation and discussion with Andrea Harris Jordan. The talk is entitled “House Around Irish Music: Past and Present in Discourses of Irish Music from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries” Please find an abstract below.

As always, we will meet at 4:30pm in Goodspeed 205. Our workshop is open to the public and all are welcome.

 

Abstract
In this Ethnoise! talk, I will be giving a big picture look at some of the themes of my dissertation and a closer look at some of the case studies in it, in preparation for my defense later in the month. Traditional music and song occupy a vibrant field of cultural production in Ireland in the twenty-first century. Musicians, performers, singers, dancers are all more publicly visible than ever before, however music and song in Ireland have a long history of relevance, enjoyment and celebration. From the late eighteenth century to the present, intellectuals, culture brokers, and scholars have presented particular and varied perceptions of the past through music and song, both performatively and through discourses surrounding traditional music. Individuals, particularly intellectuals in nineteenth-century Ireland made use of the past to construct their ideologies of what Irishness meant in their society. Today, musicians and scholars of traditional music contextualize their own music making and practices in light of both more distant nineteenth-century musical pasts and more recent events, histories, practices and memories.