BEFORE the age of recorded music, the five performance was every thing. Some musicians had only a couple of tunes, and players' repertoires were as economically vital as their technical prowess. In the 1830s, Kerry piper Padraig a Chasur, upon finding a rival, Donnchadh O Se, eavesdropping on his private rehearsal of a prized tune, opened up on the snooper with a shotgun. At a gathering a few days later the plagiariser, who had the audacity too lead off with the stolen piece, was savagely attacked and almost killed by Padraig".
That is one of the anecdotal gems recorded in this long overdue anthology of the scattered works of Breandan Breathnach, part of a proliferous skein of writing on traditional music which was terminated by his death in 1985. The applied dedication of the scores of "revivalists" to what they all, from the 1950s until the present day, considered a national, cultural cause, was essential to constructing what is known today as "traditional" music.
Among them, Breathnach articulated a particularly intelligent, non-sentimental vision. He relentlessly criticised what he saw as the failure of RTE television in this area, and he was uncompromising in his commitment to the rescue of piping and the creation of an independent archive. Without him it is arguable that the music could never have achieved the aesthetic status, and consequently the commercial appeal, it enjoys today.
Compiler of three unique music collections, and our first publicly accessible book on the subject, he put things in clear, emphatic nutshells, such as "Irish folk music is a solo art form of which embellishment comprising ornament, melodic and rhythmic variation is a prominent stylistic feature."
Black and Tans, and then the Civil War, 1930s clerical purges, the postwar establishment's shunning of the music, all had irreversibly disrupted the music's social practice.
Breathnach analysed practically thus, in this paper, in 1973, he wrote "The dance music [has] lost its function and, not finding another, is becoming a private hobby pursued by the few ... the future of the music now depends to a large extent on its acceptance by the public." He scorned validation by politics, religion or nostalgia. "No person wishing to learn the music is ever questioned about the contribution his ancestors made to the national store."
For players and pundits his objectivity yielded contemporary ground rules which seem validated by their continued service ability. Of course, in the process he created his own pragmatic "counter Romanticism". And with its benefits presently all around, one now has the space to query whether his emphasis on pipping as centre of the music might be yet another monster.
Does Davy Spillane's direction illustrate that pipes can be as versatile an agent off "the enemy" as, for instance, the accordion? Is it the human condition and not the devices which mediate its cultural expressions that undermine "tradition"?
Has the fact of River of Sound's fetishisation of ornamentation invented yet another blinding myth out of Breathnach's rational analysis? Re-reading the writer now as the Saoi of the revival prompts yet more productive questioning, and can do much to disturb the kind of complacency he questioned in his own time.
This anthology's variety of anecdote, reference to other works, documentation of piping all over the country, of pipers past and present, of dancing, collectors, tune transmission and tune smiths, all raise a curtain on complexity, and evidence a history and a continuity. They might have been profitably illuminated by the inclusion of some of the author's hard hitting, polemical essays. Even so, the collection positively enfranchises all of the broad spectrum of traditional music's interpreters and challenges the ineptness of our educational curricula's attitude to it. This is a book that should be in every school library.
