With more traditional players than ever before, most of them swapping and sharing their music, are they neglecting the regional variations of their art, asks Siobhán Long
Colour and shade, nuance and gesture - this is the stuff of living. What Patrick Kavanagh called "the wink and elbow language of delight" might just as well have described the subtlety of the bowing technique in east Clare music as it did the finer points of the mating game in Inniskeen on a July evening.
We live in a country that revels in its disparate accents, celebrating the labyrinthine recesses of a Belfast diphthong with every bit as much verve as the broad hammock of a west Kerry blas. Our conversation is peppered with hollows and humps, hillocks and valleys where accents ebb and flow according to time-honoured principles of linguistic interaction.
Our music has hewn a similar pattern in our midst: Sliabh Luachra's wit, inherent in its polkas and slides; Co Donegal's lonesome gentility and vigorous ornamentation shining through its slow airs and elaborate dance tunes; and Co Sligo's insistent rhythmic intensity a hallmark of its flute and fiddle players.
It was Seán Ó Riada who first documented the regional styles in Irish traditional music. During his travels around the country in the 1950s, he heard distinct differences in accent and colour which led him to believe that "Irish traditional music is a patchwork quilt and therein lies its soul".
If Ó Riada was right, then there are many who fear that the tradition has sold itself to a mischievous sprite. Despite the fact that there are literally hundreds more traditional musicians than there were a few decades ago, much has been made of the homogeneous (some might even suggest anodyne) nature of their playing. Does "more" necessarily equal "better", or could it be that traditional music has sold itself down the river, sacrificing its essence at the altar of mass consumption?
Seamus Tansey is a Sligo flute player who's far from convinced that the plethora of players swapping and sharing tunes is a mark of a thriving tradition. "As the technical ability of young players continues to grow, I'm fearful that they'll leave behind the real essence of the regional tradition," Tansey says.
If the blame for this perceived anaesthetisation of the music is to be laid at anyone's door, he believes it should be that of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann.
"Comhaltas are trying to address it now, to be fair," he says. "And they play a blinder in turning out great musicians of enormous technical ability - but after that, they do nothing with them.
"Their emphasis is on learning tunes and competition. They indoctrinate young musicians, and they deal a death blow to regional styles. They dole out tunes to young players, and they're all expected to play the music in the same way. They plough into the music like Panzer divisions - battalions even.
"Comhaltas are claiming jurisdiction of the whole country and they could be doing a whole lot more to support regional styles, in my view."
Tansey doesn't limit his ire to Comhaltas though. Some of the responsibility for the diluting of musical accent must also rest with Planxty, he feels.
"Planxty started it all, when the folk crowd started to invade Irish traditional music," he says. "It seemed great at the time, but it was a disaster, because young players started to copy them, and the regional traditions suffered as a result. It was the stereotype revivalists and the long-haired progressives who mixed up national musical cultures with traditional music, and ruined it in the process."
DONEGAL IS A county that's successfully hung on to its musical identify, Tansey suggests, offering a beacon of hope to other regional accents.
"I salute Donegal, which has quietly, without a word, passed on the essence of the tradition. Listen to [revered Donegal fiddler] Tommy Peoples and you'll know what I'm talking about."
Peter Browne, uilleann piper, radio producer and broadcaster, traces a link between the diminution of regional accent and the sundering of traditional music from dance.
While he acknowledges that there's nothing inherently malign in such a separation, nonetheless it inevitably impacts upon the essence of the music.
"At some point, traditional music was dance music," Browne says. "And at some point you had musicians playing for the dancers, so the music had to have certain characteristics to please dancers. I would say that rhythm is the main one. But later it was transformed into 'listening' music.
"It's an interesting thing that music which was essentially dance music, which didn't have a raison d'être outside that, suddenly became something that thousands of people in Carnegie Hall wanted to listen to. The music then becomes something different: ornamentation and flair come into play, and I would see that as a good thing, an expansion of the music.
"Maybe it's not that different from central European or classical music. Some of the rhythms of early baroque music have to, I presume, have had their origins in physical movement of some sort. It just moves from that to something more cerebral."
THE FUTURE OF traditional music's multifarious accents lies in the hands of its players, plain and simple, Browne maintains. Just as a language needs speakers to survive, a musical accent needs players who trade in its every syllable and intonation.
"If you look at any place with a strong regional style, you'll find strong players. Pádraig O'Keefe was crucial to the Sliabh Luachra style of playing, even if it mightn't have been called that at the time. A regional style is not created by the geographic area, but by a small cluster of people who are playing in that way and who are learning from one another. You need a critical mass to keep that going."
Despite the increase in sheer numbers of players, Browne is quick to underline the essential fragility of the music at its core.
"Pádraig O'Keefe focused on teaching airs, even though there wasn't much of a demand for them. Most people wanted dance music. Tunes like Caoineadh Uí Néill, and Caoineadh Uí Dhomhnaill were written in the 1600s, at the time of the Flight of the Earls, and passed down through the centuries from ear to ear.
"Pádraig would have been the only person who had those tunes, but he was intent on handing them on to the likes of Denis Murphy. It just shows you what a fragile thread it was that led a tune from one set of ears to another to another, without ever having been written down. It's a marvellous example of how a piece of music survives through the centuries - and a beautiful music at that."
• Canúintí Ceoil, a six-part TV series on regional styles in traditional music, starts on TG4 tomorrow at 10pm and is repeated on Fridays at 8pm
Play it: one musician's way
Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh is a Dublin fiddler, piper and flute player who has dedicated more than his share of thinking time to unpicking the conundrum of regional accents in traditional music. Speaking on the new television series, Canúintí Ceoil, he is at pains to demonstrate the subtlety of the bowing technique that sets the musical rhythms of Sliabh Luachra apart.
"When I came to study Sliabh Luachra music in depth," he says, "I didn't pick it apart. I drank it in and let it emerge. The problem for most people is that they have a big blockage to let the music that's in their bones out, because they have to get by all the things they've been taught. For instance, you may have been taught that A, B, C, D, E, F and G are the only notes that exist, but in your musical landscape, if you've never been told about any notes, and you just play them, then you've got infinite possibilities."
"The problem with regional styles in terms of how they can continue?" Ó Raghallaigh asks. "You have to be living and breathing it. Your sense of tuning is destroyed when you're surrounded by music that's even-tempered, and that's everywhere at the moment: when you turn on the radio, look at television or walk into the shopping centre. Everything is equal-tempered, pretty much. One of the big areas of interest to me is not so much regional styles, as particular players like Denis Murphy or Pádraig O'Keefe. Their sense of tuning distinguishes their music."