Vol. 4: White, Harry.

Type: Article

White, Harry. ‘Carolan and the Dislocation of Music in Ireland’, Eighteenth-century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 4 (1989), pp 55-64.

This article discusses the achievements of Irish composer and poet, Turlough Carolan (1670-1738) and the polarized perceptions of the native music tradition. “For those few who wrote about music in Ireland during the eighteenth century, a gulf lay between the native (not necessarily folk) Irish tradition and the essentially modified and complex European musical aesthetic of the Anglican ascendancy.” White looks at the works of ‘those few’ writers to explain the lack of an “intelligible and enduring mode of Irish music” in the eighteenth-century. The writings of Laurence Whyte, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Campbell and Joseph Cooper Walker, as well as Charles Burney’s review of Walker’s Historical Memoirs, are analysed. White discusses the antiquarian tendency to romanticize Carolan’s talents, and notes that his achievement in Ireland was sometimes compared with that of Handel in England. Also discussed are Swift’s ‘marginalization’ of music in Ireland, Frank Llewelyn Harrisons’s paper on “Music, Poetry and Polity in the Age of Swift” Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr 1 (1986) : 37-63, and Kevin Barry’s paper, “James Usher (1720-72) and the Irish Enlightenment.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr 3 (1988) :115-122.