THE TIDE They Are A-CHANGIN’

So suddenly traditional music is hip, the

latest candidate for cultural canonisation. Riverdance, it seems, has joined Mary Robinson and Jack Charlton among the untouchables, those icons against whom any blasphemy will provoke instant and intemperate fatwas.

Simultaneously Hummingbird co-operate with RTE and BBC Northern Ireland to produce River Of Sound, a 7-part television series on the music and Gay Byrne devotes a complete edition of The Late Late Show to it. Louis McNiece was wrong: it’s no longer no-go the bagpipe music. But was it only a year ago that the series’ presenter, Micheál O Súilleabháin was complaining that Radio 1’s music controller, Cathal McCabe, was discriminating against trad in the station’s evening schedules?

Why this double-whammy of The Point dance spectacular and the television series? Obviously there’s no conspiracy. Series like River Of Sound always have a long and complicated gestation period and the Hummingbird pair of Philip King and Nuala O’Connor were planning this project as far back as four years ago after Bringing It All Back Home had made it to the television screens. Rivers never know they’re going to meet as two tributaries to form a mightier stream.

Still, there’s usually good reasons for the

overground suddenly recognising what was long prospering underground. Some of those reasons are musical and others are cultural. The media sometimes ignores the obvious under its nose. With its power-bases outside Dublin and the capital city’s reception circuit, traditional music often forfeits coverage which goes instead to glitzy no-hopers with neither artistic nor commercial merit.

Besides, this latest resurgence isn’t unprecedented. Traditional music has always been around but it tends to receive more attention when there’s less quality activity in other sectors.

Take the Seventies wave led by The Chieftains, Planxty and The Bothy Band, which also produced De Danann and Clannad. They all rose to prominence during a phase when Irish rock was fallow – the pre-punk era when the hippie dream was busted, there was little credible live local action and all our best hopes, Van Morrison, Thin Lizzy and Rory Gallagher were abroad and still sorting themselves out, for all the Irish audience at home knew.

’95 finds a similar fallow patch both at home and abroad. Rock becomes regurgitation and the English retro-rock scene is Anglo introversion. Rewiring The Kinks for the Nineties will always make far more parochial sense in Surbiton than Stillorgan. Those voices don’t directly speak for, and to, the concerns of a newly extrovert and self-confident Irish audience.

As for the alternative US option, Kurt Cobain’s suicide is the sad result of another brand of American navel-gazing. Rightly or wrongly, young Ireland is no longer culturally defeatist or saddled with an inferiority complex. There’s a limit as to how far it can identify with the rampant self-doubt in rock’s two former leading powers.

Irish rock still hasn’t figured out its response to the negative vibes that surround it. For if The Cranberries and Therapy? have emerged to triumph in the MTV meat and media market, both groups recoil from taking leadership roles for their generation. Meanwhile singers from the generation just before them, Sinéad O’Connor and Liam O’Maonlai were reaffirming their kinship with traditional music. The over 25 audience just weren’t finding any sustenance in the local Irish rock scene. One symptom of the rock crisis: The Rock Garden closes and Whelan’s is now the dominant Dublin live club venue.

Of course, dance has also thrown its own dagger at the heart of rock. But in Ireland, dance remains anonymous, a music – excepting possibly D:Ream – without our own identifiable figureheads or national anthems outside its specialist scenes.

Meanwhile a new generation of traditional musicians were emerging of whom Sharon Shannon was only the most publicised and popular personality. Altan, Cooney and Begley, Niamh Breatnach, Martin Hayes and Sean Smyth were all putting on commercial weight. The sea-divided Gaels brought us Eileen Ivers and Brendan Power.

All came from a far more settled scene that no longer needs the constant injection of subsidies into its infrastructure. Musicians no longer need fear the professional life. Audiences exist abroad, while the recording and studio environment prospers as never before with local radio stations that are often supportive, especially in the West of Ireland.

In ways, it’s rather amusing. All the initiatives to support the Irish music industry may now have been most effective in the small-scale traditional sector where costs can be most easily matched with potential income and an act doesn’t need an injection of £100,000 or more from abroad before it can leave the launch-pad.

These economics have also attracted the entrepreneurs. Paul McGuinness and Dave Kavanagh have set up Celtic Heartbeat in partnership with Atlantic. Recognising Sharon Shannon’s success, Solid have stepped up their investment in traditional music. Without any doubt, trad is now the most natural candidate for any schemes to boutique the Irish music business.

Is this also another unsuspected, serpentine and subterranean part of the peace dividend? You could wonder. Certainly there’s now the seedbed of a new and younger audience for the music. Are they rejecting rock? You could also certainly wonder.

As the series director, Philip King explains it, River Of Sound stemmed directly from Bringing It All Back Home. “Micheál O Súilleabháin,” he says “was a contributor to Bringing It All Back Home both in his role as a teacher in UCC and as a player and a musician. And he did very well on it and people really liked him. And he has a real take on the music, his own angle and ideas on the music. So we approached him, talked to him and worked out an idea for a series.

“It was based really on the ideas he had developed while teaching in UCC. So, over several months, we met two full days a week polishing and honing those ideas, turning from ideas written down for lectures into a televisual format.”

So this is Micheál’s course to some extent ?

“Yeah,” he says but then he emphasises that “it’s not ethnomusicology. It is not sociologically or anthropologically based, even though all those elements are there to some degree. For when we talk about Irish traditional music, it’s an interpersonal music. It’s an inclusive rather than an exclusive music. It is based on community.”

But River Of Sound is a musical document as well as a television documentary. The 16 tracks on the accompanying album on Hummingbird/Virgin represent only a few choice slices from the feast of music recorded.

Philip King : “We filmed 130 musicians with over 100 hours of material. When we came to sit down to put a record together, we were hoping there would be two volumes so we tried to put out a balanced record for the first one and still have remaining a load of really good material. We didn’t want to get into a situation where you put out a second album of what’s left over.”

He says that for the seven 40-minute programmes, “the ratio of music to speech would be about 2 to 1. But then when we filmed people, we filmed two or three tracks with some people and the constraints of the television series didn’t allow the inclusion of full pieces either. So there’s a wealth of music. The first album has 16 tracks and there’s a good 30 or 40 tracks sitting there in the can.”

He, producer Nuala O’Connor and presenter Micheál O Súilleabháin had a set of motives in filming River Of Sound. “We went out and took a sounding,” he says “a photograph of what was happening to the music, to aspects of the tradition in 1994. And I suppose it’s interesting to see what happens to the music as the technological age is really really changing. As computerisation is happening. As the information superhighways are happening.”

To me, they’ve shown a music that now gazes both backwards and forwards as it faces an unprecedented set of new choices. The music has found a constellation of new players but some fear that it could also be corrupted by recording opportunities that don’t so much prettify as subtly and almost imperceptibly deface the music.

Philip King scans the spectrum of these options but comes to no strict conclusion. Still he’ll ask: “How is a music that is apparently based rurally, that comes out of community, going to survive and adapt?” And is there an answer?

“It’s always survived and adapted before. It survived the wax cylinder, it survived the 78, it’s engaging very very profitably and seriously with the CD. But I think the great thing about Irish music is that it always remains in touch with its source. Now, however, it’s beginning to be turned into product. And this never happened before.”

“So,” he continues “we interviewed Paul McGuinness for the series about his new label, Celtic Heartbeat and he says his aim is to bring Irish music into contact with the full force of American marketing. In other words, he’s going to engage the power of a major like Atlantic.”

This can sound hazardous. Some fear Irish music will get pulverised by Atlantic as an American label fascinated by the success of Clannad and Enya. Well, Paul McGuinness will soon have his day in court to plead his label’s case. Besides, commercialisation isn’t some late 20th century novelty. Surely Thomas Moore opened up that road as far back as the 1820s.

“In this case, if you’re sitting in the Atlantic boardroom and wondering what to do next,” Philip explains “they may think that Irish music looks interesting and could sell a lot of product. They think ‘could make a lot of money here, better get on the bus’. So the bus has now arrived and is taking some of our material.”

“I’m not saying this is a good or a bad thing. For instance, rock music has always lived in the commercial world. By its nature, it’s a commercial not an amateur music . . . But there’s an amateur streak forming the basis of Irish music. There are people who play it just for itself. And I’m not saying that this is a better or worse thing. That’s just the way it is.”

Clearly, there is an extent to which Philip King is bothered that Irish music is not suited to the Hit Factory mentality: “If they don’t have A Hit next week, if it’s not selling, we’re not at the ball-game. So it’s great if the music is disseminated but there are still people who play the music brilliantly without the pre-requisite of the record company sitting there, saying you must have a hit. Now what Paul McGuinness is saying is that we’re introducing Irish music to the mainstream of American marketing because we’re certain it can sell product.”

Irish music is resilient because it can survive without all that paraphernalia. As Philip King insists: “ As a musician in rock, without commercial success, you are dead. In Irish music, that doesn’t matter. You can be dropped from the label in the morning and still be playing in the pub in the evening in a way that is absolutely valid to the soul of the music.”

Yet there remains a perfectly valid middle course, based on the principles of appropriate technology and the economics of scale. Acoustic musicians naturally tour and record more cheaply. Even a traditional group doesn’t have to sell 100,000 copies of each album to secure a comfortable living.

Quickly scan the studio file in the Hot Press Yearbook and you’ll find approximately twenty 16 or 24-track rural Southern studios outside the two cities of Dublin and Cork. Add an example not mentioned in our yearbook: Liam Clancy has just opened his own 24-track studio in Waterford’s Ring Gaeltacht. Past and future can be allies not enemies. Irish music is the purest form of indie. Sean-nós singers can locally circulate their songs on cassette. The era of the BBC or Radio Eireann collector with the unreliable and unwieldy tape-recorder is long past.

Still, other arguments need to be addressed. The dangers may be external not internal if Irish traditional music is misrepresented and misunderstood in the world outside, a constituency which also sadly includes much of our own Dublin-based media, which ignores the variety and scale of traditional music activity beyond its ken.

Then this fear follows : ersatz Irish music floods the market; production of the pure drop slows to a trickle. But Philip King remains an optimist. He’s proud that River Of Sound has given a platform to the new generation. He talks of Niall Vallelly with Nomos as an astounding player.

“And then there’s Laoise Kelly,” he adds “who’s a harper from Galway who’s going to really revitalise the harp and kick it right into the next century. Gone is that age-old nicey-nicey image of the harp. It’s great that the series has brought people together and made something happen.

“Now,” he says, “if you go out around the country, you hear all these new people playing. There’s hundreds of them, all over the place. And as in any generation, there are some who are really special.”

There used to be fears that distinctive regional accents would be eroded but now Philip believes that “people in their own areas have gone back to look for their own music, so there’s a real development of regional styles. The Donegal thing – what’s happening with Altan and Dermot McGloughlin – will show you that. It’s developing the tradition of their own area and making it pertinent and part of the now.

“In the series,” he elaborates “you’ll see and hear all the different manifestations of the tradition. For instance, you’ll hear Paul Brady talking about Scots-Irish influence in the North and you’ll hear Donegal fiddlers playing Scottish styles and tunes that are still shot through with that Donegal thing.”

River Of Sound also demonstrates how the different local styles reflect the physical environment from which they come.

“West Connemara, that has a really rocky sound, sean-nós that’s very, very difficult and very harsh. Compare that with someone from Waterford like Nicholas Tóibín who died last year, singing one of those big Munster songs. Connemara’s like a pneumatic drill whereas Waterford’s like the rolling hills.”

Beside the renewed pull of regional styles, Philip cites another trend in “players like Niall Vallelly who are beginning to deconstruct the music, who are starting to push it very hard formally. They’re saying why can’t we play 500 different versions of a tune. Why can’t we pull it apart, drive it on? It’s still part of the tradition.

“We had a framework when we went out to shoot,” he happily concedes, “but then we threw it up in the air because things happened. Like Brendan Power meeting John and Cyril Murphy and we went down to Wexford for a weekend and, everywhere, there were harmonica players. Nobody would have believed it. Micheál might have said ‘well, there might be some harmonica players but there’s never that many’. It was like a convention with guys taking their harmonicas out of their boxes and filing down their reeds. And all of these people had come to this tiny village in Wexford, Carrick-on-Bannow.”

Such situations breed the mammoth, majestic sessions when Irish music reveals its truest secrets. As Philip King says: “The music has always happened in the middle of the night. That’s when it’s real. It exists on record and on stage but a lot of the times, you’ll find five or six people at 3 o’clock in the morning and those are the magical sessions.

“And sometimes if you play the music and you come home after travelling away for a long time, you walk into your favourite local pub and something happens to you. The air changes, you start to play and you hear the music in a very different way.

“This is very important” he says later, urgently continuing the theme. Philip makes the distinction between “the community of musicians” and “the community of sound” which is wider. “That’s people like you and me,” he speculates “who sit and listen to the music but we feel much more a part of it than other sorts of music because it’s inclusive.

“When you sit in a pub at a session, you feel part of the whole thing. The gulf of the stage to the audience, the barriers, the roadies and all those things that keep you away from the music aren’t there. You’re in there.”

Or as Seamus Heaney says in the series: “It goes behind the talking head and it calls you out.”