UNCG - MLS610C Global Arts Unit 5 - Ireland
This time responses required in Unit 5 are in the comments section of the Text post. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Sumerian Harp, Iraq, 2500 BCE
by Beverly Jones, '97
"This is a recreation of Queen Shub-Ad's harp, an artifact unearthed early this century from the Sumerian Royal Cemetery at Ur. It is the oldest known example of the true triangular harp, which evolved directly from the hunting bow" (Smith College Museum of Ancient Inventions)
Sumerian Bull Lyre, Iraq, 3200 BCE by Stacey Rolland, '00 (Smith College Museum of Ancient Inventions)
Boyne Valley Mounds at Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, Ireland. Built circa 3200 B.C.E. They predate Stonehenge in England and the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
Megalithic Passage Tomb - Newgrange Mound (from Knowth Website)
posted by Y @ 7:59 PM
2 Comments:
For my discussion of the Folktales please click on "comments" under the UNCG - MLS610C Global Arts Unit 5 - Texts.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
The class discussion question this unit was:
How has traditional music influenced the Irish and world music scene in the last fifty years? Use examples from your reading and film viewing.
My post was:
The first time I knew this was going to be an emotionally difficult unit for me was two weeks or more ago. I was half-heartedly reading O’Connor’s rather dry, academic discussion of the technicalities of Irish music -- the beats to numbers to repetition sort of things – and the telling once more of the sad Irish emigrations, the loss of Gaelic oral culture due to British censorships, America as land of liberty.
Along the way and back in Ireland there were somewhat frantic efforts to record the elder generation’s performances – not to be heartless but it all sounded much like the same post-WWII efforts made to record American Indian songs, dances, languages, and by the same kinds of “outsiders” trying to convince the actual “owners” of disappearing cultures that, use it or lose it, we’re going to preserve you nonetheless. In some cases, the best was lost while the mediocre was saved; outsiders didn’t always know the difference.
Two weeks to live with one question: How has traditional music influenced the Irish and world music scene in the last fifty years? Use examples from your reading and film viewing.
I got to O’Connor’s section titled, “The Hills of Glenshee: Music of the Lumberjack” (O’Connor 40). When I read this section, flash! the years I spent in Girl Scouts from when I was 6 years to 22 years old, or from about 1955 to about 1971, exploded my memory circuits and a personally-held, long forgotten, but still a great mystery, dissolved into clarity.
I had not yet viewed the movie, “From a Whisper to a Scream” when I read O’Connor the first time, and so much of the meaning of what she writes had no visual or audio attributes in my brain. That is until I read, “In Ireland this song [“I’ll sell my Hat, I’ll Sell my Coat”] is known by its Irish language title ‘Siúil a Rún’. It was recorded in the mid-1970s by the Donegal band Clannad […]. The song dates from the seventeenth century and somehow endured in the living tradition in Ireland” (O’Connor 40). I got a cold shiver realizing how far back this really is.
In the next paragraph O’Connor explains that “Siúil a Rún” is an example of a macaronic song. These kinds of songs “date from a time and place when the spoken language of the people was in transition from Irish to English. […] Sometimes in the Irish song […] the chorus is in Irish and the verses in English. [….], the American version substitutes a nonsense-word rigmarole to approximate the sound of Irish words."
Oh! Now I understand!!!
How many times around how many Girl Scout campfires did we play our baritone ukuleles and sing folksongs from all over but one in particular, “Shule, shule, shule ah roo, Shule a rackshack shule a boppa coo, When I die before my grave, sing Shule a rackshack shula."
There were other songs, like the "Gypsy Rover" but "Shula Roo" -- I can hear it in my head as I type. What did the words mean? We asked the question so many times!!! O'Connor explained the macronic in words of logic. A secondary understanding, now that I’ve viewed the movie a couple of times, comes from one of the Clannads who explained that their ethereal, mystical sound comes from slowing down the sounds of syllables, the “nonsense.” Again, I shiver like my teen years suddenly went on public view as I realize what we did in Scouts was part of how much traditional Irish music influenced what was, in the 60s, my “world music scene.” And we saved some.
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