Riverdance: Irish Identity and the Musical Artwork

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

Riverdance: Irish Identity and the Musical ArtworkAuthor(s): Harry WhiteSource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 13, No. 2 (SAMHRADH / SUMMER2009), pp. 63-69Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25660879 .

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Riverdance as Music

If you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense?and the historical sense involves notonly a perception of the

pastness of the past, but equally of its presence.

Eliot also reminds us that in the achievement of a truly great artist, "the most

individual parts of his work maybe those in which... his ancestors assert their

immortality most vigorously."11 Unless and until we learn to acknowledge that

the work of our great artists both accepts the beauty of tradition while pushing that same tradition to the outer boundaries of possibility, we risk rupturing our

ties with what has gone before and what is yet to come. For, as history teaches, the innovations of our master artists of today invariably become the living tra

dition of tomorrow.

EMORY UNIVERSITY

j flanne@emory. edu

Harry White

Riverdance: Irish Identity and the Musical Artwork

It is becoming increasingly difficult to define the imagined community to which Irish music might reasonably belong. Other than the chauvinism and privilege that attend a notably rebarbative strain of journalistic criticism?which River dance itself has more than once attracted?there is not much to suggest that Irish music has been absorbed by cultural history, with the sovereign exception of rock music and popular music. The merest condition of historical or stylis tic narrative often remains unfulfilled, with the result that it is very difficult to situate a work such as Riverdance in purely musical terms without calling atten tion to the generic disagreements that plague and divide Irish musical dis course, and even if the discourse itself is incomparably more plural and more

engaged than it once was.

This state of affairs is all the more perplexing, even inhibiting, given the

prominence of Irish music in Western culture over the past thirty years, but the record remains implacable. Richard Taruskin's recent and monumental Oxford

History of Western Music (2005) powerfully affirms the plausibility of an exhaus tive narrative of Western musical affairs, which remains nevertheless wholly

ii. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank

Kermode (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1975), 38.

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Riverdance as Music

silent on the global presence of Irish music. Within his compendious treatment

of almost all forms of contemporary music in Western culture, Taruskin has vir

tually nothing to say about Irish music beyond a passing reference to the Melodies

of Thomas Moore.1 One does not need to stretch the imagination to conceive of a history of Western music without the Chieftains: that absence is general to a

canonic degree, although a corresponding lacuna in literary history?a narrative

of twentieth-century poetry in English without Heaney, for example?would be

impossible to envisage as anything other than a willful distortion.

And even when the idea of narrative itself is under siege?especially when

narrative is deconstructed as a strategy for maintaining the status quo of an

inadequate literary or musical canon?history waits in the wings while the

debates rage on. These debates can be pernicious in the domain of music. More

monuments are torn down than are raised up by the new musicology, and yet, the works survive as cardinal points of reference in the construction of new cul

tural discourses, or as the focus of stringent analytic or theoretical scrutiny. The discrepancy between the presence of Irish music and its striking absence

from the narrative of musical history significantly increases the challenge of

responding adequately to a work such as Riverdance, if only because the sheer

ubiquity of the musical phenomenon is contradicted by the narrative silence in

which it is enveloped. The silence is by no means general. On the contrary, Riverdance has stimulated more commentary, I would suppose, than any other

Irish musical artwork to date. Nevertheless, this commentary does not guaran

tee the work any kind of canonic reception history or analysis, simply because

the mental geography of Irish music is at best a by-product of social or cultur

al history?Riverdance as the polished roar of the Celtic Tiger and so forth?or, at worst, an affirmation that the maps of that geography are either out of date

or have never been drawn in the first place. The thriving condition of contem

porary Irish musicology gives every reason to suggest that this fairly deplorable situation is about to change. But in the meantime, the problem remains.

In these circumstances, the easiest port of call for Riverdance has been the

cultural self-confidence and material prosperity that it came to signify almost

from the outset. For more than a decade, Riverdance was the auditory signature of a new Ireland celebrated and satirized in equal measure, to the point where

iconic motifs strongly suggestive of Bill Whelans score became the signature tune by which the nation announced itself. On occasion, these signatures

(another was Ronan Hardiman's music for The Late Late Show) were indepen

dently conceived but nevertheless unmistakably related to Whelans original. Riverdance engendered innumerable parodies, which attested not only its pri

i. See Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2005).

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Riverdance as Music

mary condition of Irish identity, but also the untrammelled quality of its exis

tence simply as a musical work of art. Even as it abided the vehement outrage of reactionary criticism, the most disagreeable indictments that Riverdance

incurred could only fortify the organic presence of the work itself. Riverdance

lived in the glare of its own symbolic suggestiveness. This correspondence between the works reception and its organic pres

ence no longer obtains, for obvious economic reasons. We are now better placed to think about Riverdance independent of its astonishing cultural and social res

onances. I would like to propose that this separation between the work and its

context permits Riverdance to function more easily, and more prominently, as

a work of art and less easily as a cultural or social phenomenon. Considered

under the light of that distinction, the work sheds its primary and very power ful role as an auditory marker of Irish identity in favor of its autonomous, and

problematic, condition as a musical art work.

In his seminal Foundations of Music History, Carl Dahlhaus set the general terms of this autonomy:

Works of music receive their documentary or historiological significance not in

isolation from, but precisely by virtue of, their essence as art. Thus, in the course

of that "social decoding" expounded and practised by Adorno, the element of artifice must never be given short shrift even though aesthetic isolation has been

broken. It is precisely its autonomy that makes music such an eloquent com

mentator on society. For the interpreter this means that he must never lose sight of autonomy, even when infringing against it, in his attempts to decipher the

message of the music.2

This emphasis upon the autonomous condition of musical works is worth

exploring in relation to Riverdance, even if this emphasis also exposes Dahlhaus himself to the charge of creating a general law, as it were, of music history from the particular circumstances of German idealism expressed in nineteenth-cen

tury music. Dahlhaus ascribes the importance and functional condition of the musical work in and through history as "an eloquent commentator on society" to the inherent autonomy of musical discourse. This autonomy remains vul nerable to the charge of self-absorbed idealism, even as it confers upon music the ability to reflect and interpret the social circumstances from which it

emerges. By invoking Adorno, Dahlhaus?who is in every respect Adorno's most ardent disciple?seeks to protect the integrity of the musical work from that notorious commodification of culture that Adorno himself diagnosed as the unravelling of music s claim to serious attention.

2. Carl Dalhaus, Foundations of Music History, transl. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni

versity Press, 1983), p. 114.

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Riverdance as Music

In the end, the "documentary significance" of music as an historical conduit

depends upon the aesthetic autonomy that the musical work enjoys. If this

autonomy is relative?a declaration that seems self-evident, at least to me?it

is nevertheless constituent of the musical work as a self-standing aesthetic expe rience. In the case of Riverdance, this autonomy gains from divesting the work, at least temporarily, of its social or cultural resonances in favor of examining issues of discourse as these relate to the admittedly complex aesthetics of Irish

music. These issues can most easily be identified under the multiple rubric of

style, genre, and identity, in order to approach a reading of Riverdance that

might transcend, rather than succumb to, the aesthetic difficulties that virtual

ly define almost all discussions of Irish musical works.

Although it would be fair comment to describe Riverdance as being sui

generis, it is no less fair to suggest that the generic provenance of the work orig inates not only in Irish traditional music?in which Whelan's immense exper tise and experience prior to its composition were decisive?but also in a range of other stylistic assimilations, which at first glance might appear heteroge neous. Whelans technical assurance as an orchestrator and arranger speaks to

this stylistic pluralism, as does his work in original composition: the film score

of Lamb (1984) and the Seville Suite (1992) both express a musical imagination

given to strong narrative segmentations. The stylistic parameters of the suite as

a genre, moreover, inform Whelans approach in Riverdance, in which fixed

forms (in the classical sense) are necessarily enlisted to meet the requirements of a radically new choreography. I strongly suspect that Whelan's own charac

teristically disciplined brief as a composer for film enriched his ability to create

in Riverdance a stringently precise sequence of movements governed by the

rhythmic, durational, and physical lineaments of the choreography?even if the

striking visual-musical correlatives of Riverdance eclipse the collaborative or

interdependent nature of the whole enterprise. What cannot be doubted is that in Riverdance, Whelan's music enables the

narrative of this choreography to a primary degree, even if more local narratives

also obtain from movement to movement. In this fundamental respect, the

score of Riverdance belongs with its choreography no less than does Stravinsky's music with Diaghilev's original choreography for The Rite of Spring. In either

case, the music can lead a productive afterlife of its own, but not without refer

ence to the narrative "force field" that its choreographic dimension demands.

This interrelationship, simply and by itself, takes generic precedence over any

allegiance?however explicit?that Riverdance owes to Irish traditional music.

This generic likening as between Stravinsky's Rite and Riverdance is modestly

strategic on my part; I recognize that it would not survive a direct comparison of one style with the other. But I employ the comparison to press home both the

66



Riverdance as Music

narrative priorities that Whelans score promotes, and the specific means

through which Riverdance "defines Ireland musically"?the last phrase being a

deliberate echo of Richard Taruskin's approach to The Rite of Spring in Defin

ing Russia Musically (2000). There is no "chosen one" dancing herself to death

in Riverdance and, we may be thankful, no grounds for identifying the kind of

"subhuman" primitivism that informs Taruskin's diagnosis of musical and cul

tural meaning in Stravinsky's score.3 But the comparison does extend to a read

ing in which musical artifice is obligated not only to a narrative design which

speaks of "Russia" or "Ireland," but also to a controlling musical agency in

which stylistic iterations are paramount. The accumulation of these iterations

in Riverdance governs the pluralism and mosaic of Whelans score. There, the

conventional thematic recurrences are of less moment than the overarching reliance on a sequence of musical counters, which stabilize a sound-world that

extends from the impressionism of Maurice Jarre to Spanish Flamenco. These

counters are anchored in Whelans astonishingly inventive recourse to Irish

music, but they are cleverly constructed so as to maximize the thematic affini

ties between, for example, Russian and Irish modes of color, timbre, rhythm, and melodic contour, which the score affirms and explores.

Thus, the mosaic of which Riverdance is composed affords distinctive layers of stylistic assimilation, which are bound together by a pervasive and tightly controlled series of motives that underpin the organic coherence of the work as

a whole. This feature is more easily perceived when the music is considered in

isolation. At the risk of straining the Yeatsian metaphor, this kind of scrutiny allows us to distinguish "the dancer from the dance." But in any case, the func tional and narrative obligations that Riverdance maintains in respect of the

choreography deserve to be identified separately from the purely musical tech

niques that imbue the score with precisely the sort of eloquence Dahlhaus nominates in his argument for aesthetic autonomy. The rhetoric of Whelans

technique is so beguiling in its admixture of stylistic versatility and motivic rigor that the surface appeal of the music may conceal the structural logic by which it unfolds. In this respect, too, generic prototypes can help to advance our

reception of the piece beyond identifications of stylistic pluralism (to say noth

ing of the extent to which this pluralism offends against the canon law of a reac

tionary aesthetics of traditional music). One component of Whelans compositional technique that offers an instruc

tive case in point is the instrumentarium of Riverdance. Its apparent heterogene ity?Bulgarian, Turkish, Spanish, and American stringed and wind instruments

3. See Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Prince ton: Princeton University Press).

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Riverdance as Music

consort with an already rich ensemble of traditional Irish colors, in addition to a complex retinue of percussion, synthesized sounds, and orchestral textures?

is resolved through the agency of textures, which constantly affirm Whelan's cre

ative dependence on baroque and classical concerto models. Thus, "Firedance," the sixth movement from the work, typifies Whelan's adroit recourse to classical

prototypes as it modulates from the introspection of a slow movement from a

concerto for guitar and orchestra to the ebullient ensemble of a concerto grosso. Indeed, the most striking textural distinction throughout Riverdance, as well as

the most systematic, lies between the frequently introspective claims of a concerto

soloist (uilleann pipes, fiddle, saxophone, Gadulka), and the robust ensemble of a baroque ritornello. Whelan mediates these textural allusions and reliances

through the much more recent conventions of ensemble established by Planxty and the Chieftains in the 1970s and 1980s as a definitive aural signature of neo

traditional Irish music (a development that, it should be noted, represents a

decisive invention rather than a tradition in itself). This means, in turn, that Whe

lan's score, for all its novelty and original deportment, connects to a sequence of

musical conventions that may not be immediately apparent to the listener but

which nevertheless stabilizes the work within a far-reaching tradition that has

nothing directly to do with "Irish" or "Bulgarian" or "Macedonian" music.

Instead, it is a tradition defined by the conventions of the professional European ensemble. These conventions are affirmed by the cluster of virtuosi that performs in full view of the audience when Riverdance is presented in the theater, rather

than being subdued and submerged in the pit. The musical discourse of River

dance is not constricted by these conventions, but as each movement narrows to

its narrative or extra-musical obligations, which originate in and return to Ire

land, the immediate impact of such stylistic and textural allusions as Turkish

instruments or recognizably Russian melodic signatures is offset by the consis

tency and integrity of the scoring and texture as a whole.

And yet: Riverdance, if only because it speaks so effectively through this

synthesis of generic and stylistic prototypes, attains to the invention of a genre that is exhausted by the work itself. Its sheer originality poses an absorbing

problem. This is not because Riverdance fails to create an aural image of Irish

ness in which the sum of its parts is distinct from the traditions upon which it

depends. The problem arises, rather, because the mutation from originality to

cultural commodification posed by its very popularity, endangers the identity of the work itself. One can only imagine the pressures exerted upon Whelan to

exploit his own invention, pressures that in different circumstances would sim

ply disappear. To name one familiar instance, in the early eighteenth century Handel's invention of the English oratorio entailed the production of a genre that could be adapted indefinitely from one Biblical drama to the next. Indeed,

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Riverdance as Music

the kind of generic originality that Riverdance represents was an extremely rare

occurrence in European music prior to the French Revolution, and for long afterward: originality itself could obscure that contract of intelligibility upon which most forms of public music depended for their very existence. But in the

late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, the aesthetics of the musical art

work are strikingly otherwise, so that originality is the contractual condition

that a work must fulfill?even if it leaves its audience stranded on the shores of

its own discourse in the process. This is a point not lost on certain contemporary composers (John Adams,

Arvo Part and Philip Glass among them) when they seek to re-engage with audiences through the reinstitution of tonal forms and genres after almost a

century of puzzled neglect or contempt. In Bill Whelans case, the communica

tive reach of the musical language is extravagantly successful. The generic

audacity and originality of the work?and here, I emphatically rejoin the score

with the choreography and visual representation of Riverdance as a whole? could only be diminished by the prospect of further works in the same vein. The musical identity of Riverdance is a composite of style and genre which its imi tators have to some extent made their own: a work such as Lord of the Dance both confirms the general laws of cultural commodification to which River dance is vulnerable by virtue of its own spectacular success, and proves that

originality is not the only game in town.

From a commercial point of view, this does not matter in the least. And it would be a striking and unwarranted condescension to suggest that in the case of Lord of the Dance Michael Flatley's choreography or Ronan Hardiman s music should perforce achieve the same degree of originality as Riverdance. What does bear consideration, however, is the extent to which Riverdance itself "defines Ireland musically." In that respect, the originality of Bill Whelans com

position takes precedence over the most skilful imitation it can inspire. In that

respect, too, it exemplifies the imperative need for an adequate narrative of Irish musical history.4

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

[email protected]

4. This need is answered at least in part by John O'Flynn's very recently published The Irishness

of Irish Music (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), in which Riverdance features prominently as an icon of Irish musical identity.

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Riverdance: Irish Identity and the Musical Artwork

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