Musicology: I suppose that if we didn't have a Harry White we would have to invent one. After all, who else in music in Ireland can write with such a passion, facility and breadth of knowledge that is so impressive, and at the same time infuriate and antagonise with such ease?
One of his main concerns is music in Ireland in the context of ethnicity, colonialism and nationalism. He asserts that "the history of art music in Ireland . . . can fairly be characterised as an attempt to redeem music from the burdens of nationalist ideology". He admits that it was in the 1980s that he began to consider "the condition of music in Ireland as the expression of some kind of unresolved cultural dislocation". He revisits the legacy of Sean Ó Riada, which he had examined in his earlier volume, The Keeper's Recital. He states that Ó Riada left behind him "a divided imagination" whereby composers had to decide to explore their Irish identities or forego them. This preoccupation with a nationalism he seems to disparage becomes confusing when he later says that "German musical nationalism contradicts the commonplace understanding of musical nationalism as a species of liberation from the colonial world". It becomes even more confusing when he seems to criticise Gerald Barry, certainly our most internationally known contemporary Irish composer of classical music, for composing music that does not depend on Ireland in the least.
At times I wondered if the title of the book was a mistake. He takes the title from a poem written by Matthew Pilkington in 1725 but he is critical of so many things that his book could have been titled "The Lack of Progress of Music in Ireland". Brian Boydell wrote in 1951 that "music in Ireland . . . is in a shocking state". Harry White seems to think that, in general, it still is. He takes swipes at the easy targets of the Department of Education, the Arts Council and the Leaving Certificate syllabus in music, with few really constructive suggestions, and even says: "At the last, the danger may not be that classical music will die in Ireland, but that it will continue to be ignored." At one point he says that "Wilson, Kinsella, Victory and Bodley all made important contributions to the symphonic genre" and at another refers to the "sad annals of Irish symphonic enterprise".
He could also be termed a musical snob, and I feel that he would take that as a compliment. He has little time for the RTÉ Proms or Lyric FM. He couples Riverdance with "the commercial development of Irish music and a striking and highly professional model of international entertainment" and has no difficulty with the opinion that "Carmina Burana is unadulterated, fascist trash". His main praise is for the developing state of musicology in Ireland, not surprising seeing that he is co-founder of the Society for Musicology in Ireland and general editor of Irish Musical Studies. Musicology in Ireland is fortunate to have his leadership, vitality and enthusiasm and I will not be surprised if he eventually achieves his dream of an Irish Musicological Institute based on the model of the Irish Traditional Music Archive.
I have more reservations about his views on music education and I am very surprised by his vehement anti-American bias. Having visited so many American universities and conservatories myself, I am a great admirer of their facilities, equipment, standards and programmes. All through his book I got the impression that Harry White wants to have nothing whatever to do with any aspect of American music education. He may be a fanatical Europhile, but I am shocked that he can ignore the achievements, for example, of the Juilliard School in New York or the University of Indiana at Bloomington.
Other essays in this book examine the use of music and its references in the works of Friel, Beckett and Joyce, and the tribute to Brian Friel is apposite. He certainly justifies his view that "Music is the sovereign ghost of the Irish literary imagination".
There are also excellent chapters on the important contributions of Brian Boydell and Aloys Fleischmann to music in Ireland in the 20th century and I hope that he might one day develop further his views on the reason for the sad decline of the reputation of Charles Villiers Stanford, who, it was hoped, would achieve in music the worldwide reputation subsequently earned in literature by WB Yeats. Music in Ireland would have a totally different stature had he done so.
I will always have major disagreements with Harry White on certain matters. He cannot expect otherwise when he makes provocative statements such as "The cult of performance has so overtaken our sense of music (from the regiments of Suzuki to the peaks of the international competition) that our conception of music has narrowed accordingly". It's hard to understand how he could make a large list of musical infrastructures in Ireland without including the Royal Irish Academy of Music.
But this is a book that I will come back to again and again. Infuriating, opinionated and biased though he may be, we need more Harry Whites in music in this country.
The Progress of Music in Ireland By Harry White, Four Courts Press, 176pp. €45
Pianist John O'Conor is director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music and artistic director of the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition