Sean-nós, Sean-nua… Sean-nós Nua?-- --

Bent Sørensen, Aalborg University, Denmark

This paper examines the dynamics between old and new ways in Irish music. The

traditional unaccompanied song in Gaelic nowadays known as sean-nós, or the

old style, is not the most commercially viable type of music in an age with little

patience for longish laments without vibrant beats or obscene lyrics. What then

might be the sean-nua, or new style that is more befitting for today’s audience?

Paradoxically the answer might lie in looking backward while at the same time

looking forward.

Some of Ireland’s biggest names in contemporary popular music have been

enamoured of the idea of crossing old with new, creating hybrid forms that

would at once contain the wisdom of the old style and yet yield some authority in

the marketplace. Such position taking in the field of traditional as well as the

field of contemporary music (to borrow terms from Pierre Bourdieu) can be seen

as an attempt by these artists to take over the existing cultural capital in older

songs and pieces of music (looking backward to tradition) and incorporating it

into and thereby enhancing their own contemporary cultural capital. One such,

already consecrated artist is Van Morrison, who in biographies is routinely

introduced as a sean-nós man, as also in the following quote by Paul Durcan,

comparing Morrison to Patrick Kavanagh:

Both Northerners—solid ground boys. Both primarily jazzmen, bluesmen,

sean nós. Both concerned with the mystic—how to live with it, by it, in it;

how to transform it; how to reveal it. Both troubadours. Both very ordinary

blokes. Both drumlin men—rolling hills men.

Critics generally praised Morrison’s 1988 collaboration with the Chieftains, Irish

Heartbeat, and saw Morrison as revitalized by the largely traditional material, or

by the mere proximity to the exuberant performers in his ‘backing band.’

However, some Northern Irish newspapers were highly critical of Morrison’s

vocal antics, however, and Brian Hinton quotes a review in the Belfast Telegraph

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claiming that if Patrick Kavanagh had lived to hear this interpretation there

would have been “trouble in the Dublin pubs” (269). The same newspaper

reckons that upon hearing Morrison’s version of “My Lagan Love” – were he to

sing this at a Belfast party – “people would leave early” (270). It is hard not to

ascribe this reaction to a feeling of betrayal that the native Belfast son has gone

more Irish than the Irish south of the border, collaborating with The Chieftains

and picking a green Celtic design for the record cover just to rub it in. Bourdieu

would analyse this as the Belfast Telegraph calling Morrison out on trying to

trespass on a field in which he has insufficient credentials. The Telegraph is thus

acting as a reverse gatekeeper, trying to keep Morrison out of a field over which

the Telegraph obviously has no control.

The tour in support of the album drew rave reviews from the English press: “You

have just watched genius culminate, pass the utmost,” wrote the Melody Maker.

Irish Heartbeat, while by no means Morrison’s first foray into Irish mythology

(that would be Veedon Fleece from 1974, or even portions of Astral Weeks from

1968), proved to be the first true example of a successful meeting between Irish

traditional songs and a jazz/r&b-influenced vocalist, sparking a number of other

Chieftains records all with a hybrid rock and world music feel to them (Another

Country (1992), The Long Black Veil (1995), Tears of Stone (1999) – to mention

but a few), featuring popular Irish, British, American and third world vocalists.

A decade ago the once popular Sinead O’Connor (remember “Nothing Compares

2 U”?) attempted a comeback with an album titled Sean-nós Nua, on which she,

self-confessedly, ‘sexed-up’ traditional Irish songs, some even sung in Gaelic,

much as Van Morrison had done 15 years earlier. In her case it was seen as a

more cynical attempt to revitalise a career that had fallen on hard times,

involving as it did constant confrontations with several aspects of traditional

Irish culture, such as Catholicism and its conservative stance on female sexuality

and abortion rights. In contemporary reviews, Mark Richardson for instance

wrote in Pitchfork in early 2003: ”As much as I hate to admit it, it's odd hearing

Sinead singing songs that seem removed from her direct experience.” O’Connor’s

often virulent attacks on the Catholic institutions (for instance tearing up a

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picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992 and blaming him for

child abuse within the Church) had not exactly endeared her to an audience that

might be tempted by a traditionalist repertoire (Q Magazine was particularly

dismissive: “The results, while respectfully chocolate box pretty, make Enya

seem like a bomb-making radical”), yet O’Connor’s recording of ballads and

songs in both English and Gaelic seems a sincere expression of belief in the value

and relevance of these songs to a contemporary audience, and to her personally.

Sadly, even generally positive reviews such as the one in Rolling Stone could not

resist the Enya comparison: ”She's better off right now borrowing other

songwriters' notions of mysticism and melodrama. [Some tracks are] slow and

stately enough to suggest a grab for the Enya market.” (Milo Miles, September

2002). Robert L. Doerschuk writes in the All Music Guide that a ballad such as

“Peggy Gordon”, ”evokes misty pictures of mystic Eire by drenching strings,

acoustic guitars, and her own voice in the kind of echo normally associated with

whale songs.” O’Connor’s album is thus irrevocably trapped in the clichéd

reception much Celtic music receives from the British and American music press.

The gatekeepers of the music press would much rather see O’Connor stay in her

limited post-punk, angry feminist music field.

I shall proceed in due course to look specifically at examples from these two

albums where the vocal stylings of these singers resemble the sean-nós in its

canonical meaning, yet are examples of boundaries of Irish time and place being

transcended in the songs’ hybrid musical style, lending new meaning to both

sean-nós and nua.

First, though, I would like to address the themes of the conference: authority and

wisdom. In the case of songs and performance the concept of authority might at

first glance seem irrelevant, especially as with traditional works the authorship

of the original is often lost in time, yet we often as critics find ourselves using the

term authoritative about a specific artist’s version of a well-known piece. In this

usage what is implied is two-fold: both that the version in question cannot be

improved on at present, and that the version follows the traditions regarding

performance practice, whether that relates to lyrics, musical arrangement, or

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quality of performance in comparison to previous efforts by other artists. The

authoritativeness of a performance or recording thereof, thus has a temporal

aspect in that the adjective locates the song vis-à-vis the past (improves upon it,

or usurps the authority/cultural capital of older practitioners) and also achieves

a present state-of-the-art level. The authority can be conferred onto the new

state-of-the-art version by various agencies. As I have already hinted at, the

marketplace is one possible site of authority: if it sells it is in some ways bound

to set the standard for what is to come, because familiarity that comes with

success and fame guarantees that new generations will be forced to relate to the

best-selling product. However, in Bourdieu’s sense of gatekeeping as an

important part of canon formation and transmission of cultural capital, it is more

commonly the critics who confer the status of authority to a specific cultural

product, and thus build a lineage for a song or piece of music in this case. This

immediately relates back to my introductory remarks concerning tradition and

renewal: a contemporary sean-nós must know the tradition, and its authority will

weigh upon him or her, yet he/she must also dare to transcend the tradition and

set a new level of excellence, i.e. be a sean-nós nua.

As regards wisdom, the traditional is often seen as implicitly carrying with it as

part of its cultural capital an element of ‘the wisdom of old’. Certainly the

etymology of the word wisdom teaches us that ‘knowing/gnosis’ is an integral

part of it, so the wisdom of tradition could here be defined ad hoc as the

knowledge of where a song has been, where it comes from – but also, crucially,

where it can be taken in the present. Wisdom therefore also is time-bound, with

both past and present alignments, again anchored to the elements of tradition

and renewal. The formidable authority of a performance of a well-known

standard or classic song or tune can occasionally deter newer artists from trying

out their hand at besting the old stand-out version. Critics can then have

occasion to question the ‘wisdom’ of the new wannabe artist in daring to engage

with a sacrosanct version, or, more often, simply deem it folly on the artist’s part

to dare this. As we shall see in the cases of Morrison and O’Connor these

concepts have very much been in play. I have previously written extensively on

the song On Raglan Road and its remediations, but will just mention it briefly

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here as a case in point. When Van Morrison recorded this song with The

Chieftains on Irish Heartbeat, some critics were vocal in denouncing Morrison’s

tampering with a song that was ‘owned’ by Luke Kelly of The Dubliners, whose

version was deemed authoritative by many – and still is. Yet Morrison did dare,

and the ensuing recording for newer generations has replaced Kelly’s as the

authoritative one, although the debate over the respective excellence of the

performances is not yet over, as I have shown in my article on the use of the song

in recent films such as Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges.

Turning now to the tradition of unaccompanied singing in an Irish context, sean-

nós singing is defined as follows by Abigail Gilmore in the Continuum

Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World:

It refers to a singing style that belongs to the Irish tradition, where the

voice is unaccompanied by an instrument and any accompaniment by other

singers is in unison. The melodies are learned aurally by imitation rather

than from notation or a tutor. It can be melismatic, in which additional

notes embellish the main notes and intervallic, in which changes or

additions are made to the intervals between the main notes.

As we shall hear, Van Morrison does not really deviate from the definition as far

as his vocal work is concerned, although on the record Irish Heartbeat, he is of

course accompanied by the full instrumental line-up of The Chieftains,

augmented by a rock style drum set, played by Morrison himself. His vocal style

is however, excessively melismatic in comparison to the stiffer tradition of Irish

singers, obviously inspired by a range of black American traditions from blues

and jazz, up to and including scat singing (as defined by Alyn Shipton in the same

source as: “a style of wordless jazz singing in which meaningless syllables are

sung as part of an improvised melodic line. It allows the voice to assume the role

of an instrument to be used as if it were an instrument engaged in improvised

solos.”) By introducing scat techniques Morrison thus already breaks the frame

of sean-nós singing as unaccompanied by allowing his voice to function as an

instrument, soloing. It is however, also possible to see Morrison’s use of vocalise

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as more akin to traditional Gaelic vocal techniques such as keening or lilting. As

for the play with intervalling, both Morrison and O’Connor practise this

excessively too, compared to the Irish tradition. Morrison again borrowing from

blues, r&b, and jazz; O’Connor borrowing a syncopated reggae beat, as well as

aggressive vocal rhythm scans for her sean-nós nua.

Both O’Connor and Morrison have chosen to include both Gaelic and English

language lyrics on their records, although in Morrison’s case only a single song is

in Gaelic, and that only halfway so, as Morrison sings the English version of the

song “Tá Mo Chleamhnas Déanta”, where Kevin Conneff alternates with the

verses in Gaelic. The other nine tracks (two of which are Morrison originals) are

in English throughout. O’Connor includes two Gaelic lyrics out of thirteen tracks

all told. This slant towards the Anglophone songs, of course reflects the singers’

lack of familiarity with the Irish language first-hand (not surprising in the case of

Morrison who comes from a Protestant Belfast background). O’Connor does

come from a Catholic background, specifically a broken home in County Dublin

(her father was middle class – an engineer turned barrister), and has learned

Irish in school, but her troubled childhood and youth may well have prevented

her from gaining fluency in the Gaelic tongue, as she was in and out of a number

schools, including a stint in the Grianán Training Centre run by the Sisters of Our

Lady of Charity. She does not seem to ever use Gaelic conversationally, but her

pronunciation of song lyrics in Gaelic seems relatively unforced and natural.

The dominance of Anglophone lyrics in the two singers’ practice, of course runs

directly counter to the core of the sean-nós tradition, although practitioners of

that style have also often included English lyric pieces in their repertoire when it

suited them. The conflict between a preference for English or Gaelic lyrics also

reflects, as Christopher J. Smith points out, a greater musical and cultural

“tension between the two camps: the Gaelic-speaking or Gaelic-oriented pipers,

fiddlers, flutists, and sean-nós singers of the rural South and West, and the

English-speaking and English-oriented banjoists, guitarists, and harmonizing

choral singers of the urban ‘Ballad Boom’” (such as The Dubliners, The Clancy

Brothers and Tommy Makem, Planxty and The Chieftains).

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As Irish music became globalized (as I examined in the case of Christy Moore in

my paper here in Falun last year), the prevalent image of Irish music became the

Anglophone, fully orchestrated one, not the purist sean-nós strand. It would lead

too far to fully recount the developments in folk music and popular culture that

frame this victory for the Anglophone version of Irishness, but suffice it to say

that the advent of the folk singer-songwriter, part of whose persona it is that he

pens his own work (the archetype here being Bob Dylan), helped push tastes

away from traditionalism towards topical and political songs. The radical politics

of the youth movements of the 60s and 70s furthered this development, as did

the radicalization of the Anglo-Irish conflict in the specific Irish context.

In the second half of this paper I wish to look at two examples of recordings of

traditional material by Morrison and O’Connor and analyse to what extent what

they do with the material can be said to constitute cases of sean-nòs nua. Both

Morrison and O’Connor have covered the same repertoire to some extent

through their careers (“She Moved Through the Fair” and “On Raglan Road”, for

instance), but the two records we are concerned with today overlap on two

tracks only: the Scottish children’s song “I’ll Tell Me Ma”, and the Irish ballad “My

Lagan Love”, the latter of which I shall analyse comparatively. First, I want to

focus on one of O’Connor’s Gaelic tracks, however: “Óró sé do bheatha 'bhaile”.

This song has a long history, beginning as a ‘hauling home’ song (used to mark

the end of a married couple’s honeymoon), continuing with its inscription in a

Jacobite tradition with verses welcoming Bonnie Prince Charlie home to Ireland,

and culminating with Irish Nationalist Patrick Pearse adding new verses to it,

leading it to being used extensively by rebels during the Easter Rising and during

the Irish War of Independence. When sung in the sean-nós style later in the 20th

C., the song therefore takes on shades of a lament for the fallen in those conflicts

and for the unrealised potential of Irish freedom in many contexts. A

performance by Darach Ó Catháin, singing the Pearse version, (recorded in

Sandycove in 1980) for instance bears this out clearly, while still remaining

completely traditional within the limited vocal styling range of sean-nós. [VID]

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A contemporary folk arrangement of the song, such as the one by Mary Black

from 2005 shows that striking a middle ground between sean-nós and the ‘new

balladeer’ folk tradition is possible. Black sings with traditional Gaelic

accompaniment, including harp, fiddle, uilleann pipes and her own bodhran

playing – yet there is also an acoustic guitar, a piano and a stand-up bass in

evidence, pulling the mix towards the singer-songwriter folk tradition of

instrumentation. The band is allowed an instrumental break after two of the

three stanzas. The vocal performance is kept simple, with little melisma use.

Rather Black limits herself to a minor amount of intervalling, sustaining for

emphasis the final word of every stanza’s third line, for instance “méirleach”, as

well as the very last repetition of the chorus. The band provides back-up vocals,

but restrict their harmonizing to the last line of the chorus as well. This is neither

sean-nós, nor sean-nua, but is a version in conformity with the emerging Celtic

performance canon, post-1970s.

O’Connor’s version is considerably longer than the two previous ones. Black

takes two minutes, whereas Ó Catháin uses even less, but O’Connor’s runs to

three minutes and twenty seconds. The mid-tempo progression chosen lends

itself well to a laid-back reggae inspired lilt. There is time for extended

instrumental bridges between stanzas, and one hears dub effects and other

Jamaican musical influences. The tune is introduced by a tin whistle-carried run-

through of the chorus, without vocals. O’Connor then sings the three stanzas of

the Patrick Pearse version of the lyrics, after which the instrumental coda (with

some soloing) ends the performance. The instrumentation is a hybrid, featuring

the already mentioned tin whistle, plus fiddle, and button accordion on the

‘Gaelic side’, as it were and drums, keyboards, electric violin, acoustic guitar and

stand-up bass on the ‘contemporary side’. Echo effects in the mix, and sustain

effects in O’Connor’s vocal style emphasize the combative aspects of the lyrics, as

does O’Connor’s restless march-like jog in the accompanying video. [VID] Here

we see fully the sean-nós nua strategy O’Connor uses throughout her album:

danceable tempi, choruses that are already familiar and militant in politics – be

they nationalist or sexual, and a powerful physical presence signalled by voice

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and body working together as in a standard music video. No sitting about on

uncomfortable chairs, looking down to the floor or into the off-camera distance,

as evinced in so many sean-nós videos on Gaelic-language Irish TV, not any of the

pub-like or homey settings often preferred by folk groups such as Mary Black’s.

Turning now to “My Lagan Love”, Van Morrison and The Chieftains’ version

starts with an 80 second instrumental introduction of the song’s theme, followed

by the verses sung by Morrison over an instrumental drone, interrupted by harp

chords, and eventually a complementary flute voice harmonizing with his vocals.

The vocals are melismatic throughout, but not excessively so until the closing

phrase is reached: “The song of heart’s desire” at the 4-minute mark. This phrase

is repeated as a riff in an extended coda for an astonishing 70 seconds to end the

track. After two intelligible repetitions of the line, Morrison’s vocals become a

wordless scat or keen, ending with a snarling drone as the melody dies down.

[AUD] This hyper-dramatization of the outcome of the doomed love affair

between a mortal man and a leánan sídhe (fairy lover) described in the lyrics is of

course unthinkable in a straight sean-nós rendition of the song.

The song must have appealed to Morrison on a number of levels, both with

regards to lyrics (it uses what seems to be his preferred tragic mould, similarly to

“Carrickfergus,” “Raglan Road” and “She Moved Through The Fair”, all included

on the record) which reference the river that runs through Belfast town, and in

regards to melody where, sung in slow ballad tempo, it is a fine vehicle for an

extended improvised coda. In a BBC radio interview quoted by Hinton Paddy

Malone of The Chieftains has stated that Morrison’s vocal techniques are close to

a style of singing that can still be heard in remote pockets of Connemara and

Donegal (where around 1900 Joseph Campbell supposedly found the air that he

later set words to). Malone continues: “At the end of a song, he just rattles on.

You don’t know when he’s going to stop, he doesn’t know when he is going to

stop, depends on what’s in him at the time.” (274)

As this is an Anglophone ballad one must already bend the definition of sean-nós

somewhat to find traditional versions, but a recent one by Tony Cuckson from

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the 2011 Words and Harps Day will suffice in this context. [VID] Cuckson sings

without vibrato, with regulated intervalling, and almost without melisma as well

(of course his voice is unschooled, and realizing this, he does not attempt any

sustained vocal stunts at all). He delivers the song in slightly over 3 minutes

total, despite fitting in three stanzas (Cuckson mixes the first half of stanza four

with the second half of stanza two in Campbell’s version to form a new third

stanza) to Morrison’s two (Morrison only sings stanzas one and three out of

Campbell’s five). Cuckson’s version tells a slightly different story because of the

re-ordered stanzas, but one is still never in doubt as to the sad ending of the

relation described. The excesses of Morrison’s version are completely absent, as

Cuckson favours simplicity of delivery and understatement of emotion.

O’Connor starts her version with a brief vocalise over plucked strings. The

vocalise recurs between stanzas as well, and is repeated in the coda, over the

electric violin solo that commences at the 4-minute mark and extends till coda at

4:40. When her vocals commence the lyrics, there is an excess of echo in the mix,

and oddly intrusive percussive electronics punctuate the song. A syncopated

reggae beat sets in for the last two lines of the first stanza, and the rhythm locks

the performance in step and disallows the extensive use of intervalling that can

be found in some sean-nós singing (a rare exception is on the word “desire,”

which Morrison used in extreme intervalling acrobatics, extending the word

almost infinitely, whereas O’Connor deliberately shortens it almost to one

syllable). The vocal style is dramatic, and underscored by gestures in the

accompanying video track, but relatively free of melismatic fireworks, preferring

O’Connor’s trademark sustain techniques instead. Lyrically a clear influence from

the Morrison version can be detected, as O’Connor also only sings stanzas one

and three. The gender dynamics of the lyrics are of course subverted as O’Connor

retains the female gender of the Lagan love, hinting at her often-repeated homo-

or bisexual preferences. [VID]

The mix attained is thus complex compared to Morrison’s performance: the

instrumentation is much more global, and barely discernably Irish (acoustic

guitar, acoustic double bass, electric violin, acoustic percussion and drum kit,

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plus keyboards and electronic percussion effects form the line-up, augmented by

a vaguely Celtic-sounding female vocal chorus), whereas The Chieftains provide

straight-up Celtic instrumentation for Morrison (who refrains from using drums

on this track), and of course no harmony vocals. On the other hand, O’Connor’s

vocals are almost unadorned with melisma (an exception is on the word

“bogwood”), and in comparison with Morrison’s seem sparse and traditionalistic.

Compared with Cuckson’s singing, they do however contain striking emphases

on certain phrases, for instance on the words “fire” and “life.” O’Connor with this

fine performance truly clears a new path between tradition and authority, and of

the nearly 300 available versions of “My Lagan Love” (on iTunes alone) hers is a

stand-out sean-nós nua original.

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Performances:

Sean-nós:

Darach Ó Catháin: Óró sé do bheatha 'bhaile

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AFRCWg_kOc

Traditional folk treatment:

Mary Black: Óró sé do bheatha 'bhaile

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VqEtpOdhTE

Sean-nós Nua:

Sinead O’Connor: Óró sé do bheatha 'bhaile

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sje2VYw99A

---

Sean-nós:

Tony Cuckson: My Lagan Love

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaFvOohor1E

Van Morrison hybrid: My Lagan Love

http://i12bent.tumblr.com/post/37477923883/the-paper-i-am-almost-

finished-writing-while-here

Sean-nós Nua:

Sinead O’Connor: My Lagan Love

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-dAlYrioGA

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Bibliography:

Anonymous: Folk and Traditional Song Lyrics: “My Lagan Love“

(http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/folk-song-lyrics/My_Lagan_Love.htm)

Anonymous: “Sinéad O'Connor - Sean-Nós Nua” in Q Magazine, November 2002,

109

Bourdieu, Pierre: The Field of Cultural Production, Columbia University Press,

1993

Doerschuk, Robert L.: “Sinéad O'Connor - Sean-Nós Nua” in All-Music Guide

http://www.allmusic.com/album/sean-n%C3%B3s-nua-mw0000661934

Durcan, Paul: "A Celebration of Van Morrison" in Magill (May 1988), 56

Gilmore, Abigail: “Sean-nós” in The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of

the World (eds. David Horn, et al.), Continuum 2003

Hinton, Brian: Celtic Crossroads: The Art of Van Morrison, Sanctuary Publishing

1997/2000

Miles, Milo: “Sinéad O'Connor - Sean-Nós Nua” in Rolling Stone, September 25,

2002

Richardson, Mark: “Sinéad O'Connor - Sean-Nós Nua” in Pitchfork, January 15,

2003 (http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5942-sean-nos-nua/)

Shipton, Alyn: “Scat” in The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the

World (eds. David Horn, et al.), Continuum 2003

Smith, Christopher J.: “Irish Traditional Music on Audio Recordings: A Core

Historical Collection”, in Journal of American Folklore (Summer 2012), 343-358

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