{"title":"‘Their lamentable hone’","authors":"Marie‐Louise Coolahan, W. Hamrick","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190859671.013.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190859671.013.4","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the sounds and voices of caoineadh (keen), an Irish Gaelic form of lament, associated with performance by women as part of the burial process and with the female expression of political protest. It opens with a study of the sounds of caoineadh, setting non-Gaelic, often travellers’ accounts, from the 1570s through to the 1770s, in context with the genre’s long-established formal conventions of metre, rhyme, and theme. This is grounded in a critical history of the genre and illustrated with examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Questions of oral transmission, performance, textual authority, and authenticity are crucial to the history of the surviving texts and, therefore, central to the discussion.","PeriodicalId":385379,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Irish Song, 1100-1850","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132109936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vocal music in medieval Ireland","authors":"F. Kelly","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190859671.013.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190859671.013.1","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers the evidence of medieval Irish vocal music which can be found in surviving Old and Middle Irish texts. The texts contain many references to public singing in secular contexts and indicate that the normal practice was for songs to be sung by a single man or woman or by groups of either men or women. A prestigious type of chant or song called aidbsiu ‘poetic recitation’ is distinguished from a martial singing mode described as dord (or andord), the basic meaning of which is ‘humming, buzzing’ and which has the capacity to mesmerize those who hear it. In the Fenian tales, the phrase dord fiansa ‘the hum of the war-band’ is used of a type of singing practised by young warriors, accompanied by the rhythmic banging of the shafts of their spears. Extempore group-singing by women is described as cepóc; another category of singing is coíniud ‘keening of the dead’, which regularly incurred the disapproval of the Church, but continued to be practised into modern times.","PeriodicalId":385379,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Irish Song, 1100-1850","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132720167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Robert Owenson’s macaronic song repertoire and the Dublin theatre audience of the late eighteenth century","authors":"Helen M. Burke","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190859671.013.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190859671.013.33","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Robert Owenson’s bilingual song repertoire represents an urban strain of the Irish macaronic tradition which developed over the course of the eighteenth century as Irish-speaking poets and song composers responded to a public that was increasingly diglossic. In Owenson’s case, this repertoire was formed from the crossings between songs and tunes from the Irish-speaking area where this performer grew up, and those that came out of the playhouses, taverns, and streets of Dublin, the city where he spent his twenty-year Irish stage career. The article also explores the politics of these songs and the Dublin audience’s shifting response to their performance. While Owenson’s songs were enthusiastically received in the years leading up to 1782, a period dominated politically by the patriots and the Volunteers, they provoked a reactionary backlash in the later 1780s and 1790s when Dublin’s radical element began claiming them as their own.","PeriodicalId":385379,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Irish Song, 1100-1850","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114402100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}