Music and Irish Identity: Celtic Tiger Blues. By Gerry Smyth.

Abstract

Building on a career spent examining Irish music, literature, and cultural identity, Gerry Smyth, in his latest book, provides a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary look at the various contexts in which music, or the idea of music, participates in the formation of Irish identity. Structured as a series of case studies that span the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, the majority of the book’s ten chapters treat subject matter from the latter half of the twentieth century, especially the years surrounding the meteoric rise and equally precipitous fall of the Celtic Tiger economy. The text is brilliantly written, as Smyth balances his own personal anecdotes as an Irish musician with close reading and theoretical analysis. Each chapter is well structured and concise. He begins by outlining his personal interest in the topic, moves on to reviewing the salient methodological approaches, and concludes by applying those approaches to the given subject. Five chapters approach music through a literary lens—poetry and prose—and in so doing Smyth adds to his own earlier work, such as The Novel and the Nation (London, 1997) as well as to that of other Irish cultural scholars such as Harry White’s Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford, 2008).