Despite its isolation on the western edge of Europe, Ireland occupies vast amounts of space on the music maps of the world. Although deeply rooted in time and place, Irish songs, dances and instrumental traditions have a history of global travel that span the centuries. Whether carried by exiles, or distributed by commercial networks, Irish traditional music is one of the most popular World Music genres, while Clare, on Ireland's Atlantic seaboard, enjoys unrivaled status as a "Home of the Music," a mecca for tourists and aficionados eager to enjoy the authentic sounds of Ireland. For the first time, this remarkable soundscape is explored by an insider-a fourth generation Clare concertina player, uilleann piper and an internationally recognized authority on Irish traditional music. Entrusted with the testimonies, tune lore, and historic field recordings of Clare performers, Gearoid O hAllmhurain reveals why this ancient place is a site of musical pilgrimage and how it absorbed the impact of global cultural flows for centuries. These flows brought musical change inwards, while simultaneously facilitating outflows of musical change to the world beyond - in more recent times, through the music of Clare stars like Martin Hayes and the Kilfenora Ceili Band. Placing the testimony of music and music makers at the center of Irish cultural history and working from a palette of disciplines, Flowing Tides explores an Irish soundscape undergoing radical change in the period from the Napoleonic Wars to the Great Famine, from the birth of the nation state to the meteoric rise-and fall-of the Celtic Tiger. It is essential reading for all interested in Irish/Celtic music and culture.

About the Author
Professor Gearoid O hAllmhurain is an award-winning Irish musician, ethnomusicologist and cultural historian. Formerly Jefferson Smurfit Chair of Irish Studies and Professor of Music at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, he is the inaugural holder of the bilingual Johnson Chair in Quebec and Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.

Reviews
This is a welcome analytical study of Irish Traditional music, and one that has been heralded by the same author's 1998/2017 Pocket History of Irish Traditional Music. ... This is a book by a writer whose life is surely governed by 'clock time, schedules and timetables', and who earns his living and lives outside of Clare society. But he is intelligently enthusiastic about that community and, refreshingly, he avoids the destructive smugness of academic anti-essentialism...[I]t sets a marker for needed academic studies in other key rural regions in Traditional music, song and dance, not least Connemara, Kerry, and Sligo, and urban centres Galway, Belfast, Dublin, and Cork. * Folk Music Journal *
Flowing Tides R is quite a feat and the fruit of a great deal of time and hard work. O hAllurmhain writes that the book had its beginnings in the 1970s, and I would argue that the time and effort was well worthwhile and agree with others that this will prove a seminal work in its field. * Irish Literary Supplement *
This book will be remembered as an important contribution to the newcoming field of what is termed here as 'Celtic ethnomusicology', the latter component defined as 'a hybrid discipline that grew out of comparative musicology'. Here's to the growth of Celtic ethnomusicology. * The Irish Times *
This is a rewarding and valuable book, successfully integrating close detail with a longue duree approach, and it is particularly notable for its emphasis on how Clare's traditional music soundscape has been continuously shaped by cultural flows both local and global, and its refusal to lapse into such binaries as 'tradition and innovation. * Dublin Review of Books *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199380084
Author Gearoid O hAllmhurain
Format Hardback
Page Count 344
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 635g
Dimensions(mm) 163mm * 236mm * 28mm