"Even inside the music itself there's a little moral code, I think, that's kind of built into it, kind of an artistic kind of morality we call it, or set of codes or what have you. It's like knowing the line between what's authentic and sincere, and what's manipulative and...what's not authentic. I mean, both for yourself in terms of something that's sincerely felt, and I think music being felt is probably the main thing, and that it be sincerely felt. Because, you can almost play anything if it's really true for you, you know? I'm probably long past being authentically East Clare...but being authentically East Clare at this point in my life is not as important as it was when I was 25. So being authentically musical, inside the tradition, is probably where I'm at now, and that encompasses a lot more than it did when I was starting out...."

--transcribed from Martin Hayes, "Sincerely Felt" track on Gerry Diver's The Speech Project album

I was listening to The Speech Project one day last week and my brain stuck on this passage from the track. (As mentioned elsewhere in this blog, The Speech Project is an album where Irish musicians were interviewed and the musical qualities of the recordings of their voices were used to arrange orchestral pieces.)

While Hayes is speaking here about playing traditional Irish music, I think to some degree it holds true for other traditional genres as well. I'm specifically thinking of contra here, and the ways in which the newer infusions are in their own ways authentic to the time in which we live, and yet still fall under the umbrella of the Tradition -- or at least, ostensibly they do, and this is what has created some interesting tensions within the community.

Fellow syncretists would argue that the new iterations do in fact fall under the "authentically musical, inside the tradition" idea. Detractors, on the other hand, would claim that pandering to modern tastes falls into the "manipulative and...not authentic" camp. But that implies, to me, that the purists think that syncretists are out to intentionally destroy the tradition for some as-yet-unarticulated reason. (For any purists out there, I would be genuinely interested to have a civil discussion about theories, started with the understanding that we are likely to agree to disagree at the end.)  

Normally on this blog I try to keep myself pretty narrowly focused on stuff with at least a tenuous connection to the contra dance world (e.g., other projects of people who play at contra dances). However, when this particular cool thing crossed my RSS feed, I decided to make an exception. People who like Andy Reiner's other project Fiddlefoxx might be interested in The Speech Project by English musician and producer Gerry Diver. He has taken prerecorded footage of live interviews with significant figures in Irish music (folks ranging from accordionist Joe Cooley to Shane McGowan, for those familiar with that scene). The correlation between the speech patterns and the subsequent instrumentation is probably the most apparent in "Old Time Musicians."

Unfortunately for those of us in the U.S., Diver is only taking this show on the road overseas in various Irish venues (with live instrumentation and a pre-looped video of the relevant pieces of the interviews), but listening to his concept and his work on The Speech Project's site reminded me quite a bit of hearing Phase X or Double Apex at work, but with really different recorded sounds as inspiration. A couple of these tracks even approach being square, although that wasn't necessarily the intent going in. I have seen this project called "the closest thing to folk dub[step]" in other reviews, but frankly I'd pit that assertion against the various techno-influenced contra bands over here (although the folk and contra music scenes appear quite removed from one another -- but that's another kettle of fish). Regardless, this is still really neat and the tracks do rather tend to stick with the listener in a lyrical loop.