This presentation argues that Riverdance and Michael Flatley’s commercial Irish dance productions promote a profitable model that contributes to staged, stereotypical, and over-simplified understandings of Ireland, Irishness, and Irish traditional music. This model which is still referred to and still lucrative today, also contains gendered, heteronormative, and racialized expectations. Drawing on ethnographic research with instrumentalists and dancers who performed with Riverdance and/or Michael Flatley’s various dance productions — Lord of the Dance, Feet of Flames, Celtic Tiger, Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games — I will examine the impact of the performance requirements and staging as presented in these productions on both performers and audiences. Attempting to understand multiple perspectives, I will present discussions of sexualization and objectification within broader sociocultural contexts as well as the concepts of choice and agency, recognizing the importance of understanding the performer’s own evaluation of their experience. Although Riverdance and Michael Flatley’s shows have been acknowledged by ethnomusicologists for having a significant impact on the commodification and tourist consumption of Irish traditional music and Irish culture (Foley 2015, Scahill 2013, O’Connor 1998), this presentation provides important insight into the experiences of instrumentalists in these shows as well as the continued and long-term impact of Riverdance and Flatley’s productions on both performers and understandings of Irishness and Irish traditional music.

This paper critiques issues of whiteness and masculinity in relation to the translocal practices and discourses of Irish traditional music in Germany, a primary context for Irish music practice and consumption In Central Europe. While existing ethnomusicological scholarship on Irish music has recognized its circulation in global flows extending beyond Ireland and its Diaspora (Santos 2020; Williams 2006), the racialized and gendered paywalls of belonging to these transnational communities of practice have only been problematized more recently (Williams 2021; Slominski 2020). Drawing upon several years of fieldwork, I will argue that much of the current and historical German investment in a proximal white European musical sibling tradition rests upon gatekeepers of race (Ignatiev 1995), class privilege (Bourdieu 1984) and hegemonic masculinity (Connell 2005). For instance, the history of a significant white nationalist underbelly to the ethnographic present of Germany’s investment in Irish music is apparent in the racist polemic of German Celtic scholars operational in the service of the Third Reich’s military expansionism (Lerchenmueller 1997). In the present, the aforementioned power structures manifest in the striking underrepresentation of women and people of color in German pub sessions, while popular culture contributes to perpetuating the male gaze of Irish rebel songs. In terms of its larger implications for the field, and ultimately making a claim for the necessity of balancing critique and care in ethnomusicological research, the paper purports to question such pillars of inequality and highlights the ongoing challenge of honoring communal values that sustain this global music culture.

The association of Irish music with a particular level of cultural capital in the United States has led to its inclusion in identity-building for both ends of the political spectrum. For the hard right, the apparent “guaranteed whiteness” of Irish music assures an identity of alleged purity and authenticity. For the hard left, the music’s association with colonization and hardship assures an identity of shared struggle and community. Drawing from fieldwork among people of multiple political persuasions, participant observation, and current scholarship, I will explore the duplications in both the motivation for and deployment of Irish music in reinforcing widely differing sets of political identities. While previous research has acknowledged the elements of white nationalism that seek out “authentic” representations of whiteness—including Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White, Negra’s The Irish in US: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture, and Duffy’s Who’s Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for American Identity—this is the first comparative attempt to explore the ways in which each side uses all that Irish musical culture has to offer for their own political needs.

The sonic presence of bagpipes has become a ubiquitous and necessary aspect of line-of-duty funerals and 9/11 memorials, much like “Taps” in military ceremonies honoring fallen soldiers. But the direct line between Irish or Scottish musical traditions and recent invented traditions for those in public service are blurry or imagined. This paper will discuss areas in which the porous nature of Irish or Celtic identity – especially in musical settings – allows for a personal identification with the performed identity of a bagpipe band, regardless of one’s ethnicity or heritage, in moments of ceremony, memorialization, and pageantry. It will explore the idea of a New Celticism (James, 1999) in performed rites of passage (Corcoran, 1996), how these traditions are staged (Negra, 2006), how they have been disseminated through media (Gibbons, 1996), and how they have been embraced by expanding groups of people (Miller, 1996). With an eye to the material (bagpipes, kilts, balmorals) and an ear to the sonic spectacle (drone, marches, drums), this paper will explore the changing nature of identity in this (mostly white and almost exclusively male) musical performance. The results will include a new perspective on how public traditions form and become vital to different groups of people; the role of gendered performance in assembling and demonstrating heritage; and the importance of sonic spectacle in performing ethnicity and identity.