In the business of traditon

RADIO broadcaster, musician, songwriter and music producer, Philip King has been closely involved in the arts in Ireland for over 20 years.
As a musician, he has recorded a number of albums and has been involved at editor, producer and presenter level with a number of television and radio programmes, including Other Voices, The Full Set, South Wind Blows and Sé mo Laoch. He was appointed to the Special Committee on the Traditional Arts in 2003.
With this level of experience, he is rightly placed to speak on the contribution of the traditional arts to the economy, a subject he tackled at the Breandán Breathnach Memorial Lecture to open the Willie Clancy Summer School in Miltown Malbay last Saturday.
He pointed out that there was a time, not so long ago, that the traditional arts were simply not a consideration.
“The notion of having the words traditional, arts and economy in the same sentence would have been unthinkable and maybe meaningless. Until fairly recently, this triad of words would have related to the life experience of very few, if any, players of traditional music in Ireland.
“For the masters of the universe in finance and banking and for leaders in business and public life, it looks like the traditional arts were treated as something to be wheeled out to impress on others the fact that we are not English, that we have a remarkable cultural heritage and an even more remarkable rate of corporation tax.
“For tourism, a pastiche version of Ireland and traditional arts held sway and that has not gone away yet, but the signs are encouraging,” he said.
He believes, however, that in the first decade of the 21st century, an enhanced awareness of the issue is beginning to prevail.
“There’s public and official acknowledgement by the State that we are talking about a valuable art form and there’s a general realisation that the economy and the world of traditional music are symbiotic and can be mutually reinforcing in the right conditions.
“More of us are starting to see the plain good sense of concepts like ‘cultural tourism’. The traditional music community has vast expertise in cultural tourism, cultural diplomacy, enterprise, adaptability and finding smart ways of fitting into and exploiting new environments,” Mr King continued.
Certain specific milestones have brought about this change in mindset.
“Ó Riada sa Gaiety, Seán Ó Riada’s 1969 recording with Ceoltóirí Chualann at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin was an historic moment. This was perhaps the occasion above all others that awakened in the Irish public the idea that traditional music was a ‘proper’ art form, at least equal to all others and a uniquely Irish artform at that.
“That concert and album did have and continues to have economic implications. Some time earlier, the Clancy Brothers developed a template that demonstrated precisely how a traditional art, called ballad singing back then, could sustain economic activity and create successful professional careers. Other pioneers, like The Dubliners and The Chieftains, continued to create and mark out the pathways into this new business environment. However, in our world we still call it touring, doing gigs, playing festivals and entertaining people,” he said.
Mr King also noted America’s influence, particularly in the way Irish traditional dance music was shaped by the US economy.
“For much of the 20th century, Irish traditional music was part of a vigorous entertainment industry sustaining an economy whose elements included record companies, stage shows, dancehalls, as well as a lively social scene. In turn, Irish traditional dance music was shaped significantly by the American economy. There was a brisk trade in Irish traditional music commercial recordings from the turn of the 20th century onwards. They were exported to Ireland where they continue to make their mark.”
He considered the responsibility and role of the State, through the Arts Council and the national broadcaster, RTÉ. 
“During the ‘tiger years’ the traditional arts had a truly productive and beneficial relationship with the Irish economy, steered mainly by the Minister for Arts and the Arts Council and well-protected from the incompetent excesses of bankers, speculators and marketeers. After 14 meetings and under the chairmanship of the late Jerome Hynes, the report of this committee was adopted and implemented by the Arts Council.
“From the vantage point of membership of this committee it was possible to get a pretty clear overall picture, perhaps for the first time, of the exact nature of the traditional arts’ relationship with not just the economy but with the wider world of Irish culture and arts,” he added.
“Traditional music’s formal relationship with the State is still relatively young: the Arts Council was set up in 1951 but it was over a quarter of a century after that when the council was given responsibility in 1979 for traditional music. This happened only because responsibility for some organisations and events were transferred – with their funding – from Bord Fáilte to the Arts Council. At that time, the Arts Council’s expressed reason for becoming involved was couched in cultural, not economic, terms. Its focus was education and standards of performance.
“This policy position was gradually refined to accommodate the notion of the centrality of the solo performer and the role of transmission in sustaining and refreshing the artform. This, in turn, opened the way for the Arts Council to engage with the traditional arts across a wide spectrum of activities: establishing the Irish Traditional Music Archive, offering funding to support for summer schools such as Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy, establishing a scheme for masterclasses, support for touring solo performance, assisting recordings and publications and the creation of content and many other positive interventions,” Mr King explained.
State investment in the arts since 2005, has been €16.7 million. Other than architecture and circus, however, traditional arts are the most poorly funded format despite reports that there are more practitioners than any other artform.
Mr King continued, “The traditional arts are a natural resource running at the heart of communities throughout Ireland, diverse in regional accent and vocabulary and an emblem of a shared identity and history, recognised throughout the world and increasingly in Ireland, as a serious musical genre.
“Through the Arts Council, the State is able to find ways to support sustainable professional careers, often operating in a competitive global marketplace and always carrying a positive and unblemished image of our country. We are world leaders and standard-setters in traditional music. In any other sector this would be recognised and celebrated as a definitive strategic and competitive advantage.”
He also believes that financial and economic health are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for excellent traditional music to exist.
“The language of the market place, with its distortions of the ordinary into the unintelligible, is not compatible with the language of our tradition. The market does not husband and nurture resources. It exploits and ‘leverages’ them. It mines them and if unchecked, will open cast mine them before moving on,” he said.
Mr King also spoke of the huge influence that RTÉ has on the fortunes of the Irish Traditional Arts, playing a crucial role in the exposition, celebration, archiving and popularising of all traditional art forms.
“RTÉ’S commitments to traditional arts programming are to be welcomed. There are many issues to do with commissioning, co-producing, scheduling, programme content and budgets that need to be addressed,” he commented.
“In RTÉ and also TG4, what we have is a large chunk of Ireland’s memory and the means and potential to remember and recall even more. However as outside broadcasting, collecting and archiving diminish in importance, because after all these things are cost centres the accountants say there is a risk that RTÉ’s track record will start to slip.
“What we need for the future is a long-term strategic direction from the State, as has happened with the Arts Council, that restores RTÉ’s prominent role in the traditional arts in Ireland, in harvesting and sharing the best of the traditional arts with Ireland and the world,” he concluded.