If you’ll allow me a moment to gloat, I spent the fall 2024 semester studying abroad at the University of Limerick (UL) in Ireland. As a part of my semester abroad and as a result of looking for something to do that I absolutely couldn’t do in Canada, I ended up as the head of traditional music at the UL music society.
I know how strange this is, but the position was unfilled and I love to help out. The duty of the head of trad was to oversee a weekly session that took place in one of the pubs on campus. For the unfamiliar, the session, or seisiún, is an important Irish traditional music form in the modern day.
Ideally spontaneous, a session is a group of unaffiliated musicians convening (usually in a pub) to play traditional tunes. Anyone can show up with an instrument and join in if they know the tune and those who don’t know the song being played clap and holler along.
This community freedom reminded me of a conversation I’d had with the manager of Oso oso after a show they played in Toronto about the state of live commercial music today. The 20th century revolutionized music culture multiple times, but no change has proven more consequential than the rise of recorded music.
That invention has shaped my life in dangerous ways — I can have unbearably smug conversations about Sufjan Stevens with people I’ve never met or spin out about how the Smashing Pumpkins somehow wrote music seemingly specifically for me in the mid-1990s.
Despite the ways recorded music objectively enriched my life, it also has distinct downsides. It has enforced a strict hierarchy on the music industry, and this is most obvious at live shows. The performer performs on a stage four and a half feet above the audience. The artists are rigidly separated from the community of enjoyers and vice versa.
Sometimes the camps will exchange words, or a stage diver will temporarily pierce the veil between the two, but the bigger the band the more that’s usually an exception. This asymmetrical relationship couldn’t exist in local music before stars and fanbases. Before then, people could only make their own music.
Some people saw this coming —the American composer John Philip Sousa had been a vocal doomsayer, declaring that the advent of the record player would lead people to stop learning to play instruments altogether.
While he wasn’t correct, a generation of young people who only experience live music by shelling out to Ticketmaster prove that he wasn’t exactly incorrect. At the trad sessions, that ethic of community participation stood out and on a good night you’d see 20 musicians roll though — toting whistles, fiddles banjos or any other instruments that have found their way into the tradition.
This characteristic was of chief importance when the session was covered in a course I took at UL on Irish trad music. In such a tradition, there isn’t a binary distinction between performers and audience, but a pool of potential performers — any of whom can start and stop, chat, drink and resume at their leisure.
This is not a phenomenon unique to Irish traditional music. That same ethic of community par- ticipation in local music still exists in do-it-yourself scenes across the United States and Canada.
Below the line of profitability, there’s still local communities of musicians who know one another and whose art is unlikely to grace the cover of Rolling Stone.
Despite this, they continue to express themselves. This is all to say, go see local music. If you come across printed out flyers for small shows in your area, drag someone along, talk to the artists and talk to other folks around you.
Those are the interactions that sustain global music culture.
Graphic by Bachir Miloudi
