How may tree diagrams deepen our understanding of cultural phenomena?

Are some forms of knowledge better suited than others to “tree-ish” representations?

Francis O’Neill was born in 1848 in Tralibane, County Cork. He would sail the world as a crewmember on a British merchant ship before settling in Chicago, where he eventually rose to the position of Superintendent of Police. Francis O’Neill is best known as a collector of Irish traditional music, as one of the men who “saved” this music. He published a number of collections between 1903 and 1922: O’Neill’s Music of Ireland; The Dance Music of Ireland; O’Neill’s Irish Music: 250 Choice Selections Arranged for Piano and Violin; and Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody. This probe will focus on the first and most renowned and influential of these collections: O’Neill’s Music of Ireland.

The collection contains 1850 tunes, and is colloquially known as O’Neill’s 1850. Each tune in the collection is listed with the sheetmusic notation, the tune’s title (in English and in Irish Gaelic), and, where available, the name of its contributor. Contributors to the collection include Francis O’Neill himself, others members of the Chicago Irish Music Club, such as James O’Neill, Bernard Delaney, John Ennis, Edward Cronin, and John McFadden, and other miscellaneous contributors. Of the 1850 tunes, 419 have no named contributor or source. In Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby, one of the many books O’Neill wrote about the music he sought to save, he explains that “[w]here no names were appended their absence indicated that such tunes did not come into [his] possession from individuals” (O’Neill, 65). It is not clear what O’Neill meant by this. O’Neill did occasionally acquire tunes that already existed in written form (Carolan, 34-35); the tunes with no explicitly stated source may have come from manuscripts.

Tunes with known contributors (Francis O’Neill, James O’Neill, John McFadden, and James Early).

Tunes with no contributor indicated

It is worth emphasizing that the contributions to the collection converge on Francis O’Neill, who ultimately decided which ones to include. Plotting out a tree of contributors to the 1850 would certainly be feasible, with a node at the name of each contributor branching off into all the tunes this individual contributed, and all of these tunes in turn converging back onto a node representing Francis O’Neill as the main editor and collector. An “unknown” category could perhaps be created for the 419 tunes that are listed with no named source. However tracing the origins of each tune past the names of their contributors – say, tracing a genealogy of the tunes’ transmission over a 50- or 100-year timespan – would be exceedingly difficult. The origin of Irish tunes is a highly contentious issue, as O’Neill himself acknowledged:

Irishmen from all parts of Ireland intermingle promiscuously in all countries to which they migrate and the man from Ulster soon learns the Munster man’s music, and so on until the fact of obtaining an air or tune from a native of a certain county or province carries with it no assurance that the music was not learned from a stranger or chance acquaintance (O’Neill, 66).

This matrix of tune transmission through time and space may be as convoluted as the Celtic knot designs on the front cover page of the 1998 reprint of O’Neill’s collection. Indeed the designs’ interconnecting, overlapping and crisscrossing lines seem to harken to an apocryphal tale often told in Irish traditional music sessions. In this tale a well-known elderly fiddler passing through a town or village teaches a tune to a younger local fiddler. A few years later the old fiddler returns, and the younger one enthusiastically plays back the tune the old man taught him. The old fiddler leans in and says: “That’s a nice tune. Can you teach it to me?”

Other factors further complicate the situation. For example, human error is rampant in collection endeavours of Irish traditional music.

After James [O’Neill] had noted a tune to his own satisfaction, Francis [O’Neill] listened to his playing of it and, relying on his acute ear and encyclopedic memory, passed final judgement on it. He did not know that James was sometimes playing correctly what he had inadvertently written down incorrectly (Carolan, 41).

Francis O’Neill himself believed that “[t]he classification of Irish melodies is to a certain extent arbitrary, as dance tunes are not infrequently used as airs for songs and marches, and vice versa” (O’Neill, 86). Other attempts to categorize and plot out Irish traditional music have run into a similar quandary. Ethnomusicologist James Cowdery has applied tune-family theory to Irish traditional music. Yet even Cowdery acknowledged that music tends to evade strict categorization: “…the use of [the tune-family theory] can lead us into a thicket of melodic relationships coherently without forcing tunes into final categories [emphasis added]” (Cowdery, 94). These forces – musico-geographic miscegenation, human error and the music’s evasion of categorical parameters – all exemplify Moretti’s notions of “divergence” and “convergence.”

Divergence prepares the ground for convergence, which unleashes further divergence: this seems to be the typical pattern. Moreover, the force of the two mechanisms varies widely from field to field, ranging from the pole of technology, where convergence is particularly strong, to the opposite extreme of language, where divergence…is clearly the dominant factor…Because if the basic mechanism of change is that of divergence, then cultural history is bound to be random, full of false starts, and profoundly path-dependent: a direction, once taken, can seldom be reversed, and culture hardens into a true ‘second nature’ – hardly a benign metaphor. If, on the other hand, the basic mechanism is that of convergence, change will be frequent, fast, deliberate, reversible: culture becomes more plastic, more human, if you wish.  But as human history is so seldom human, this is perhaps not the strongest of arguments (Moretti, 55-56).

In light of Moretti’s insights, O’Neill’s 1850 may be interpreted as an instance of a cultural hardening, a point of cultural convergence, the creation of a true “second nature,” to borrow Moretti’s phrase. This first collection became a node for the transmission of Irish traditional music both in time and around the world, thus enacting a phase of divergence. It also spawned offshoots, additional branches in a metaphorical tree. O’Neill’s next collection – The Dance Music of Ireland, published in 1907 – was designed specifically for “musicians who were interested only in dance music and who needed a cheaper and more focused publication that the deluxe hardback of 1903…” (Carolan, 46).

The Cabinet of Horrors

People have generally sought to explain cultural change and cultural variation by supposing that culture is causally driven by something else (the climate, the social structure), or, more strongly, that it is adapted to something else, or, more strongly yet, that it functions adaptively for the benefit of something else (here social structure, or ruling classes, are favored as suspects over the climate). This has led to an awful lot of (if I may use the phrase) adaptationist just-so stories, and uncritical analogy-mongering on a level with the sort of thinking which leads rhinoceros horn to be prescribed for impotence (Shalizi, 121-122).

While Shalizi considers factors – climate, ruling class, etc. – that relate tangentially at best to O’Neill’s collection work, the subtitle “Cabinet of Horrors” seems an appropriate moniker for O’Neill’s collection work in light of some of its methodological deficiencies. For one, O’Neill claims to have selected only “[t]he best settings [of tunes for his collection], representing all varieties…” (62). The notion of “the best” in any field of cultural practice is highly subjective; cynics might legitimately suggest that O’Neill’s choice of tunes for Music of Ireland and subsequent collections – perhaps having been based on his own personal aesthetic preferences – may have relegated a number of old tunes to oblivion. Furthermore, in at least one known instance, O’Neill filled in the gaps for a tune he could only partially remember.  He had learned “The Woods of Kilmurry” from his mother’s singing during his youth, but decided to compose those parts of the tune he could not remember before including it in his collection (O’Neill, 69). This tune does raise issues of methodological integrity, however moot it may be to blame Francis O’Neill given the inherent fluidity of Irish traditional music. One may also wonder how “The Woods of Kilmurry” might be represented in a tree diagram. With a broken, zigzagging line? With sections of the branch in different colours to indicate some creative filling-in?

The questions considered in this probe highlight the paradoxical nature of Irish traditional music as both a definable practice – insofar as tunes, practitioners, contributors and sources can be accurately identified and labeled – and as a fluid one that evades linear, causal representation in the form of a tree diagram. Anyone attempting to represent this tradition in such a diagram would have to take both aspects into consideration.

Works Cited

Carolan, Nicolas. A Harvest Saved: Francis O’Neill and Irish Music in Chicago. London: Ossian Publications, 1997.

Cowdery, James, R. The Melodic Tradition of Ireland. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990.

Moretti, Franco. “GRAPHS, MAPS, TREES: Abstract Models for Literary History – 3”. New Left Review 28 (Jul-Aug 2004): 43-63.

O’Neill, Francis. Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby, with some account of allied subjects including O’Farrell’s Treatise on the Irish or Union pipes and Touhey’s hints to amateur pipers. Edited by Barry O’Neill. Darby, Pennsylvania: Norwood Editions, 1973.

Shalizi, Cosma. “Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing.” Reading Graphs, Maps, Trees: Responses to Franco Moretti. Ed. Jonathan Goodwin & John Holbo. Anderson: Parlor Press, 2011. 115-39.