In my last probe I considered the possibility of portraying Francis O’Neill’s seminal collection Music of Ireland as a tree diagram. For this bootcamp, I tried to put this plan into action.

Below is an Excel tabulation of the data I used to prepare the diagram.

And here now is the diagram (don’t forget to zoom in or out as needed):

Bootcamp 1 excel

TREE DIAGRAM

The blue cloud  in the middle represents the unknown and unknowable mists of the past, from which each contributor learned, composed, or came across the tunes in their own musical baggage. The blue arrows indicate this murky diffusion. The black arrows from each contributor and the accompanying numbers indicate the number of tunes from each contributor that was retained in Music of Ireland (the great hollow red square). An arrow then points out to yet another unfathomable (orange) cloud, representing “Anyone who ever read O’Neill’s Music of Ireland.” While I chose not to do so, I recognize that I could also have done without the orange cloud, and instead used arrows pointing outward from the hollow red square to represent the collection’s influence – hefty and recognized, yet tantalizingly unfathomable – in the music’s transmission.

INTERPRETATION

I am forced to admit that this attempt at representing O’Neill’s 1850 as a tree diagram is a spectacular failure. Chief among the reason for this failure is the sheer quantity of data involved. I had to resort to multipliers (x3, x470, etc) to indicate the number of tunes retained from each contributor, instead of having one branch per tune as I had initially planned. The only tree-graphing software with which I was familiar – and even then, perhaps not familiar enough – were Excel and Mindnode. I was thus limited to point-and-click tree building, rather than the automatic generation of a tree from a data set, which would have been ideal. However given the large quantity of data involved, I had to use multipliers to convey a sense of the number of tunes being transmitted.

Second, a tree diagram is most appropriate when dealing with a phenomenon whose evolution is relatively clear-cut and traceable. This is far from the case in Irish traditional music, as in many other folk traditions. The diagram says nothing about the close similarities – perhaps misspellings – between the names “Tuohy” and “Touhy”, nor about the possibility of contributor overlap. Could G. West, who contributed a single tune, be the same as West, who submitted two tunes? Also, while the blue arrows appear as beacons emanating from a fog-of-war of tune transmission, it is entirely possible that some contributors learned a tune from another of the contributors before the tune made it to Francis O’Neill. The diagram does not denote this possibility, however unknowable it may be due to Irish traditional music’s inherent fluidity.

Last, the diagram perpetuates inaccuracies. The framework I used would suggest that one of the contributors had the last name “Carolan,” and that O’Neill may have sat down with this person to learn their tunes for his collection.  In this situation, “Carolan” actually refers to Turlough O’Carolan, an 18^th-century Irish harpist whose compositions hold a prominent place in the Irish traditional repertoire. The diagram obscures this crucial fact, and others as well, in what is little more than a simplistic reproduction of the data in the table above.