Francis O’Neill’s seminal collection Music of Ireland, and Irish Minstrels and Musicians, his principal book on the subject of his collection endeavours, both contain a photograph of Chicago’s Irish Music Club (Irish Traditional Music Archive; O’Neill, 479). The photo is dated as having been taken between 1901 and 1909, and shows 26 members of this club, with each member’s name in a caption below the photograph. Using this club as a case study, one might consider the applicability of network theory to interpersonal relations in circles of Irish traditional music in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chicago.

The club itself was short-lived. It was formed around 1901; by 1912 “[Francis] O’Neill could say that not even a remnant of the Club remained and that few of the former members were on speaking terms” (Carolan, 39). While the club most likely broke down in the wake of personal disagreements between members, it is impossible to trace with any kind of accuracy the vicissitudes of individual musicians’ relations with each other. Were some friends, others rivals? Did any of these musicians teach tunes to some of the others? During the years of the club’s existence, each musician could have met with any other on a number of occasions, and interacted with him in myriad different ways. This leads to the conceptualization of something like Figure A in the document below.

Irish Music Club, Chicago

Figure A depicts all 26 musicians as vertices, as well as all 299 edges connecting each musician with every other one.  It ultimately represents a mere matrix of acquaintance. Each musician in the photograph would have at least been aware of the existence of every other one, and therefore could have interacted with him. This network diagram can then be viewed as a map of potentiality. We do not and cannot know – beyond the imperfect, patchy traces of written records – the details of who spoke to whom, nor for what length of time their acquaintance lasted. Nor could we accurately present this information in a network diagram, were it even available. These edges are thus not weighted and have no direction, to borrow Moretti’s phrase (Moretti, 3).

It is worth emphasizing that the network diagram in Figure A makes no reference to the broader network of musical transmission and interaction within which Chicago’s Irish Music Club existed. It is embedded in the broader global assemblage of practitioners of Irish traditional music, as well as that of historical Irish-American ethnicity. These overlapping and crisscrossing networks may be interpreted as a rhizome, whose points “can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Deleuze and Guattari, 7).

In Irish Minstrels and Musicians, Francis O’Neill recounts some interactions between the Irish Music Club and some external actors. To imagine these interactions as a network, the 26 vertices of Figure A may be conceptually lumped together in Figure B to create a vertex representing the club as a whole. Figure B then serves to illustrates a tiny slice of the club’s history. This second network diagram depicts the interactions of four individuals with the Irish Music Club at some point in its history. While Figure B does indicate some degree of contact, it does not reveal anything meaningful about the nature of the interaction. It does not show, for instance, that Rev. Richard Henebry and Rev. William Dollard visited Chicago in 1901 and mingled with some of the club’s members (O’Neill, 178), nor that John Coughlan, an Australian player of the uilleann pipes, arrogantly asked the Club to help him fund a journey to America (O’Neill, 253), nor that Australian fiddler Patrick O’Leary bemoaned in a letter that he could not partake in the music and companionship of Chicago’s Irish Music Club, as he was stuck in Australia (O’Neill, 383). The details remain textually tethered.

My last bootcamp, on O’Neill’s Music of Ireland, failed completely. This attempt seems more successful, but not by much. Figure A illustrates quite well the complex and ultimately unknowable potential interplay between some members of Chicago’s Irish Music Club. Wershler, Sinervo and Tien consider the intricacies of studying “cultural practices that you’re not supposed to know about” (A Network Archaeology of Unauthorized Comic Book Scans). While their focus is the digitization of comic books, their interrogation also seems to apply to the subject at hand. I would simply rephrase their question to: “How you do study cultural practices that you can’t know about?” One answer is to simply map out every possible edge, to highlight the network’s potential complexity.

Figure B, on the other hand, offers a clear depiction of Francis O’Neill’s accounts of the Irish Music Club’s interactions with external actors. This depiction is useful in that it positions the people involved in relation to each other in an intelligible way, but remains problematic due to issues of traceability. However this does not prevent, as I wrote in my last bootcamp, those fragments of available evidence from enacting instances of cultural convergence.

Works Cited

Carolan, Nicholas. A Harvest Saved: Francis O’Neill and Irish Music in Chicago. Cork: Ossian Publications, 1997. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Massumi, Brian. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 3-25. Print.

Irish Traditional Music Archive / Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann. “The Irish Music Club of Chicago, ca. 1901-1909 / unidentified photographer.”  http://www.itma.ie/digitallibrary/image/irish-music-club-chicago

Moretti, Franco. “Network Theory, Plot Analysis.” Literary Lab Pamphlet 2. May 1, 2011. [Orig. pub. New Left Review 68, March-April 2011]. http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet2.pdf

O’Neill, Francis. Irish Minstrels and Musicians, with numerous dissertations on related subjects. Chicago: The Regan Printing House, 1913. Print. 

Sinervo, Kalervo, Shannon Tien, and Darren Wershler. “A Network Archaeology of Unauthorized Comic Book Scans.” Amodern 2: Network Archeaology (fall 2013). http://amodern.net/article/a-network-archaeology-of-unauthorized-comic-book-scans/

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