| Summary: | Traditional music and song occupy a vibrant field of cultural production in Ireland in the twenty-first century. Musicians, performers, singers, and dancers are all more publicly visible than ever before, however music and song in Ireland have a long history of relevance, enjoyment, and celebration. From the late eighteenth century to the present, intellectuals, culture brokers, and scholars have presented particular and varied perceptions of the past through music and song, both performatively and through discourses surrounding traditional music. Individuals, particularly intellectuals, in nineteenth-century Ireland made use of the past to construct their ideologies of what Irishness meant in their society. Today, musicians and scholars of traditional music contextualize their own music making and practices in light both of more distant nineteenth-century musical pasts and more recent events, histories, practices, and memories. Through the lens of music in Ireland, it is possible to gain a deeper understanding in how attitudes towards the past affect the present and in turn how ideologies today influence our perceptions of the past and the ways the past is deployed to build the present in light of the future.
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