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Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire (Yellow Mary O’Leary; 1774–1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song. As an oral arts practitioner, Máire Bhuí composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.
“Structured into three eloquent chapters and a conclusion, the book features a detailed appendix section containing the Irish compositions, the English translations and the music transcriptions, as well as a list of sound recordings, bibliography and discography. As readers, we are left with a thirsty ear, craving to listen to Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire’s musical makings, perhaps hoping to gain an aural glimpse into those ‘liminal moments of sheer potentiality’ that have inspired generations of women, and men, before us.” • Scenario
“Singing Ideas: Performance, Politics, and Oral Poetry, presents an innovative take on researching the ephemeral, non-textual archives of oral tradition…Ní Shíocháin’s weaving of frameworks from philosophy and literature in Singing Ideas will be useful to anyone studying performance of the subaltern, embodiment, and unjust political structures of power.” • Ethnomusicology Review
“This excellent book gives a concise, comprehensive overview of oral poetry in a crisply written style, confidently delivered and supported by rigorous scholarship.” • Lillis Ó Laoire, National University of Ireland, Galway
Tríona Ní Shíocháin is a whistle-player, singer and interdisciplinary scholar specializing in performance theory, oral theory and Irish-language song and poetry. She is Professor of Modern Irish and Performing Arts at Maynooth University, and was previously Lecturer in Irish Traditional Music at University College, Cork. She is author of Bláth’s Craobh na nÚdar: Amhráin Mháire Bhuí (2012).
Chapter 1. Singing Ideas: An Alternative History of Thought
- (Un)doing History: The Authority of Literacy and the Performativity of Thought
- Oral Trouble and Women’s Voices: Searching for Intellectual
- Traditions Beyond the Written Word
- Singing Politics and Power in Society: Some Comparative Examples
- Seizing Agency: Women of Song
- Beyond the Limits of Textuality: Performing the Past and Performing Thought
Chapter 2. ‘Where Everything Trembles in the Balance’: Song as a Liminal Ludic Space
- The Theory of Liminality
- Performing Liminality: Poetry as a Symbolic Marker for Liminality in the Irish Tradition
- A Journey to the Sacred and Back: The Liminality of the Aisling (Vision)
- Song and Oral Poetic Performance as Ritual
- Separating from the Profane: Ekstasis and Song
- Moments of Potentiality: The Antistructure of Melody and Verse in the Irish Tradition
- The Ritual Powers of (Song) Poetry: Satire, Insult and Fearlessness
- The Potentiality of the Play-Sphere: The Challenging Discourse of Song
- The Singer of Ideas as ‘Seer of Communitas’: The Liminality of Song and the Generation of Ideas
Chapter 3. Singing Parrhesia: Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire, Song Performance and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
- Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire: Nineteenth-Century Song Poet
- Irish-Language Song-Making: Poetry as Performance and the Aesthetics of Orality
- Multiformity and Oral Formulaic Techniques
- Local Agrarian Agitation and the Creation of the Poetic Radical
- Crisis and Charisma: The Song Poet as Prophet and Truth-Teller
- Identity and the Aesthetics of Orality: New Ideas and the Narrative of Belonging
- Framing the Revolution: Performing Antistructure and the Vision of the Revolution through Song
- From Generation to Generation to Regeneration: The Legacy of Ideas through Song
Conclusion: Singing Ideas in Society: Experience, Song and ‘Passing Through’
Appendix of Songs and Lore
Bibliography
Index