Political and Cultural Refractions in Music: Moving Hearts, Reflecting Minds, Ireland 1981

Political and Cultural Refractions in Music: Moving Hearts, Reflecting Minds, Ireland 1981

Program alumna Méabh Ní Fhuartháin will deliver this year's Dalsimer Lecture. Titled "Political and Cultural Refractions in Music: Moving Hearts, Reflecting Minds, Ireland 1981," this talk considers the eponymous Moving Hearts album, first released in 1981, to reflect on contemporaneous political, social, and environmental concerns in Ireland at the beginning of a tumultuous decade on the island. Among the concerns are the North of Ireland, climate and fuel instability, colonialism, and landlordism. Creating an innovative soundscape which draws on a range of musical precedents, the album presents a generational response to Ireland and its place in the wider world at that moment in time. Some forty-five years later, thematic resonances with concerns of Irish activists-creatives of the twenty-first century are notable, raising questions about the capacity of the political complex in Ireland to ever resolve these issues satisfactorily.

Specializing in Irish Music and Dance Studies, Méabh Ní Fhurtháin is an Associate Professor in Irish Studies at the Center for Irish Studies, University of Galway. A former graduate student and early-career teacher at Boston College, Méabh's attention to popular music, dance, emigration, and gender in her published work makes her a leader in the interdisciplinary field of Irish Studies. She has co-edited special issues of Ethnomusicology Ireland (2021) and Éire-Ireland (2019) and was subject editor for the Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland (2013). She has edited and contributed chapters to numerous book collections, including handbooks of Irish Studies; published a monograph titled Heading to the Fleadh: Festival, Cultural Revival and Irish Traditional Music 1951-1969 (Cork University Press); is currently General Editor of Ethnomusicology Ireland; and is a Board Director of Music Generation Ireland, the national body for non-curriculum music education in Ireland.