Irish Folk in Austria: Evading National Identity

While there has long been recognition of Irish folk-music practices and venues transnationally, existing ethnomusicological accounts of these phenomena have tended to foreground the genres reception in Anglophone diasporic sites, and have only relatively recently begun to consider large non-diasporic Irish-music scenes, such as those found in the German-speaking regions of Central Europe. Engaging in the ethnographic study of Irish music-makers and consumers in Austria, the task of this research project is to trace how translocated folk-music practices and their consumption still confront the traumatic legacy of extreme nationalism in modern European cultural history. By combining a methodological toolkit of ethnographic fieldwork and historical inquiry, it purports to unravel the manner in which various performative avatars and longue-durée discursive imaginaries of Irishness find complex refractions in the Austrian ethnographic present. Ultimately, it is suggested, such analysis deepens an understanding of the remarkably polyphonic trajectories of global musical nationalisms (Bohlman 2004), at a time when rising xenophobia and enclosing right-wing extremism appear particularly imminent in a European framework. To approach these complexities, the project is driven by the following sociological and political research question: In what respect might the practical and discursive affinity of Austrian performers and audiences with Irish folk music provide an alternative sphere of cultural identification to indigenous Austrian folk-music practices? The projects two attendant, interconnected aims (1) explore the extent to which the global Irish music-communitys primary gatekeepers of race/whiteness, class and masculinity (Slominski 2020) are reflected or distinguished in Austria, and (2) interrogate trajectories through which Austrian Irish-music practitioners negotiate other parameters of their social practice, such as high-level technical command over Irish performance styles and credentials of authentication.

The focus of this research project was to trace how translocal (Irish) folk music practices and their consumption in Austria confront or elide their traumatic historical relationship with extreme nationalism on the backdrop of modern European history. By combining a methodological toolkit of ethnographic fieldwork and historical inquiry, one primary task was to unravel the manner in which various performative iterations and discursive imaginaries of Irishness find complex refractions in the Austrian ethnographic present. Ultimately, this inquiry deepened an understanding of the remarkably polyphonic trajectories of global musical nationalisms (Bohlman 2004), at a time when rising xenophobia and enclosing right-wing extremism appear particularly imminent in Europe. The project was driven by the following research question: In what respect might the practical and discursive affinity of Austrian performers and audiences with Irish folk music provide an alternative sphere of cultural identification to indigenous Austrian folk music practices? The two attendant aims involved exploring the extent to which the global Irish music community's primary gatekeepers of race/whiteness, class and masculinity (Slominski 2020) are reflected or distinguished in Austria, and interrogated trajectories through which Austrian Irish music practitioners negotiate other parameters, such as high-level technical command over Irish performance styles and credentials of authentication. The majority of my interlocutors were white, male and non-Irish nationals without any diasporic ties to Ireland. Many of these enthusiasts regularly travel to music sessions and workshops in Ireland in search of cultural capital (Burdieu 1984) and social distinction. Back home in Austria, these intercultural transactions (Slobin 1993) serve to set up a cosmopolitan community of practice (Turino 2003) that foregrounds ideals of heightened participation (Turino 2008) in lieu of gateeping parameters of nationality that were historically integral to both Irish and Austrian cultural nationalist enterprises (Morgenstern 2023). Critically, while the instrumentalisation of folk music in Austrian political right-wing ideologies looms large in the present (Doehring and Ginkel 2022), two primary dynamics are apparent in relation to the contemporary translocal Austrian Irish folk music community. Concretely, while an insistence upon the acquisition of high-level technical prowess and the subscription to stylistic authenticating markers of locale within "the music itself" (Slominski 2020) characterises the lived experience of contemporary interlocutors in Austria, interviewees who were operational in the post-war Austrian folk scene of the 1970s and '80s have rather highlighted an ongoing investment in nostalgic imaginaries of Irishness as a mythical repository of musicality and leftist political resistance against a colonial oppressor. However, these profound longings for someone else's "folk tradition" (Cole 2021) are encountered less through top-down intellectual discourse, but are often mediated "sideways" (Boym 2001) to audiences, by popular culture and the relative geographical proximity between Austria and Europe's "Celtic" fringes (Stokes and Bohlman 2003).