Listening to Identity: Music in 21st century Ireland

This paper firstly reviews recent scholarship on music and identity in Ireland. The review detects and discusses a set of issues around the identification of genre and nationality in a country which continues to experience a rapidly changing population structure, against which the mapping of a communal Irishness onto existing categories such as ‘traditional music’ becomes increasingly difficult. Against the grain of this recent scholarship, the paper argues that, in a postmodern and globalised consumer culture, one of the principal locations of music’s affect is through music synchronised to advertising. Having examined the musical content of a number of television advertisements, the paper concludes that the global culture they represent indicates the comparative dis-location of music, identity and Irishness.