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.