Locating the centre: Irish traditional music and re-traditionalisation at the Willie Clancy Summer School

Abstract

The Willie Clancy Summer School is the foremost school for Irish traditional music transmission and practice in the annual Irish traditional music calendar. !e particular success of the Willie Clancy Week (as it is more commonly referred to) is the result of a synergy of factors, the reverberations of which resonate in a dialectical exchange with the wider community of Irish traditional music practice. In this essay, two inter-related factors which contribute signi"cantly to the production of cultural authority at the school are considered: Firstly, transmission, and the re-traditionalisation of the processes of transmission at the school and secondly, peripherality and how the location of the school, in the west of Ireland, is a constitutive element in legitimating this re-traditionalising process.