Festivity and the fleadh: an examination of festivity in contemporary practice at Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann

Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann is an annual Irish festival organised by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, which attracts participants from around the globe, primarily with an interest in Irish music, song, and dance. The variety of activities taking place during the Fleadh enables a range of engagement possibilities, which consequently makes defining the Fleadh a complex process.This dissertation seeks to identify and explore different ‘sites’ of festivity at Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann to gain an understanding of the festival’s identity and how festivity is constructed through the Fleadh. Four main Fleadh activities are considered in terms of their festivity, space, and participant engagement, in an effort to demonstrate 1) how activities overlap and contrast in various ways, 2) how activities coalesce into one Fleadh community, and 3) how the Fleadh enables participants to cultivate their individual festival experience.

This ethnographic study is situated primarily in the fields of Irish music studies, festival studies, and ethnomusicology. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork includes participant observation, in-depth interviews, detailed ethnographies, and a case study of the 2016 Fleadh in Ennis, Co. Clare. The Fleadh and its activities are explored primarily through four theoretical frameworks: 1) festival, 2) space, 3) community of practice, and 4) family resemblances. Utilising my own categorical structures, I employ the terms site, in reference to the conceptual Fleadh activity, and space, in reference to the physical structures which host the sites. A site has to be serviced and realised by the host town and its physical spaces. The following four Fleadh sites are examined from multiple perspectives: formal performances, competitions, sessions, and the Trad Disco. These four sites also exist outside of the Fleadh in a variety of contexts, but their collective realisation during a specific time frame, in the curated spaces of the host town, is what creates the Fleadh.

The Fleadh’s complex festival identity encapsulates a diversity of sites, festive behaviours, and experiences, all of which are connected by family resemblances, and realised in the spaces of each host town. The Fleadh is being perpetually reinvented through communal acts of Fleadhness which evolve over time, as well as through the spaces of new towns. The Fleadh also enables participants to negotiate their own mutual engagement with the festival and cultivate their individual Fleadh experience. Participants may not engage to the same degree, attend the same sites, or agree on how festivity is enacted, but they are nevertheless mutually engaged with the one festival. This may in fact be the triumph of the Fleadh—its versatility and ability to cultivate an extensive programme that appeals to a myriad of participants and unites them into one Fleadh community.