"From Leitrim to Sligo" : some irish traditional dance music sessions : Systematic,interactions between music and environment
As period of time and spatial entities invested by music, sessions in Irleandnowadays are a marker of cultural expression, superficially, those can be defined as a gatering, planned or spontaneous, of several musicians with the prospect to produce music and to share a nice moment together. Yet, a survey pursued over a seven-year research work in north-western Ireland revealed that, in depth sessions represent complex socio-cultural events, social as much as musical, musical as well as social happening, symbolic entity enriched by interactions whose permanently renewed combination reflects the interplay between individual factors and group strategies, that, radically, affect the whole structure of the event.To understand how a session functions then requiredraising a number of questions whose end is to elucidate how the two poles, social and musical, happen to be inextricably linked, though distinct at the same time musical sessionsthus become a source of problems wich, a priori connected to the amount of knowledge specific of our topic, lead to overcome the exclusive domain od ireland up o facing the broader isuues of contemporary ethnomusicology. The present theses includes five chapters. The first ome is a general description of sessions. Attention is paid to the dynamic links operating between what belongs to music and what proceeds from a line more specifically social. Questions then raised trigger a second chapter, whose content is bipartite. First are exposed the major problems on which the thesis rests, and secondly the methodological answers related to the given problematic. A third chapter consists of setting the spectrum of methods required to conduct analyses, through a reflexion bearing on the system properties of the whole range of social and musical parameters comparative analysis of 26 musical pieces that were collected in the context of seven different situations in distinct sessions. In the fifth chapter, the thesis ends with a synthesis of all analytical results as a gathered in the previous chapters.