The Department of Creative Arts, Media & Music at Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT), in association with Sounding the Feminists and the Centre for Creative Arts Research, promoted a one-day symposium on women in popular and traditional music in Ireland last Friday 23 November.

This event brought together both scholars and community activists engaged in work to address gender imbalance in both the music industry and academia. The event occurred on the same date marking the centenary of women’s suffrage in Ireland.

The symposium was organised in response to the a wider artistic movement in Ireland around need to better document and promote the contribution women have made to modern Ireland’s cultural history. Speaking on this topic, Dr. Ann Marie Hanlon, lead organiser of the symposium and lecturer in Popular Music at DkIT said: “A feminist history, or any history for that matter, of women in music in Ireland remains mostly unwritten and the question of how to conduct a feminist historiography within the Irish context needs to be addressed”.

Furthermore, said Hanlon “scant statistical data exists for the Irish musical context and scholars have yet to quantify or qualify the reality of the situation for women in music in Ireland. This is the cultural and academic context within which this symposium on women in traditional and popular music in Ireland was conceived.”

The symposium commenced with a panel on women in popular music in Ireland that dealt with the themes of trauma, gender inequality and women's rights across the genres of pop and electronic dance music.

This was followed by a round table discussion on contemporary feminist initiatives in the Irish music scene. Representatives from a variety of national music organisations including Fair Plé, the Gash Collective, Improvised Music Company, Mnásome, Girls Rock Dublin and Sounding the Feminists engaged with DkIT’s Dr Ann-Marie Hanlon in a conversation on why feminism is needed within the Irish music scene today and what these respective groups are doing to improve the lot for female performers across a variety of genres.

A later panel discussion with focus on women in country and traditional music in Ireland explored female narratives in country music song, 1990s post-feminism in the traditional music context and feminism and cultural nationalism in musical theatre.

The symposium concluded with a keynote address titled 'Raging Mother Ireland: The intersection of faith, fury, and feminism in the body and voice of Madga Davitt (Sinéad O’Connor)' by Dr Aileen Dillane, lecturer in music at the Irish World Academy of Music, University of Limerick.

Drawing upon musical examples from the early 1990s to 2018 Dillane argued that Davitt's 'songs and stories are powerful and poignant, resonating both historically and in the current moment, with various inflections of Irish womanhood.'

Dillane noted that “the architecture for how we do feminist historiography and historicise and appreciate our female "mavericks", will help us think about the academic and social work that is yet to be done.”

Feminist Movement in Arts & Music in Ireland:

In the past three years Ireland has witnessed a resurgence of feminist activity and public debate around gender inequality and the participation of women in Irish society.

The need for feminism in the Irish cultural context was starkly foregrounded with the centenary celebrations of the Easter Rising in 2016. Initially cultural commentators noticed the lack of acknowledgement of the role of women in the War of Independence: women were largely absent from the historical narrative being presented.

In November 2015 The Abbey Theatre announced its programme for the centenary year of nine men and one woman. Within a week of the programme announcement the Waking the Feminists movement had been formed, the purpose of which was to campaign for awareness of the need for gender equality in Irish theatre. A few months later the National Concert Hall announced its    Composing the Island series for September 2016 in celebration of the Rising.

Featuring the work of ninety composers (almost 200 compositions), only 17 works by living female composers were programmed versus 74 by male composers.

Prompted by this concert series and following in the footsteps of Waking the Feminists and international groups such as female:pressure (Vienna) and Fair Play (Brussels) the Sounding the Feminists working group was established in 2017 with the purpose of promoting gender equality and opportunities for women in music in Ireland and to encourage debate in this area.