Creative Processes in Irish traditional music: a bodhrán-playing perspective

Robert Brian Sheehan

This is the web-based written component of an arts practice research project carried out from May to August of 2022 as part of the MA Irish Music Studies programme at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance (IWAMD) at the University of Limerick. The project set out to explore the broad topic of creativity within Irish traditional music through the embodied means of my own bodhrán playing. In particular, I set out to see to what extent the creative process of switching between ways of gripping the bodhrán stick (“grip switching”) could be embodied effectively in my bodhrán playing. As well as this written component, which contains multimedia elements such as video and music notation, this project is also presented as a thirty minute performance of traditional Irish music where I accompany an accordion player to demonstrate and explain some of the findings of my research.

Grip Postures

These grip postures were explored in daily practice over the course of this research, and are used within my creative process of Grip Switching. The letter codes I use to annotate staff notation for the "up" and "down" strokes of each grip posture are also given. Up and down lose meaning for some of the grip postures (for example Ó Riada and Reverse Ó Riada), and can instead be thought of as "strong" and "weak" strokes. Strong strokes usually fall on an accented beat, and weak strokes usually fall on unaccented beats, but this need not always be the case. Further context for the information in this table is found in the Bodhrán Literature and Practice Review and Notation sections.

Cunningham's Categorisation	My Categorisation by Exemplar	Exemplar in Performance	My interpretation of the grip posture
Cunningham's Categorisation	My Categorisation by Exemplar	Exemplar in Performance	"Down" Stroke (strong)	"Up" Stroke (weak)
Kerry Style (two-ended)	Mercier, after Peadar Mercier of Dublin. Ubquitous.		v	ʌ
West Limerick Style (one-ended)	O'Donoghue, after Séamus O' Donoghue of Roscommon (rare)		d	p
Waterford Style (two-ended)	Mel Mercier, after Mel Mercier of Dublin. Very similar to Peadar Mercier style but with use of loop to attach stick to the middle finger. Rare)
Tambour Technique (two-ended)	Ó Riada, after Seán Ó Riada of Cork. Also used by Éamonn de Buitléar, a musical collaborator of Ó Riada. Rare.		r	ɹ
A style peculiar to Tommy Hayes (two-ended)	Hayes, after Tommy Hayes of Limerick. Rare.		h	ɥ
Matched grip fill technique (one-ended)	John Joe Kelly fill, after John Joe Kelly of Manchester. Well-known technique but not currently the basis of a style in its own right.		k	ʞ
	McNamara, after Stevie McNamara of Clare.
	Reverse Ó Riada. A grip posture that I developed. To my mind it uses a similar wrist action to the Ó Riada posture, but with the wrist turned upside-down. The unaccented stroke (ʎ) is quite similar to the accented stroke in the Mercier posture (v).		y	ʎ (≃v)

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