Date: Thursday 06 November 2025
Time: 16.00 - 17.30
Location: Boydell Recital Room, House 5, Department of Music, Trinity College Dublin.
Admission is free and all are welcome.
‘Rethinking Popular Music and Liberalism in Late Twentieth-Century Ireland’. A talk by Dr Adam Behan, Maynooth University.
Few aspects of twentieth-century Irish cultural history have been praised quite as fervently as its popular music, and a successful lineage of rock groups, Eurovision winners, boybands, singer-songwriters and others are now a fundamental part of the story that modern Ireland likes to tell of itself.
Yet for a phenomenon so widely celebrated, it is chronically under-historicised, though perhaps that is no coincidence. In this largely theoretical paper, I sketch a historical approach to Irish popular music between 1970 and 2000 by bringing insights from several fields of study into dialogue with one another. In doing so, I suggest a more critical approach that frames popular music as the cultural practice of liberalism in late twentieth-century Ireland.
First, I unpack some of the themes of Irish musical scholarship, in particular the prevalence of ‘Irishness’ as a way of intellectualising Irish popular music, and argue instead for an approach that builds on social history and critiques of modernisation theory rather than one that focuses on questions of national identity.
Second, I discuss the importance of Ireland’s growing mediascape in relation to the discursive circulation and social emergence of Irish popular music: I consider some questions of method involved in tapping into this mediascape by drawing on thinking in political theory and the field of popular music studies.
I finish with a brief example of rock culture and individualism that grounds some of my discussion of popular music and liberalism.
Adam Behan teaches at Maynooth University, where he has just finished a Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellowship. He holds degrees from Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge, and his research has won awards such as the Karl Geiringer Scholarship from the American Brahms Society and the Westrup Prize from the Music & Letters Trust. He has published articles in journals including Music Analysis, Twentieth-Century Music, Music & Letters, the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the Musical Quarterly. He is currently writing a book that is notionally titled Popular Music, Ireland and the Making of Liberalism, 1970–2000.
For further information on this event please email Dr Nicole Grimes, Department of Music, School of Creative Arts at nicole.grimes@tcd.ie