Inis-Ceol

by Melodie Monahan

I heard Inis-Ceol for the first time four years ago at the annual St. Patrick’s Irish Festival in Detroit. I was in the balcony of the auditorium of this girls’ school turned senior center that shoulders St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. The place was riotous and noisy--clapping, hooting, shouting; children running and screeching; adults below on the wood floor tossing their heels; many people into their cups of Guinness. In this place not intended for careful listening, I heard Inis-Ceol play their traditional island music.

The music that Tom Dooley, Ice Marie Frady-Alley, and Marilyn Hotaling create strikes me as true, soulful, at the heart of the best in traditional Celtic music. For me, it resonates with the sense of a life oppressed or a kind of experience that fuses people to place, to one another, and to a unique cultural and political past. The music conveys and honors hard-working people, their trouble and fun, their island landscape.

The group’s name, which means “Island Music,” points to the contradictions in the Celtic nature and its past, to the isolation and the connection which music itself creates. These people farmed stony remote places; they created community in wind-swept outposts. For me, their music as it is played by Inis-Ceol calls me back to the essential, indeed mythic part of the human condition: to unreconciliable feelings of alienation and commitment; to love of land fused with the need to leave it, and the persistent longing to return.

Much Irish music is happy, rollicking, drink-along, clap along stuff. It gives us the heartbeat, the jubilation we seek. We love it, we talk and laugh across it and because of it. Inis-Ceol plays this rollicking music with the best.

But what I love most in their music is another dimension. It is their ability to bring me home to something true and poignant, to a sense of love and loss, to a sense of spirit and the spiritual, to a sense of continuance and faith that pulses perhaps especially among oppressed communities who were forced to be tough but remained tender. Like ethnic musicians around the world, Inis-Ceol attends to the beautiful: these musicians foster it, insist upon it, call us back to it.

For what in us is hurting, for our doubts and disrupted faith, for the troubles in the world for which we have no answers, the music of Inis-Ceol is here, in honor and in truth. It calls us home to the poignancy of our condition in all its complexities, humor, and spirit.

April 2002