Culture – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some thoughts on what keeps a culture alive.

I really enjoy going to concerts and hearing all sorts of musicians from all around the globe perform. I’ve been lucky enough to attend some historic concerts, such as the 2012 performance of the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra at the Kauffman Center in Kansas City. It was their first performance in the United States since the beginning of the embargo on Cuba in the 1960s. In that moment I could feel echoes of a vibrant and lively culture living alongside my own in the same moment in time. The way the musicians put their own spin, their own rhythm on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue to make it sound Cuban was wonderful to hear. Still, the setting of the concert hall where there is a clear physical barrier between the performers who stand or sit on a stage frozen in place with an audience watching all around does sometimes give me chills. 

There have been many other concerts that I’ve attended where music or stories from particular cultures are played or told, relayed to us an audience foreign to those artists’ culture. Yet the way they’re transmitted, removed from the physical surroundings of those artists’ home, placed on a sterile stage where we can hear and see everything in perfect clarity, takes something out of the performance. It worries me that in America we’ve come to expect that particularly “cultural” things, especially if they’re foreign or “ethnic” ought to be neatly packaged in an expected format and set up. That way they can be interpreted through our own cultural lens in such a way that if I see a bottle of Italian seasonings in the grocery store, I’ll be able to tell first and foremost that those are seasonings. Yet in that standardization of culture to fit a set mold into which all its many and contradictory elements can be poured and melted down, we lose a great deal of the memories and the life that those cultural artifacts embodied.

My own people, the Irish Americans, have an interesting relationship with this. We still maintain some elements of a distinct culture from other European-descended ethnic groups in the United States, though I know some reading or listening to this might object to my use of the word “ethnic” to describe a community so assimilated into mainstream American society. The problem for me arises in trying to answer how our culture is still even partially Irish. Here in Kansas City, we have plenty of people who play Irish music, myself included, as well as a couple of local Irish dance schools. We even have a local Irish Center where classes in the Irish language are taught. Yet when most of those cultural milestones are performed, they are often more so in delineated places and situations where they are expected, say at the Kansas City Irish Fest, rather than more organically on a regular basis as a daily part of life. 

One of the great exceptions to this rule is with music, after all some of my favorite concert memories have been sitting in on the jam sessions at the Irish Center and at other venues around town, even in the homes of friends. There, an element of our Irish American culture is still being performed organically, like a group of friends getting together one evening for a party. It just so happens that instead of playing the Top 40 Hits at that party they might pull out their own instruments and play their own top 40 for themselves.

Culture is fundamentally performative, and to survive it must flourish organically in the setting where it exists. This past weekend I had the honor of serving as a groomsman for one of my best friends who is Greek Orthodox. The wedding took place in his church, and clearly seemed to be an unfamiliar ceremony to many of those present who weren’t themselves Greek (myself included). Still, I found the chanted prayers and hymns––most of which were performed in English––to be fairly easy to learn, and after the first one I was able to add my own voice to the congregation. Later that evening the typical wedding reception DJ hits were freely interspersed with Greek dances, which likewise for the average participant were far easier to pick up on than any of the Irish dances I’ve done over the years. There’s a culture that’s still vibrant in how ordinary its performances tend to be for the people who live it every day.

It struck me that the idea of having Irish music played at an Irish American wedding reception would probably be met with shock, after all most of us don’t know the steps for the jigs and reels that make up Irish dance today. Furthermore, someone is bound to be annoyed by some inconsistency with what is properly Irish American, meaning that trying to toe the line of ensuring that one’s Irish American cultural practices are so highly regulated that they become harder than necessary to follow. I for one would love to try and introduce some elements of jazz into the jigs, reels, and airs that I’ve learned to play on the tin whistle, and if I do ever get around to joining in a specifically Irish dance again you can bet that I’ll let my arms move more freely than is expected.

I worry that a culture which isn’t performed as a daily routine will gradually become fossilized. Such a culture, if confined only to special events that aren’t expected or normal for the everyday, will surely die, leaving its participants poorer as a result. Perhaps one of the greatest differences between Greek American culture and Irish American culture is that our ethnic church, Roman Catholicism, did not preserve our Irish language as the language of liturgy and spirituality. Rather, Catholic priests continued to say the Mass in Latin until the 1960s, by which point so few Irish Americans still spoke Irish that there are hardly any Irish Masses performed here in the United States today. I’ve only ever been to one such Mass that was done entirely in Irish. It was said on a stage at the Dublin Irish Festival outside Columbus, Ohio where we the congregation watched on as if gazing at some exotic ceremony stuck out of place and out of time. That most essential element of any culture, the way in which it speaks and sings and laughs and cries, its language, is vital to that culture’s survival. And in a country where we make up a good portion of English-speaking Catholics, our Church has assimilated faster than our hopes for a distinct Irish American culture may have wanted.