The term “traditional music” is widely used in musicological discourse as well as in everyday conversations, and is, indeed, in the name of our organisation: the International Council for Traditional Music.1 It was also used in the titles of classic studies of Asian music by our elders, such as Yi Hye-gu (1981), Kishibe Shigeo (1969), William Malm (1959), A. C. Scott (1967, 1969, 1975), David Morton (1976), Judith Becker (1980), Terry Miller (1985), and others, and in the titles of many journal articles. In short, the term is at the core of the discipline of ethnomusicology and for this organisation.

Histories of colonial cultural erasure, unsuccessful decolonisation or postcolonialism and rapid modernisation are typically seen as the challenges to sustaining Indigenous traditional musics (Harrison, in press). The Indigenous peoples of Canada have experienced colonial assimilationist policies of government and church, including residential schools that took children away from their families and forbade song, dance and language. These policies resulted in musics and even entire cultures being erased. Although there have been recent improvements in Scandinavia, similar kinds of discrimination happened where the traditional Sámi vocal form, joik (in pan-Sámi juoiggas) was long (and in some cases, still is) regarded as sinful, and Sámi children were forbidden to use their mother tongues at school (for example, from about 1850 to 1980 during Norway’s Fornorskning or Norwegianisation policy). In recent years, the Indigenous musics of Canada and the Nordic countries, among others, have reflected, articulated and interpellated sociocultural interrelations and politics (Diamond 2002; Diamond et al. 2018; Harrison 2009; Hilder 2012, 2015; Moisala 2007; Ramnarine 2009, 2017), and Indigenous artists have taken action on politicised issues through a range of contemporary and flourishing artistic expressions (Robinson and Martin 2016).

In his article “The Ethnomusicology of Music Learning and Teaching,” Timothy Rice argues that the practices of teaching and learning music are fundamental to the ways in which music is conceptualised, transmitted, and invested with symbolic meanings (2003). Ethnomusicologists studying music and diaspora have also drawn attention to the significance of music education as a key medium for the construction and maintenance of diasporic identities.1 In diasporic communities, music education can be a principal means for transmitting perspectives on the historical and political forces that have shaped the diaspora and for developing the linguistic and cultural competency of younger generations. Music schools and other institutions of musical learning can also play important roles in the public representation of diasporic communities and in articulating the relationship of the diaspora to the linguistic, musical, religious, and national heritage of its perceived homeland.

At Oakland’s Circle Left contra dance, I notice my hands fumbling as I take “hands four” with my partner and our neighbour couple to form one of many foursomes in a long line of contra dancers. My partner and I place our hands facing palm up expecting to find a hand to hold facing palm down. In “traditional” contra, it is the person in the “lady” role who places their hand palm down on the hand of the person in the “gent” role. But this time it is I, a cisgendered male,1 who am in the wrong, since we decided before the dance that I am dancing the “raven” part, traditionally the “lady,” and my partner is dancing the “lark,” traditionally the “gent.” I correct myself and place my hand upon theirs. When I adopt the “raven” role, thirty-three years of contra dancing, that is, thirty-three years of gendered behaviour that have contributed to how I have learned to be male, are slightly difficult, but, as it turns out, not too difficult to unlearn. As we advance down and back up the hall, I make other, less minute mistakes, some that have to do with the new role expectations and some that are just part of a customary failure at executing dance moves perfectly. Like “traditional” contra dance, Circle Left (Figure 1) is a communitarian, participatory activity, and forgiveness is quickly given with a smile.

Dini niŋ ka tuma kalinsi mini pukparigu ni labiri nyanga saha ŋɔ la zuɣu, dabba ban be Tuduyaɣili polo (Northern Region) di niŋdi tom pam tiba zaŋ jandi bɛ biɛhigu ni bɛ laɣi dibo soya diyi ti kana dotali polo. To ayi yuli zaŋ chaŋ kali wahi din jandi Dagbamba Sapashin nim polo, sabbu ŋɔ wuhirila waligimsim din be dotali mini kali wahi yeltɔɣa. Gun Gon nyala kali tuun kpeiŋ din wuhiri dotali tuun tumsa Sapashin nim ni Dagbaŋ pulini, kadi wuhiri ka kpaŋsiri dotali ni nye sheli zaŋ ti dabba ban tumdili.

Whether in Ireland or elsewhere, most people first encounter Irish traditional music in public spaces such as pub sessions or concerts, or through the recorded traces of music-making produced for a listening public.1 For those who become more involved in the scene as players, dancers, or avid listeners, festivals, schools, non-profit organisations, archives, and other instruments of the public sphere of Irish traditional music shape perceptions of the genre’s style, history, and participants. But while public and semi-public music-making has been a vital part of the transnational Irish traditional music scene for at least a century, the genre’s self-understanding still relies on its associations with a domestic, private past. In this article, I locate the roots of this contradiction in the historiographical problems presented by the 1935 Public Dance Halls Act—a piece of legislation that has had profound effects on musical practice and discourse in Ireland.2 I examine the ways this law and the frequent retrospective overemphasis of its effects have contributed to the idealisation of Irish traditional music as rooted in a domestic, rural, and lower-class past. Combined with social and governmental restrictions on the activities of women during most of the twentieth century, this alignment of domesticity with imagined “authenticity” has shaped the reception of women’s public Irish traditional musical performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.