Program Overview
Program Overview
The intertwining of music, sound, and space in Northern Ireland is often a politically contentious issue, where the management of public performances of music or other sound displays can still lead to inter-community tension or conflict. During this seminar, we’ll explore the current social divisions in Northern Ireland attributed to music and sound, and we’ll learn how over the past 11 years, organizations on either side of the divide have been working together to achieve varying degrees of harmony.
Program Activities
Program Activities
Lectures, dialogs, and community engagement opportunities will provide participants with a framework for discourse on the two communities’ unique identities, nationalities, histories, religions, cultural forms, and means of representation.
Participants will hear from local scholars and have significant access to social actors, organizers, and community representatives in Belfast, Lurgan, and Portadown who have contested the political space through marching band parades and protests against parades.
We’ll also inquire into other forms of traditional Irish music, including session or “pub” music, which is subject to the restraints of the community divide in Northern Ireland. For example, the Irish Catholic and British Protestant communities, in certain contexts, regard the traditional as mutually exclusive.
Program Objectives
Program Objectives
During this seminar, participants will:
- Engage with representatives in Northern Ireland who are aiming to build intercommunity cohesion through music.
- Experience firsthand the process of harmonizing dissonance through music.
- Explore and analyze the deeply rooted connections between protest, religious and political identity, and musical performance.
Seminar Locations
Seminar Locations
Based in Belfast with excursions to Dublin, Lurgan, and Portadown; participants fly in and out of Belfast.