Music and Noise: Loyalism, Marching, and the Meaning of the Political in Northern Ireland

Abstract

In Northern Ireland, Protestant marching bands are hugely popular despite the political controversy often associated with them. Many of their parades commemorate Protestant military victories over Catholics and are seen by many today as triumphalist, sectarian, and offensive. However, tensions between Catholics and Protestants have improved over the last twenty years and there have been attempts to change attitudes toward the marching bands. Prompted by the question: “Why do people continue to march with such enthusiasm in Northern Ireland despite the negative backlash?”, this thesis utilises 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Protestant areas of Derry in Northern Ireland. Answering this question required explaining the meanings the bands had for their members, with a particular focus on the diverse and complex ways in which people understood the bands as “political”. This thesis traces the lived experience of various band members and, in particular, their experience of politics through playing music and marching, ultimately elaborating on one facet of the complexity of political identity in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Tensions between Catholics and Protestants or working-class and middle-class people were accompanied by a whole litany of more subtle tensions between different ways of being “political”. This thesis complicates previous readings of Protestant bands and parading as straightforwardly political or apolitical by treating the category of the political as an ethnographic one (as well as a theoretical one). Drawing on the relatively recent literature on the political as an ethnographic category, as well as theories of embodiment and affect, this thesis explains how the political appeared in fluid, diverse, and sometimes contradictory ways among the bands, including in explicit discourse, in embodied dispositions, and in vaguely sensed affects. Sound also played a central role, and people’s sensory experience of sound (and silence) is contextualised within wider socio-political and historical frameworks. The different “styles of politics” explored in this thesis are drawn together at the end in a contrast between “noise” and “music”, arguing that marching bands were an in-between form of “noisy music” which sonically embodied the broader in-between political position of working-class Northern Irish Protestants in a number of ways. Ultimately, this thesis explains how politics was experienced in complex, ambivalent ways, it complicates straightforward readings of Northern Irish Protestant parading as political or not, and positions Northern Irish marching bands at the nexus of a number of different socio-political contestations in modern-day post-conflict Northern Ireland.