Negotiating Genre, Style, and Contemporality in an Intergenerational Irish Music Ensemble

This article examines community negotiations of genre and style through the lens of intergenerational collaboration in a contemporary Irish music ensemble at Florida State University. In this ensemble, community members participated alongside university students in the ensemble through a state-funded senior education program. Throughout this process, students and community members navigated differences between local scene-established formats of musical material and new student-directed arrangements. Community members articulated desires to ‘keep the scene going’ and establish community longevity while negotiating this “shifting topography” (Shuker 2001: 6) of popular-traditional genre practice. The practices of this ensemble, explored through an autoethnographic lens with interview contributions from student and community members, build on existing studies on intergenerational ensemble practices (Harrington 2021, Conway and Hodgman 2008, Jang 2020), genre negotiation (Holt 2007), and aging identity (Bennet and Hodkinson 2012). This suggests important implications for intergenerational music-making and building music communities with deep generational and musical diversity.