Mourning the loss of the keening tradition in Ireland

BBC presenter Marie-Louise Muir used her own experience of grief while exploring the fading tradition of keening at Irish funerals, writes Richard Fitzpatrick

THE practice of keening — where women would gather and wail in grief at a funeral — died out in Ireland around the middle of the last century. There are live recordings of keeners from the 1950s available at the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin, tapes which Marie-Louise Muir listens to as part of her exploration of the tradition in the BBC Radio 4 documentary, Songs for the Dead. They make for uncomfortable listening.

“It shocked and surprised me how difficult I found listening to those archive recordings,” she says. “To my ear, as an orchestral, classically trained musician, they were off-note. That unsettled me. It’s akin to nails being scraped down a blackboard. Every atom of your body cringes against it. You just recoil. You’re recoiling from the horror of loss, but this music is incredible. It’s expressing how you’re feeling.