Lectures in Music Studies: Larissa Mulder, The Ohio State University

Larissa Mulder, PhD candidate in Musicology, presents “Listening with Keen Ears: Contemporary Revoicings of the Irish Caoine.”

The ritual practice of the Irish caoine (keen) has long served as an embodied expression of communal grief. Historically performed by women, keening combined structured eulogies on the virtues of the deceased with intense vocal lamentation. While public discourse often frames the keen as a lost tradition, the lament genre continues to carry cultural significance far beyond its original funerary context. Detaching from the wake and burial, songs of lament have become independent vehicles for meaning, circulating in new contexts and taking on new interpretive work.

This talk examines how contemporary artists in Ireland have revoiced and transformed the traditional keen for modern spaces and audiences. Acting as modern-day bean chaointe (keening women), these performers create vital outlets for articulating the sorrows and social traumas of their communities, while maintaining connections to historical modes of affect and memory. While the larger dissertation project traces the movement of lament from ritual mourning to emigration narratives to present-day musical performances, this talk centers on how today’s artists negotiate that legacy. The case of Irish lament demonstrates that even as modernity, globalization, and colonial pressures have reshaped and diminished ritual keening, the continuing presence of laments in Irish musical life reveals the capacity of tradition and innovation to coexist in dynamic tension, ensuring that grief remains heard. 

Larissa Mulder (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Musicology with a GIS in folklore whose interdisciplinary work explores music, gender, and the cross-cultural practices of communal mourning. Mulder’s dissertation project examines the transnational evolution of musical practices, focusing on how Irish lament adapts amid modernization and migration. Her research explores women’s roles in performed lament, analyzing gendered spaces in traditional and contemporary music. She has also written a chapter in the forthcoming edited volume Living Lament: Explorations in Shifting Ideologies, published by the Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura).