Introduction: Locating Celtic music (and song)

Western Folklore, Fall 1998 by Porter, James

The reasons for this usage are not hard to find: the huge movement of populations from Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have given rise to a contiguous New World cultural pattern of music-making which displays, nevertheless, two important differences from that of the Old: first, the language element is almost totally absent-Scottish Gaelic alone has barely survived on Cape Breton Island; second, the local character of the idiom, even when the music stands on its own without a verbal text, has been shifted towards more homogeneous aesthetic concepts, a process that has direct parallels in the Old World with the influence of transatlantic pop and the expansion of technological means.

"Celtic," moreover, in North America is popularly ascribed to a sliding scale of national or regional musics: Irish (in the US) or Scottish (in Canada) predominantly (cf. Jackson 1933), with Welsh and Breton less well known or cultivated in the New World, despite the influence of popular radio programs such as -Me Thistle and Shamrock" on PBS, which airs traditional music and song from Brittany and Wales as well as Ireland and Scotland. "Celtic consciousness" and "Celtic heritage," then, have taken on the momentum of a cultural fashion, with the exploitation of popular sentiment lurking close behind (cf. O'Driscoll 1982, Rees 1961). But if the peoples who retain a Celtic language have a distinctive art and music, of what qualities do these essentially consist?

"CELTIC MUSIC"

In particular, what can one understand by the term "Celtic music"? In two papers published ten years apart, the late Frank Harrison, author of a history of music in medieval Britain, confronted the problem of terminology that the concept raises. The first of these (1976), dealing with the chronology of Celtic folk instruments, cites Proinsias MacCana's statement that "the unity of the Celts in antiquity was one of culture rather than race" (1970:11) and suggests that a phrase such as "culturally and environmentally distinctive" might be more suitable for talking about Celtic cultural matters, including music. Further, the term "folk instrument" may be valid for some of the items dealt with in the paper, but for others the term ,,ethnically distinctive instruments" is more appropriate. The former term Harrison reserves for the late historical period, which he designates as one of cultural revival and dissemination. His conclusion is that the changes in popular musical usage in "Celtic" countries since the late 1920s and since the "folk-conflation" from the late 1950s represent part of an international rather than insular situation; some manifestations and implications of this development have been discussed in popular journals such asThe Melody Maker under the rubric, "The Celtic Sound."

In his second paper, again on chronology (1986), Harrison directly addresses the question: what are, or were, "Celtic musics"? It is significant that as a music historian and ethnomusicologist he begins to use the plural form, "Celtic musics" rather than the singular "Celtic music," which represents at best an idealization, or at worst an historical error based on an affinity of language or custom taken from descriptions by classical authors.' The issue of "Celtic musics," on the other hand, means considering not only of the artifacts of antiquity, and of some of the structural and stylistic traits of the music, but also the contexts in which the music has been used and in which it has acquired its particular meanings. For a working definition of "Celtic musics" Harrison thus proposes the following: "those musical practices in Celtic or partly Celtic regions which have, or had, some characteristics differentiated to recognisable extents from those in contemporary non-Celtic societies." I shall return to this definition below.