Introduction: Locating Celtic music (and song)

Western Folklore, Fall 1998 by Porter, James

In his conclusion, Harrison claims that one of the primary tasks of the historian of music among "Celtic peoples" is that of relating what has been recorded in the twentieth century to what was recorded earlier by other methods and to surviving artifacts. Another is that of documenting the present thoroughly and consistently. To those who maintain that "Celtic musical identities" have been destroyed by post-World War II social conditions and communications,

"one can only point out that those very residues of pre-seventeenth century musical habits in Ireland that are now so assiduously chewed over were themselves the product of a violently changed situation. Yet no-one maintains that any Irish musical character that has emerged since then is not Irish, though function, wrapping and indeed much content have changed .... Let the aim be to identify the content as objectively as possible and to chart the processes of change" (1986: 263)

To this, again, he might well have added the analysis of newer, heterogeneous contexts and their meanings. While he is forced to qualify his working definition by modifiers such as "partly Celtic," "some characteristics," "recognizable extents," Harrison touches on a central point- Celtic musics, whatever the definition applied to them, have never existed in isolation, and searching for a "pure" musical Celticity is an unrealistic pursuit. Present-day, "pan-Celtic" conflations are a different matter. They are of recent origin, and are part of a worldwide trend in many different kinds of musical activity over the last few decades.

A prime example comes from mass culture: Hollywood movies with a Scottish subject (Braveheart, Rob Roy) carry soundtracks with music played on the Irish uillean or "elbow" i.e., bellows-blown (formerly known as "Union") bagpipes rather than on the mouth-blown Highland pipes hinting, no doubt, at the historical connection of the peoples and the expressive qualities of the much later Irish instrument rather than the reasons why the "heroic" warpipes remained in Scotland when they had vanished from Ireland (until their recent reintroduction). On a participatory level of conflation, one could cite the Festival Interceltique des Cornemuses in Lorient, Brittany, in which Breton, Irish, Scottish and Welsh musics (traditional, revival, or popular) are offered in concerts that suggest a common musical heritage. A centrepiece for the 1997 Festival, composed by Edward McGuire, involved Scots and Breton pipe bands, Irish and Galician pipers, a Manx harpist and a Welsh male voice choir (Gilchrist 1997). In Lorient cathedral, again, Irish revival songs have been programmed alongside Breton cantique melodies (normally used in the pilgrimages called pardons) played on the nasal-sounding bombarde (shawm, or folk oboe) with organ accompaniment. The antique, "modal" basis of many tunes hints at the relatedness of these separate language traditions in the Middle Ages (cf. Crossley-Holland 1996). Indeed, "Celtic" modes had already been compared even with ancient Greek practice (Bourgault-Ducoudray 1885; cf. Graves 1928:284).