Introduction: Locating Celtic music (and song)

Western Folklore, Fall 1998 by Porter, James

In contrast to the original sonata style with its dramatic unfolding of harmonic possibilities, "Celtic" traditional models are built around the elaborated slow air and periodic dance tunes (e.g., hornpipe, jig, reel) of varying lengths, all cast as variations of a single melody, or as chains of tunes. Vocal music includes dance tunes (port-a-beal) or Highland bagpipe solmization (canntaireachd) and group/solo call and response (waulking songs), Breton antiphony (han ha dishan), or Welsh singing with an instrument (penillion). Techniques for instrumental music, whether for social dance or brilliant solo display, include the repetition of melodic motifs (e.g., the Breton bourre), thematic variation by means of melodic elaboration (ceol m6r), and rhythmic dexterity (Irish slip jigs in 9/8 time). Harmonic variety was generally confined, in instruments adapted to the purpose (harp, uillean pipes), to shifts from the tonic to dominant and subdominant, or alternatively from the tonic to the subtonic or supertonic following the motifs repeat a tone lower or higher. String players achieved variation in tone colour by means of skilled plucking or bowing techniques. Elaborate fingerings generated rhythmic bite on pipe or flute, or through the use of domestic or farm utensils (spoons, bodhran). While these may seem limited means in comparison with the tonal landscape of the sonata and symphony, their social purpose, underpinned by reciprocity even into the twentieth century, was tied to participation rather than exclusion, to exercising a talent for music in field and barn rather than one refined in salon and anteroom: in other words a musical style forged, increasingly from about 1700, by an economically hard-pressed, mainly rural community. It was this communally-inspired music that the Irish composer Sean O Riada (1931-71) was to harness in founding the influential folk group Ceoltoiri Chualann, the predecessors of The Chieftains, in 1961 (Harris and Freyer 1981, O Riada 1982).

The semantic content of songs, especially epic, ballad, and equivalent native forms, has been discussed in a number of recent publications (e.g., Constantine 1996, Purser 1993, Shields 1995), and there is no need to reiterate here the thematic variety found. The terms "epic" and "ballad" are loosely applied since they do not belong to early Celtic tradition but have been gradually introduced as comparative terms in a European context (Almqvist et al. 1987). Other genres, or types of sung gesture such as keening (caoineadh) have been much studied, and this particular form belongs in a wider context of European lament forms found still in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe (Lysaght 1997, O madagain 1978, 1985, Partridge 1983). The association of music and song with praeternatural forces is traditional and well documented (Ui Ogdin 1992-3, Shields 1992-3). The macaronic tradition of song texts from the 1850s in Ireland, with verses or lines alternating in Gaelic and English, could be considered an attempt to reconcile two different traditions and make them intelligible to a bilingual public (Shields 1995: 169). Stylistically Anglo-Irish, in contrast, has shown many Gaelic features in both music and text, especially in bilingual areas (Shields 1972).