Irish Traditional Music

Irish traditional music is built around a repertoire of dance tunes — jigs in 6/8, reels in 4/4, hornpipes in dotted 4/4, slip jigs in 9/8, polkas and slides — played by combinations of fiddle, tin whistle, wooden Irish flute, uilleann pipes (a bellows-blown bagpipe played sitting down), concertina or button accordion, bodhrán frame drum, Irish harp and guitar. Tempos range from 90 to 130 BPM. Unaccompanied vocal music in the sean-nós (old style) tradition, mostly in Irish Gaelic, runs in parallel with the instrumental tunes and features extensive melismatic ornamentation. Tunes are organised in sets — three or four pieces strung together, accelerating into a final lift.

Most of the tune repertoire was passed orally through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Famine years of 1845–52 sent enormous numbers of Irish musicians to Boston, New York and Chicago, where the tradition was preserved alongside its survival at home. Captain Francis O'Neill, a Chicago police chief, transcribed and published over 2,000 tunes between 1903 and 1922 — his O'Neill's collections are still the standard tune-book. The 1960s ballad revival (the Clancy Brothers, the Dubliners) brought Irish song to international audiences; the Chieftains, founded by Paddy Moloney in 1962, refined the instrumental side and toured globally. Riverdance, which began as a seven-minute interval act at Eurovision in 1994, turned step-dance and the supporting tune-tradition into a worldwide phenomenon. The current wave includes Lankum, Lisa O'Neill, Ye Vagabonds and the trad-electronic hybrid Kíla.

The pleasure of trad lies in ornamentation more than in melody — cuts, rolls, cranns and triplets that decorate each note. Listen for the unison playing of fiddle, flute and whistle, which produces extra overtones as the slight differences in tuning beat against each other. The bodhrán drives the set forward with thumb-and-stick patterns. Sean-nós song, by contrast, is unaccompanied and lives in the singer's ornamentation, which is often denser than the underlying tune.

The Chieftains' The Long Black Veil (1995) is an approachable crossover entry, with guests from Mick Jagger to Sinéad O'Connor. For instrumental purism, the Bothy Band's 1975 debut or Planxty's self-titled (1973) are foundational. Lankum's The Livelong Day (2019) shows the contemporary wave at its most adventurous; Lisa O'Neill's Heard a Long Gone Song (2018) is the strongest recent song record.

The uilleann pipes are bellows-blown rather than mouth-blown — uilleann means elbow in Irish, and the bag is pumped under the player's right arm. The pipes take roughly twenty-one years to learn properly, according to a long-standing piping aphorism: seven years' learning, seven years' practice and seven years' playing.