Back to Music Articles Index


The Welsh Take Their Hornpipes Nice and Slow

    Hornpipes have always been the poor relation in the Celtic dance tune family. Irish and Scottish enthusiasts play hundreds of jigs and reels for every hornpipe they bother to learn. And yet, hornpipes enjoy just as rich a history and just as satisfying an emotional pallette as the more common dance forms.

     I eased into Irish music from the old-time side, learning fiddle tunes at competitions and musical gatherings, and usually starting out with American takes on tunes that I later learned had Irish or Scottish origins and sometimes very different settings to compare with. My earliest acquaintance with hornpipe dates from my flirtation with bluegrass and old-time, so I’d learned a handful of hornpipes from hotshots competing at California festivals before I found out that they weren’t all supposed to sound like reels.

     The hornpipe started out as a particular, highly syncopated clog dance, often associated with things nautical, that needed to go at a particular speed in order for the dancer to fit in all the fancy clogging moves. Once upon a time, all hornpipes ended each 8-bar part with this rhythmic phrase:

[Click here for printable rhythmic notation]

    In time, as all dance tunes were weaned away from necessary connection with dancing, hornpipes got straightened out a bit and sometimes merely hinted at the old dance steps while encouraging players to speed them up and give them slightly different energy. Nowadays, your average hot American setting of "Fisher’s Hornpipe," for example, can be medleyed with reels and played with top-gear abandon and sheer rock-n-roll drive.
     But there are still corners of the Celtic world where hornpipes retain some of their old glory and are prized for not being quite like any other dance. South Wales is an extraordinarily musical place where hornpipes flourish in unique ways. In addition to the popularity of a capella traditional choral music and the huge triple-strung harp literature played by masters like Robin Huw Bowen, on any given day from Newport to Swansea you can likely find a local village dance or "twmpathan" where accordions and whistles and small pipes and fiddles keep the boisterous locals dancing half the night.