Back to Music Articles Index


The Darker Side of Irish Jigs

     I’ve always loved how the different scales and modes that Irish tunes are written in impart such dramatically different emotional potential to the melodies. It’s not as cut and dried as the classical distinction between "major" and "minor."

     While you’ll sometimes find yourself playing in major and pure minor scales, more often you find Celtic traditional tunes in a slightly dark Mixolydian mode (really a major scale with a flatted seventh scale step) or a good and broody Dorian mode (a pure minor also with a flatted seventh scale step).

     The chordal accompanists among us can thank our lucky stars for this, since the flatted sevens open up juicy chordal possibilities and make these lovely, sometimes ancient, melodies that much more accessible to the modern ear.

     I find the Scottish pipe tunes with the most visceral rock ‘m’ roll drive are the melodies incorporating what some stodgy musicologist once called the "Scottish Thumbprint." This is simply a two-bar figure establishing the tonic chord, then the same exact figure played a whole step lower, implying the flatted seven chord, then snapping back up again to the tonic to finish the phrase.

     Long before there were fretted instruments accompanying pipe tunes, this simple melodic device pulled away from the pipe drone to create tremendous tension and forward momentum. We of the multiple string persuasion can build on this tension to good advantage.

     While I plan to walk you through the "Scottish Thumbprint" later, I have another kind of tension in mind for this issue. While most Irish jigs and reels stick to a single mode, occasionally we find one that stretches the limits with accidentals and surprises, or even one that pops from one mode to another. One of my favorite examples of this latter kind of tune is The Coleraine Jig, a Northern Irish tune sportine a lilt and hopeful melancholy rarely achieved in Irish music.

     The Coleraine Jig is a pretty standard, two-part double jig that starts out in A minor, the chords toggling dramatically between the very minor tonic and very major E. But, the second part of the tune soars unexpectedly up to C, the relative major to A mnor, and suddenly we find that we’ve migrated from minor to Dorian mode, with a flatted seventh, allowing us an achingly beautiful chord progression from C to G to A minor to E. While these chords are being implied, the tune also indulges in that rare Irish flight of fancy: the four-note chromatic ascent. Very rare, indeed. But dark and gorgeous.

     The rest of the second part of the tune sneaks back to the original minor mode, with the momentary coloration of a passing F natural, giving the accompaniment a moment to drop in an exotic and mysterious D minor chord. Okay, so I don’t wax this poetic about too many Irish tunes. This is just one that I’ve considered at length and that never fails to move me.