Back to Music Articles Index


Variation on a Celtic Theme

     How many different ways can you come up with to play an Irish reel? And how different can you get before the reel becomes unrecognizable? These are two terribly important and closely-linked questions asked often in these days of blossoming Celtic musical expression and the conscious absorption of many world styles into the tradition. I figure the answer to the first question is: an unknown, very large number. The answer to the second depends on whether we’re talking about melody, harmony, rhythm, structure, or some combination of these things.

     In this issue I want to discuss (and strongly advocate) melodic variation in particular. Like most American Celtophiles, I first fell in love with Irish music through listening to records. Early on I discovered the modern Celtic revival supergroups like The Chieftains, the Boys of the Lough, and later Planxty and the Bothy Band. And I eagerly picked up vinyl collections of field recordings going back to the 1920s and featuring old masters like Michael Coleman and Padraic O’Keefe. Nearly every other budding American Celtic music nut did the same, if we weren’t lucky enough to hang out in the Irish bars of Chicago or Boston or New York.

     So, when we all learned tunes to add to our repertoire, we’d cop the licks off the records, doing our best to play the way the masters did. But the records failed in one respect to convey the tradition as it was and still is passed on in Ireland and Scotland. In order to fit onto first 78s and then short tracks on LPs, the tunes were rarely played through more than two or three times, before medleying into something else or just ending. This is one reason why the heirs of the Vinyl Tradition in sessions all over America tend to play tunes just twice through or maybe three times, and then immediately blast into the next tune.

     I don’t blame the speed of modern culture or the ever-decreasing attention span of America’s youth. I chalk it up to short 78 rpm sides and the fact that most American session players just play for each other and not for village dances, like they do in the Old Country.

     When I first started travelling extensively in Ireland I naturally found myself at village dances and ceilis and was delighted with what I learned. I found that simple tunes would roll along many times through while the dance went on and the better players made a point of slightly changing the tune, or at the very least, the ornamentation, a little bit every time it went by. I remember sitting and listening to fiddler Frankie Gavin during one such evening in north Clare, playing a tune at least twenty times through and subtlely altering it each time without ever straying far from the essential shape of the tune.

     Now, the concept of a tune’s "shape" (which I first illustrated in the Summer 2001 issue) is at the heart of the question about when a tune becomes unrecognizable. You can sometimes stretch a tune pretty dramatically and retain enough of the shape of it so other players in the session, or dancers dancing to it, or listeners just humming along, still know it’s the same tune.