Celtic music

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Celtic music
Brittany
Celtic Canada
Cornwall
Ireland
Isle of Man
Scotland
Northern Spain
Celtic US
Wales

Celtic music is a term utilised by artists, record companies, music stores and music magazines to describe a broad grouping of musical genres that evolved out of the folk musical traditions of the Celtic peoples of Northern Europe. As such there is no real body of music which can be accurately be described as Celtic, but the term has stuck and may refer to both orally-transmitted traditional music and recorded popular music. The latter sometimes has barely even a superficial resemblance to folk music of any of the Celtic cultures, but on the other hand it sometimes represents sincere work towards adapting Celtic traditions for modern, global culture.

Celtic music means two things mainly. The first: the music of the peoples calling themselves Celts (a non-musical, more political definition), as opposed to, say, "French music" or "English music." The second: whatever qualities may be unique to the musics of the Celtic Nations *(a musical definition). Some insist there is actually nothing in common, such as Geoff Wallis and Sue Wilson in their book 'The Rough Guide to Irish Music', whereas others (such as Alan Stivell ), say there is.

Often, the term Celtic music is applied to the music of Ireland and Scotland, because both places have produced well-known distinctive styles which actually have genuine commonality and clear mutual influences; however, it is notable that Irish and Scottish traditional musicians themselves avoid the term "Celtic music," except when forced by the necessities of the market. They are famous too because of the importance of Irish and Scottish people in the English speaking world. The music of Wales, Cornwall, Isle of Man, Brittany, Northumbria, Galicia, Cantabria and Asturias and Northern Portugal (though some argue the traditional music of the all Nation descend from that of the North during the Reconquista) are also a part of Celtic music, the Celtic tradition being particularly strong in Brittany, where Celtic festivals large and small take place throughout the year. Additionally, the musics of ethnically Celtic peoples abroad are vibrant, especially in Canada and the United States.

Contents

[edit] Divisions

In Celtic Music: A Complete Guide, June Skinner Sawyers acknowledges six Celtic nationalities divided into two groups according to their linguistic heritage. The Q-Celtic nationalities are the Irish, Scottish and Manx peoples, while the P-Celtic groups are the Cornish, Bretons and Welsh peoples. Musician Alan Stivell uses a similar dichotomy, between the Gaelic (Irish/Scottish/Manx) branch and the Brythonic (Breton/Welsh/Cornish) group, which differentiate "mostly by the extended range (sometimes more than two octaves) of Irish and Scottish melodies and the closed range of Breton and Welsh melodies (often reduced to a half-octave), and by the frequent use of the pure pentatonic scale in Gaelic music." [1].

[edit] Definition debate

At issue is the lack of many common threads uniting the "Celtic" peoples listed above. While the ancient Celts undoubtedly had their own musical styles, the actual sound of their music remains a complete mystery.

There is also tremendous variation between "Celtic" regions. Ireland, Scotland, and Brittany have living traditions of language and music and there has been a recent major revival of interest in Wales. However, Cornwall and the Isle of Man have only small-scale revivalist movements that have yet to take hold. Galicia has no Celtic language today (Galician is a Romance language some say a dialect of the Portuguese language, although all the Western part of the Peninsula had Celtic languages in pre-Roman times, as did England, France, and parts of Italy and Turkey), but Galician music is often claimed to be "Celtic." The same is true of the music of Asturias, Cantabria and that of Northern Portugal (some say even traditional music from Central Portugal can be labeled Celtic). Thus traditionalists and musicological scholars dispute that the "Celtic" lands have any folk connections to each other.

A strong case can be made that the similarities between the various musics called "Celtic" derive more from a common origin in the vernacular music of late medieval and early modern Europe than from any innate Celticity.[citation needed] But some call that giving too much importance to basic material, saying that the originality of a music is in the subtle transformation, by a people or a group of peoples, of material shared by larger communities..

Critics of the idea of modern Celtic music claim that the idea is the creation of modern marketing designed to stimulate regional identity in the creation of a consumer niche; June Skinner Sawyers, for example, notes that "Celtic music is a marketing term that I am using, for the purposes of this book, as a matter of convenience, knowing full well the cultural baggage that comes with it". The so-called "marketing" or "show-business" creation was popularized by the idealistic man who first (late 1960s) blended the music of all the Celtic countries with a modern touch in his recordings and concerts: the Breton Alan Stivell. Although this composer is one of the main modern promoters of this kind of music, he did not create the term.

[edit] Forms

Identifying "common characteristics" of Celtic music is problematic. Most of the popular musical forms now thought of as characteristically "Celtic" were once common in many places in Western Europe. There is debate over whether jigs were adapted from the Italian gigue, common during the baroque era,[2][3] for example, while polkas have their origin in Czech and Polish tradition.

On the other hand, there are musical genres and styles specific to each Celtic country, due in part to the influence of individual song traditions and the characteristics of specific languages. Strathspeys are specific to Highland Scotland, for example, and it has been hypothesized that they mimic the rhythms of the Scottish Gaelic language.[4]

[edit] Festivals

The Celtic music scene involves a large number of music festivals. Some of the most prominent include Festival Internacional do Mundo Celta de Ortigueira (Ortigueira, Galicia), Yn Chruinnaght (Isle of Man), Celtic Colours (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia), Celtic Connections (Glasgow, Scotland) and Festival Interceltique de Lorient (Lorient, Brittany).

[edit] Modern adaptations

The first modern adaptations in the 1960s were those of artists such as Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention in England, Planxty, Clannad, Horslips in Ireland, and Alan Stivell in Brittany, who made some of the first attempts at creating pan-Celtic modern popular music and some of whom are still now exploring new kinds of Celtic fusion; combining traditional acoustic instruments with amplified ones, adding modern beat patterns, and composing modern harmonies for traditional tunes.

Beginning in 1982 with The Pogues' invention of Celtic folk-punk, there has been a movement to incorporate Celtic influences into other genres of music. Bands such as Seven Nations and Needfire do American adaptions in the form of Celtic rock. Composer Ciarán Farrell blends classical influences with rock, jazz, folk and traditional Irish styles, using different combinations of instruments and orchestras to play his music. Marxman, an Irish-Jamaican hip hop group that gained notoriety in Britain in the late 1980s and was banned from the BBC for including I.R.A. slogans in their music, sampled traditional Celtic instruments in several of their songs. Sinéad O'Connor has also been active in the fusion movement and incorporated a wide range of modern and traditional influences into her music. Enya adds her vocal sound to music with Celtic sounds and themes on her album The Celts; Moya Brennan, former lead singer of Clannad, was featured in the soundtrack of the film King Arthur;[5] and Loreena McKennitt made an album called The Book of Secrets where she first travelled and researched the places that inspired the Celtic style of music on the album. More recently, the Irish choral group Anúna have been very successful with their unusual blend of choral, Celtic and classical music, seen and heard on the "Celtic Origins" project that received widespread media exposure throughout the USA in 2007.

In 1978 Runrig recorded an album in Scottish Gaelic. In 1992 Capercaillie recorded "A Prince Among Islands", the first Scottish Gaelic language record to reach the UK top 40. Since about 2005, Oi Polloi (from Scotland) have recorded in Scottish Gaelic. Mill a h-Uile Rud (a Scottish Gaelic punk band from Seattle) recorded in the language in 2004.

The Welsh language is less well represented[citation needed], though the lyrics of such bands as Ceredwen, which fuses traditional instruments with trip-hop beats, are sung entirely in Welsh.

Today there are Celtic-influenced sub genres of virtually every type of popular music, from electronica to rock and metal, hip hop to punk rock, new age, pop, and even reggae. Collectively these modern interpretations of Celtic music are sometimes referred to as Celtic fusion.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ translation by Steve Winick
  2. ^ The origins of Irish traditional music
  3. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=Ho9DONbTpbwC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=origin+jig+italy&source=web&ots=GWuCTr0v3a&sig=btJv8eysnsgfSzFiqbQqRwijFvw
  4. ^ Traditional Scottish Gaelic singing
  5. ^ Moya Brennan Releases EMI Signature CMG Sparrow Celtic Music - ChristianMusicPlanet.com

[edit] References

[edit] External links



v • d • e
Folk music
v • d • e
Celts
Ancient Celts
and Celtic studies
Modern Celts
and Celtic Revival
Languages
Celtic Festivals
Lists