Irish Folk Songs - Music For Dancing

Music For Dancing

Irish traditional music was largely meant (to the best of our current knowledge) for dancing at celebrations for weddings, saint's days or other observances. Tunes are most usually divided into two eight-bar strains which are each played as many times as the performers feel is appropriate; Irish dance music is isometric. (16 measures are known as a "step", with one 8 bar strain for a "right foot" and the second for the "left foot" of the step. Tunes that are not so evenly divided are called "crooked".) This makes for an eminently danceable music, and Irish dance has been widely exported abroad.

Traditional dances and tunes include reels (4/4), hornpipes (4/4 with swung eighth notes), and jigs (double and single jigs are in 6/8 time), as well as imported waltzes, mazurkas, polkas, and highlands or barndances (a sort of Irish version of the Scottish strathspey). Jigs come in various other forms for dancing — the slip jig and hop jig are commonly written in 9/8 time, the slide in 12/8. (The dance the hop jig is no longer performed under the auspices of An Coimisiun.) The forms of jig danced in hardshoe are known as double or treble jigs (for the doubles/trebles performed with the tip of the hardshoe), and the jigs danced in ghillies/pomps/slippers are known as light jigs.

Polkas are a type of 2/4 tune mostly found in the Sliabh Luachra area, at the border of Cork and Kerry, in the south of Ireland. Another distinctive Munster rhythm is the Slide, like a fast single jig in 12/8 time. The main differences between these types of tunes are in the time signature, tempo, and rhythmic emphasis. It should be noted that, as an aural music form, Irish traditional music is rather artificially confined by time signatures, which are not really capable of conveying the particular emphasis for each type of tune. An easy demonstration of this is any attempt to notate a slow air on the musical stave. Similarly, attempts by classically trained musicians to play traditional music by reading the common transcriptions are almost unrecognizable - the transcriptions exist only as a kind of shorthand.

The concept of 'style' is of large importance to Irish traditional musicians. At the start of the last century, distinct variation in regional styles of performance existed. With increased communications and travel opportunities, regional styles have become more standardised, with soloists aiming now to create their own, unique, distinctive style, often hybrids of whatever other influences the musician has chosen to include within their style.

Due to the importance placed on the melody in Irish music, harmony should be kept simple (although, fitting with the melodic structure of most Irish tunes, this usually does not mean a "basic" I-IV-V chord progression), and instruments are played in strict unison, always following the leading player. True counterpoint is mostly unknown to traditional music, although a form of improvised "countermelody" is often used in the accompaniments of bouzouki and guitar players. Much of the local character of a style comes from the type of decoration that is added to a tune.