SOME REMARYS ON IRISH MBSIC

Most of the music with which this book is concerned assumed its present
form in the 18th century. It is not possible to pinpoint precisely the persons,
places, or moments of genesis, as the music was (and is still) chiefly trans-
mitted without the use of written notation. Also, Irish music was the creation
of a rural peasantry that did not possess the means or probably even the
desire to document the rise and spread of their misic. Few of the persons who
composed the tunes have ever been positively identified, and one can only
conclude that the bulk of Irish music is the product of thousands of anonymous
folk musicians scattered across the Irish countryside.
Irish music did not arise in a vacuum, however. Several of the slow airs
and harp tunes in the current repertoire were undoubtedly composed by taking
already existing pieces of music and reworking them—changing the meter and
rhythm, reshaping the melodic structure, altering the tonality, adding new
sections and deleting others. The 18th century was a period of social upheaval
and cultural transition in Ireland; with the collapse of the old Gaelic social
order, the country was laid open to a wave of new influences in all areas of
society, and Irish music naturally reflected the contemporary state of affairs.
Scholars have presented convincing evidence showing that the reel is derived
from Scotland and the jig and hornpipe from England; indeed, a number of Scots
and English tunes are still found in the current repertoire. The professional
travelling dancing masters who flourished in 18th-century Ireland also had a
part in the creation of new tune genres, as new dance patterns required new
(or at least rearranged) dance accompaniments. Whatever the original sources
of the various musical forms, the great majority of individual pieces in the
tradition were composed by Irish fiddlers, pipers, flute and tinwhistle
players in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The fact that new tunes are still
being composed by Irish musicians working within the established traditional
framework demonstrates the stability and vitality of the idiom, as well as its
capacity to adapt to changing social contexts.
Irish music is fundamentally a tradition of solo performance in which the
melodic line is of paramount importance. Though Irish music is often performed
by more than one instrument and is frequently provided with harmonic and
percussive accompaniment, a performance of a tune by a single musician is an
entity complete in itself. Over the last decade new experiments in the ensemble
performance of Irish music have had a noticeable impact on the tradition by
promoting new tumes, tume settings, and styles, and by serving as a vehicle for
acquainting the general public with Irish music. Despite the recent interest in
the innovative possibilities inherent in the ensemble arrangement of Irish music
and song, the solo musician and singer remain the essence of the tradition.