Dance music that outlived the dances, and a body of song older than any of it, carried by ear from one player to the next for three hundred years. Here are the instruments, the tune types, and what actually happens in the corner of the pub — with honest dates, because some of the most Irish things in the room arrived within living memory.
Irish traditional music is dance music that outlived the dances, plus a body of song older and stranger than any of it. It is passed on by ear (one player to another, at a session or a kitchen table) and although it has been collected and printed since the eighteenth century, the printed version has never been the authority. Two players from different counties will play the same tune differently and both will be right.
The written record starts with the collectors. Edward Bunting notated the harpers at Belfast in 1792; George Petrie, James Goodman and others followed through the nineteenth century; and Chicago's chief of police, Francis O'Neill, an emigrant from Cork, assembled the largest collection of all — the tunes he gathered from Irish musicians in Chicago are still the reason many of them survive at all. The tradition has been saved by emigrants and policemen as much as by anyone at home.
After independence the music took on a second job as a symbol of the nation, which did it both good and harm. The good: Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, founded in 1951, built a teaching and competition structure, the Fleadh Cheoil, that now runs to more than 400 branches worldwide. The harm: a period when the music was official, respectable and slightly embalmed. What broke that open was the 1960s — Seán Ó Riada arranging traditional music for an ensemble, Ceoltóirí Chualann and then The Chieftains, and a generation who treated the tradition as living material rather than heritage.
Since then it has been unembarrassed. The Chieftains were named Ireland's Musical Ambassadors by the government in 1989 and won six Grammys; Riverdance began as a seven-minute interval act at the 1994 Eurovision in Dublin and turned into a global industry; and the session in the corner of a pub in Doolin or Miltown Malbay goes on exactly as before, largely indifferent to all of it.
Eight of them, each with what it is, how it is played in this music, and one honest note about its age. A tradition this old has taken in a great deal that is not.
A violin, played differently. Fiddlers often use steel strings for a brighter tone and sometimes a flatter bridge, and the music is learned by ear rather than from paper — which is the real difference between the two words for the same box.
Regional styles are strong enough to be identified in a few bars: the fast, driving bowing of Donegal, with its Scottish debts; the slower, heavily ornamented Sligo style; the sliding, polka-and-slide repertoire of Sliabh Luachra on the Cork–Kerry border.
Sources: Wikipedia — Fiddle ↗ · Wikipedia — Irish traditional music ↗
Ireland's national bagpipe, and the most complicated folk instrument in Europe. Bellows strapped to the waist and right arm fill the bag under the other elbow — so no blowing, which is why a piper can sing or talk while playing, and why the reeds get dry air instead of wet breath.
The chanter plays two full octaves, overblown for the upper one, and can be stopped dead against the knee for the staccato style. Drones and regulators add harmony; a full set takes years to make and longer to master.
Sources: Wikipedia — Uilleann pipes ↗
Not the modern silver flute: a conical-bore, simple-system wooden flute of the kind classical players used in the early nineteenth century and then abandoned. Irish musicians kept buying the cast-offs, and instrument makers now build new ones to the old pattern.
Its heartland is the mid-west (Roscommon, Leitrim, Sligo, south Fermanagh, east Galway, Clare and west Limerick) though it is played in every county.
Sources: Wikipedia — Irish flute ↗
Six holes, one octave and a bit, and the cheapest way into the tradition ever devised. A fipple flute, like a recorder; also called the penny whistle, which is roughly what it cost.
Almost every Irish child meets one in primary school, which makes it the instrument more Irish people have held than any other. In the hands of a player like Mary Bergin it is not a toy at all.
Sources: Wikipedia — Tin whistle ↗
A frame drum, 35 to 45 cm across for most players, with a goatskin head on one side and the other open so a hand inside can bend the pitch. Played with a double-ended beater called a tipper, or cipín.
One hand makes the rhythm and the other, pressing the skin from behind, makes the tone. Modern drums often have a mechanical tuning system, because a goatskin responds to weather and a session in a warm pub is a different instrument from a session on a wet afternoon.
Sources: Wikipedia — Bodhrán ↗
A free-reed instrument with buttons on both ends of a bellows, invented in England by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1829 and in Germany five years later. The Anglo concertina, which sounds a different note on the push and the pull, is the one Irish music took up.
It is the instrument of County Clare above all — cheap, portable, loud enough for a house dance, and sold in enormous numbers in the nineteenth century before being rediscovered by a new generation of players.
Sources: Wikipedia — Concertina ↗
The oldest and the most interrupted. The wire-strung cláirseach, played with the fingernails, was the instrument of the Gaelic nobility, and its players were professionals with legal status. When that order collapsed, the harpers went with it.
Modern Irish harping is a revival, mostly on gut or nylon strings, though wire-strung playing has been reconstructed too. The old technique was lost, not handed down.
Sources: Wikipedia — Celtic harp ↗ · Wikipedia — Belfast Harp Festival ↗
A Greek instrument, flat-backed and retuned, providing the chordal backing that older Irish music did not have. Johnny Moynihan of Sweeney's Men brought one into the music in the mid-1960s; Alec Finn brought in a three-course Greek one; Dónal Lunny had the first bouzouki built specifically for Irish music.
It gave the tradition an accompaniment instrument with drive rather than mere chords, and reshaped how bands sound. Guitar in DADGAD tuning does a related job.
Sources: Wikipedia — Irish bouzouki ↗
Tunes are short — two parts of eight bars, played two or three times through — and strung into sets that run one into the next without stopping. What distinguishes them is the time signature, and you can hear it in the first bar.
The session, seisiún, is how the music actually lives. A group of musicians gathers, usually in a pub, usually without a plan, and plays tunes together for their own pleasure. It is not a gig: there is no stage, no set list, often no payment, and the audience is incidental. Barry Foy's field guide defines it as musicians gathering to celebrate their common interest in the music in a relaxed, informal setting.
There is a shape to it even so. Somebody starts a tune and the rest join when they know it; tunes are played two or three times through and run into sets of two or three; a nod or a foot signals the change. Everyone plays the melody — this is a monophonic tradition, not a harmonic one, and the accompaniment instruments came late. A singer may be called for, and the room goes quiet for a song in a way it never does for a tune.
The etiquette is unwritten and real: do not start a tune you cannot finish, do not play over a singer, do not bring a bodhrán to a session that already has one, and if you do not know the tune, sit it out. Sessions are the reason the repertoire is shared across a whole country and a whole diaspora — a Clare tune turns up in Boston within the year, because someone played it and someone else picked it up.
Source: Wikipedia — Irish session ↗
Unaccompanied singing, usually in Irish, with long melodic phrases carrying heavy ornamentation, and regional styles that differ sharply between Connemara, Donegal and Munster. The songs run from love songs to laments to lullabies, and the singer's whole job is to carry the feeling of the words — which is why sean-nós is sung standing still, often with the eyes closed, and why a room shuts up for it.
Source: Wikipedia — Sean-nós song ↗
A living folk tradition of dance tunes (reels, jigs, hornpipes, polkas) and unaccompanied song, passed on mostly by ear rather than from written music. It is played on fiddle, flute, whistle, uilleann pipes, concertina, accordion, banjo, harp and bodhrán, usually in unison rather than in harmony.
The harp is the national emblem (it is on the coat of arms, the coins and the passport) but the uilleann pipes are the characteristic Irish bagpipe, and the fiddle is the most widely played instrument in the tradition.
'Old style': unaccompanied traditional singing, usually in Irish, with long melodic phrases and heavy ornamentation, and a strong focus on carrying the emotion of the song. Tomás Ó Canainn called it 'the key which opens every lock' in Irish music. Its origins are unknown but it is probably at least seven centuries old.
The time signature, and it is audible immediately. A reel is in 4/4, even and fast. A jig is in 6/8 and lilts in threes. A slip jig is in 9/8, and a hornpipe is in 4/4 like a reel but slower and swung.
Something like it is old (frame drums are ancient, and it may descend from a skin tray used for winnowing) but the bodhrán as a standard part of a session is a mid-twentieth-century development, promoted by Seán Ó Riada in the 1960s. That is why it attracts more jokes than any other instrument in the room.
Fleadh Cheoil means music festival: the annual competition and festival run by Comhaltas, held in a different town each year, with county and provincial rounds leading to the All-Ireland. The competitions are the formal part; the street sessions are what most people come for.
At sessions, which are free and happen year-round — Clare (Doolin, Miltown Malbay, Ennis), Galway city, Dingle, Donegal and Dublin all have well-known ones. The Willie Clancy Summer School in Miltown Malbay each July and the Fleadh Cheoil each August are the two biggest gatherings.
An informal gathering of musicians playing traditional tunes together, usually in a pub, for their own enjoyment rather than as a performance. There is no stage and usually no payment; players join in on tunes they know and sit out the ones they don't.
In principle yes, in practice with care. The unwritten rules matter: know the tune before joining it, follow whoever started it, never play over a singer, and one bodhrán is plenty. Ask before sitting in.
The Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin holds the largest collection of its kind in the world — recordings, sheet music, photographs — and a great deal of it is free online. This page links to it and takes nothing from anyone.
Is there a session in your town? Or a tune your family plays that nobody else seems to know? The tradition is kept by exactly that kind of local knowledge — tell us.
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