Traditional Irish Folk Music 2 Instrumentation Introduction

Instruments
Traditional Irish Folk music uses a wide range of instruments, some of which are more associated and common place than others.

Over time, as the music itself has evolved, more and more instruments have been incorporated and this has been for many reasons including the diaspora of the Irish themselves.So invasion, migration and trade may all have contributed to the evolution of the instrumentation used.

Quite interestingly there appears among academics to be a certain amount of disagreement regarding the preservation of Traditional Irish Folk music. The music tends to be passed on via an oral, look and learn system rather than a written notation one. This obviously creates a type of 'Chinese Whisper' scenario where by a musician in one geographic location may embellish a melody slightly differently to one from another location. As these embellishments are passed from musician to musician, a topographical map appears allowing historians to localise a song.

William H. Grattan Flood in his book 'A History of Irish Music'(Grattan Flood, 1905) discusses this disagreement.The start of chapter 5 'Irish Music Before the Anglo-Norman Invasion' has quite an interesting postulation about the Danish invasion period during the ninth to eleventh century. Whereby he states all of the ancient chronicles are in agreement about vandalism and destruction of art in Ireland, yet an Irish academic Dr George Sigerson (Sigerson, 1897) in his book  'The Bards of the Gael and Gall' offered the idea that the Norsemen actually helped preserve the arts.

Both of these books I plan on reading in depth and both are available online.

A History of Irish Music is available on the excellent Library Ireland website, which also contains a host of other books covering the Irish Culture.
http://www.libraryireland.com/IrishMusic/Contents.php

The Bards of the Gael and Gall is available on the Open Library website
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL24174000M/Bards_of_the_Gael_and_Gall

In the next post I will look at overall instrumentation.

Reference:
Grattan Flood, William H. (1905) A History of Irish Music. Dublin:Browne and Nolan. [online] Available at: http://www.libraryireland.com/IrishMusic/Contents.php (accessed: 26 September 2013).

Sigerson, G. (1897) Bards of the Gael and Gall. London: T. Fisher Unwin. [online] available at: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL24174000M/Bards_of_the_Gael_and_Gall (accessed: 26 September 2013).