Although its repertoire may seem conservative in form, the oral base of Irish traditional music allows it to be more fluid than written music.Īlthough some musicians and singers are folk composers in their own right, not all new compositions are accepted as part of the living tradition. Others learn from radio, television, sound recordings, and the Internet.

Some performers learn formally from written sources, as well as informally from experienced players. While traditional music has developed largely beyond the literate process, much of it has been written down. Experienced musicians are capable of memorizing up to five hundred pieces of music, some of which they play regularly, while others may lie dormant for years.

Irish traditional music is essentially oral in character and is transmitted from one generation to the next through a process of performance. It involves different types of singing, dancing, and instrumental music developed by Irish people at home and abroad over the course of several centuries. It is best understood as a broad-based genre, which accommodates a complex process of musical convergence, coalescence, and innovation over time. There is no ironclad definition of Irish traditional music. While their music may be traced to a rural dialect, a traveling piper, a faded manuscript, or an old gramophone record, Irish traditional musicians today command the avid attention of vast transnational audiences. Its intriguing dispersal from the kitchens and crossroads of the West of Ireland to the concert halls and recording studios of the New World has been propelled further by revolutions in mass media, popular culture, and international travel. Since then, it has put down roots in the towns and cities of Ireland, and in Irish and non-Irish communities in North America, South America, Europe, and Australasia. In its wake, the diaspora carried Irish music and song well beyond the rural cabins where Petrie transcribed during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The Great Irish Famine (1845–1852), which provided the context for Petrie’s observation, had a devastating impact on the topography of Irish traditional music, as well as the music makers who maintained it. He who would add to the stock of Irish melody must seek it, not in the halls of the great, but in the cabins of the poor.” They are insensitive to its beauty, for it breathed not their feelings and they resigned it to those from whom they took everything else. The upper classes are a different race – a race who possess no national music or, if any, one essentially different from that of Ireland. In 1855, the music collector George Petrie wrote that “the music of Ireland has hitherto been the exclusive property of the peasantry. Although Irish music’s eponymous home on the island of Ireland is still its creative center of gravity, this genre has expanded far beyond its ethnic, regional, and national origins.

Traditional irish music pub dublin