Celtic music: Encyclopedia - Celtic music

Celtic music

Celtic music is a broad grouping of musical genres that evolved out of the folk musical traditions of the Celtic peoples of Western Europe. The term Celtic music may refer to both orally-transmitted traditional music and recorded popular music with only a superficial resemblance to folk styles of the Celtic peoples.

Most typically, the term Celtic music is applied to the music of Ireland and Scotland, because both places have produced well-known distinctive styles which actually have genuine commonality and clear mutual influences. The music of Wales, Cornwall, Isle of Man, Brittany, Northumbria and Galicia are also frequently considered a part of Celtic music, the Celtic tradition being particularly strong in Brittany, where Celtic festivals large and small take place throughout the year. Finally, the music of ethnically Celtic peoples abroad are also considered, especially in Canada and the United States.

Celtic music - Divisions

In Celtic Music: A Complete Guide, June Skinner Sawyers acknowledges six Celtic nationalities divided into two groups according to their linguistic heritage. The Q-Celtic nationalities are the Irish, Scottish and Manx peoples, while the P-Celtic groups are the Cornish, Bretons and Welsh peoples. Sawyer also mentions the Galician people in the P-Celtic group (Breton was spoken in Galicia during the Middle Ages), though the long-dead Celtic language of Galicia (Gallaecian) is normally included in the Q-Celt group with the rest of Celtiberian languages.

The Breton musician Alan Stivell uses a similar dichotomy, between the Gaelic (Irish and Scottish) branch and the Brythonic (Breton and Welsh) group, which differentiate "mostly by the extended range (sometimes more than two octaves) of Irish and Scottish melodies and the closed range of Breton and Welsh melodies (often reduced to a half-octave), and by the frequent use of the pure pentatonic scale in Gaelic music" ^[1].

Celtic music - Definition debate

At issue is the lack of many common threads uniting the "Celtic" peoples listed above. While the ancient Celts undoubtedly had their own musical styles, these have grown and evolved to the point where considering any modern styles reminiscent of ancient Celtic music is misleading. There is also tremendous variation between Celtic regions. Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany have living traditions of language and music, whereas Cornwall and the Isle of Man have only revivalist movements that have yet to take hold. Galicia has no Celtic language (Galician is a Romance language closest to Portuguese), but Galician music is often claimed to be "Celtic." Thus traditionalists and most musicological scholars dispute that the "Celtic" lands have any folk connections to each other. A strong case can be made that the similarities between the various musics called "Celtic" derive more from a common origin in the vernacular music of late mediaeval and early modern Europe than from any innate Celticity.

Many critics of the idea of modern Celtic music claim that the idea is the creation of modern marketing designed to stimulate regional identity in the creation of a consumer niche; June Skinner Sawyers, for example, notes that "Celtic music is a marketing term that I am using, for the purposes of this book, as a matter of convenience, knowing full well the cultural baggage that comes with it".

Celtic music - Forms

Identifying "common characteristics" of Celtic music is problematic. Most of the popular musical forms now thought of as characteristically "Celtic" were once common in many places in Western Europe. Jigs were adapted from Italian music, for example, and polkas have their origin in Czech and Polish tradition.

On the other hand, there are musical genres and styles specific to each Celtic country, due in part to the influence of individual song traditions and the characteristics of specific languages. Strathspeys are specific to Highland Scotland, for example, and mimic the rhythms of the Scottish Gaelic language.

Celtic music - Festivals

The Celtic music scene involves a large number of music festivals. Some of the most prominent include Festival Internacional do Mundo Celta de Ortigueira (Ortigueira, Galicia), Celtic Colours (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia), Celtic Connections (Glasgow) and Festival Interceltique (Lorient, Brittany).

Celtic music - Modern Adaptations

Starting in 1982 with The Pogues invention of Celtic folk-punk, there has been a movement to incorporate Celtic influences into other genres of music. Marxman, an Irish-Jamaican hip hop group that gained notoriety in Britain in the late 1980's and was banned from the BBC for including I.R.A. slogans in their music, sampled traditional Celtic instruments in several of their songs as well. Today there are Celtic-influenced sub genres of virtually every type of popular music, from House to Trance, Hip Hop to Punk Rock. Collectively these modern interpretations of Celtic music are sometimes referred to as Celtic Fusion.

Celtic music - Musicians

Some noteworthy "traditional" Celtic performers include The Chieftains, Silly Wizard, The Bothy Band, and Solas. Celtic Fusion groups include Manau, Emcee Lynx. Martyn Bennett, Dagda, The Pogues, Flogging Molly, Croft No Five, and many others.

Celtic music groups offers a more extensive list of Celtic musicians.

Celtic music - Notes

1. ^  translation by Steve Winick

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Celtic music", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki