Genres of music having a historical connection and significance

[JeffD]

I have a gigantic preference for a tune over a song. With a song one can get locked into what the words mean, and its hard to find other ways of enjoying it. While a tune is open to a million interpretations and associations.

Its a never ending journey. Some of the speed bumps along the way - well the biggest is that some of the best music is hard to love upon first hearing. Sometimes it takes a little experience or history or context, or listening to finally "get it", at which point you can fall in love with it. I was this way with serious tango music.

So for example, tango is very rhythmic but I found it hard, at first, to appreciate, and now I love it. Ragtime, by comparison, is very rhythmic, and I fell in love immediately, and now I love it.

So if you love a particular kind of music and feel a connection right off, well that's great. When you go after the history and context it can only strengthen the connection. But be open to the idea that you might not like it right away but down the road when you have some context and history it may rock your world.

The second biggest speed bump is how obscure or how popular a genre is. I try very hard to ignore this. I think it is just as ridiculous to go after a type of music because it is obscure or to dislike a type of music right off because it is popular, as it is to sycophantically follow the popular genres. Try and figure out what you like, whatever it is, for what ever reason. The connection is very personal, and has (or should have) very little to do with what most people think.

[Jim Garber]

In my musical journey I was first attracted to the instrument (fiddle, then mandolin) and was then drawn to the genres of music that were played on them. Since I was just starting out with only a background in guitar and piano, fiddle tunes were where I began. There was a New England style teacher up in Cambridge who ran a group class so I got to know other beginners. Thru them I learned about the various styles of fiddling. The other thing that put me in the direction I ended up was the social aspect of the music. I met some wonderful lifelong friends playing old time and other musics. I think it all feeds on itself: learn and play the music, get obsessed with it and learn more about it and play more. Got to festivals, parties etc where others are playing the music you love.

[Alex Orr]

In terms of jazz...

That's a really big genre, and to some extent (in it's earliest days) it also included a LOT of popular blues artists.

I never really appreciated, nor really knew anything about, hot jazz and big band stuff until I moved to DC and started tuning into Hot Jazz Saturday Night on WAMU. Every week, for decades, Rob Bamberger has hosted this wonderful show that is not just an amazing tour through the world of jazz from the '20s-'40s, but is also a serious classroom on the air, as Bamberger is also a highly regarded jazz historian. I'm not saying you can't appreciate all this wonderful music without the corresponding history, but being both a history and music geek, I found it really helped to draw me into this wonderful music. Give it a listen, each week's episode is available to stream for the week that follows.

[EdHanrahan]

For historical perspective in the =GRAND= scheme of things, let's remember that at first there were only "folks" running around looking for food and hiding from saber-toothed tigers. Thus, there was only "folk" music.

Then they got hungry(er) and implored the Bringer of Rain and/or Herds and/or Schools of Fish to look kindly on them (and, hey, could ya maybe stop hurling down so much lightening?), and so there was religious music.

Of course, the earliest folk and religious music sounded nothing like the Weavers or a Bach organ piece but, for 95% of recorded history and 100% of pre-recorded history, Folk and Religious were the only available genres. All else is derivative (yes, even Bluegrass!), and only occupies the last 1% or 2% of human history.

Then again, YMMV!

[neil argonaut]

Oh, don't get me started on the modern "Celtic" stuff! Much of it is indeed New-Age poppycock with absolutely no real tie to history or culture. And it's not just in the music, either. There is an entire industry of "Celtic" stuff that's meant to appeal primarily to Americans who want a romanticized image of a faraway land, without actually having to know anything about it. It often becomes a mish-mash of Scottish and Irish traditions (maybe some occasional Welsh thrown in for variety), but in a way that neither Scots nor Irish recognize it. Much of this phenomenon is rooted in the revivalist "Pan-Celtic" solidarity movement, which is as much political as it is commercial. This, for example, is largely responsible for Americans thinking that the Irish wear kilts.

Of course, when it comes down just to the music, it doesn't necessarily mean that a person can't enjoy it for what it is. But a lot of people tend to let Celtic music speak to their soul, as if they are somehow tied by ancient blood to this vision of a culture which, in fact, is a recent invention. People WANT to be emotional about cultural music.

But anyway, there are a lot of labels applied to "Celtic" or even "Irish Traditional" music which aren't necessarily correct either. And while a lot of it is GREAT music, and no history is needed in order to appreciate it, I do think that in many cases knowing the history of a particular song is very important. Songs like The Foggy Dew or The Skye Boat Song come from completely different places, in completely different times. Each has a history that goes far beyond the words, and it can be very enlightening to research the background of them. For me, it does make the music more important and weighty when I know what it's really about.

Don't want to be overly pedantic, but some Irish folk do wear kilts; admittedly not nearly as many as scottish folk, but I have seen Irish marching bands wearing them, and as far as I know I think it used to be common in Irish dancing too.

I'd tend to agree the "celtic" label is widely misused by and aimed at certain americans, but I can see also how it's easier to say than "music from Ireland, Scotland, north of England and sometimes Galicia, Bretagne, etc" and I suppose it's more accurate than using "Irish Traditional Music" to refer to music that's often from Scotland. I find when I'm in mainland Europe people always call it "celtic music" , and certainly there is a massive connection musically, linguistically, culturally and historically between Scotland and Ireland.
And out of interest, I'm quite sure "the foggy dew" is adapted from an English folk tune originally.

[M.Marmot]

and that the harmonic basis of Richard Hell's "Blank Generation" can be traced back as least as far as King Henry VIII of England's "Greensleeves" (the band combines Blank Generation with Monk's "Friday the Thirteenth" - Punk meets subversive Bebop all wrapped in a rennaissance gossamer; again something with which to entertain an audience).
I'm babbling...

My favourite take on Greensleeves melody would be 'Port of Amsterdam' by Jacques Brel... i loved the song from the first time i heard it heard it covered by Scott Walker, and i love the original version even more when i eventually got to hear it, and then only a few months ago i read that it was based on Greensleeves - at first i thought it could'nt be and then i started to sing them both out and sure enough they're both basically the same.

[foldedpath]

I have a gigantic preference for a tune over a song. With a song one can get locked into what the words mean, and its hard to find other ways of enjoying it. While a tune is open to a million interpretations and associations.

Being an instrumentalist is also a good way to side-step the "authenticity" question, in some genres where that can be an issue due to racial or cross-cultural factors. As an instrumentalist, the only things that matter are your technical chops and your understanding of the genre, in the service of the tune. Nobody will care if you don't sing with the vocal inflection of an itinerant black musician in 1930's Mississippi, or like Sinéad O'Connor singing "Foggy Dew" with the Chieftains, if you're not singing in the first place.


WRT the "historical connection and significance" question... Usually the history of the tune or the original lyrics of the song version doesn't influence my instrumental playing, although there have been a few exceptions. When my fiddler S.O. and I first started learning and playing "Josefin's Dopvals" together, we played it as a slow, somewhat wistful-sounding waltz. That's how we heard it played in local OldTime circles. We later learned it was composed by Roger Tallroth (of the Vasen band) for his niece’s christening. There is nothing sad or wistful about a christening, so we started to play it a bit faster and livelier. More of an upbeat, happy feeling. The tune works either way, I think, but knowing the background steered us into one interpretation over the other.

Knowing the history may not help with other tunes, especially ones written on a sad occasion. There are only so many ways to play "sadly" without slipping into mawkishness. For example, the Shetland tune "Da Slockit Light" was written one night when the composer noticed fewer and fewer house lights at night in his home town, as people had moved away, and this was also shortly after his wife died, no less. It sounds a bit sad and wistful if you just play it fairly straight. It doesn't need any extra layers of syrup, like the way some fiddlers like to milk this tune in sessions.

[JeffD]

I guess I was asking: "For all these unique flavors and styles of music, is it something you had to be there for to fully understand?"

I sincerely hope not. Otherwise we are all caught in our own experiences and unable to relate to anything we haven't experienced. The music can and should evoke feelings in the general listener.

Do we have to have lost someone in a disaster to understand tragedy? Do we have to committed foul murder (or at least be named Willie?) in order to "get" the ballad? Do we all have to have mined coal, or crashed a railroad train, or be a horribly drunk, or unemployed or divorced or homeless. I hope not.

[bjewell]

Interestingly, this new icon of the Celtic world is known collectively as 'The Windswept Woman'. She is pictured variously posed in a rocky, craggy place (like the coast of New Zealand), or a lush green place (like a potato field in Idaho).

The ones in the potato field can give ya some trouble lad, and don't ye forget it...

[bjewell]

Don't want to be overly pedantic, but some Irish folk do wear kilts; admittedly not nearly as many as scottish folk, but I have seen Irish marching bands wearing them, and as far as I know I think it used to be common in Irish dancing too.

I'd tend to agree the "Celtic" label is widely misused by and aimed at certain Americans, but I can see also how it's easier to say than "music from Ireland, Scotland, north of England and sometimes Galicia, Bretagne, etc" and I suppose it's more accurate than using "Irish Traditional Music" to refer to music that's often from Scotland. I find when I'm in mainland Europe people always call it "Celtic music" , and certainly there is a massive connection musically, linguistically, culturally and historically between Scotland and Ireland.
And out of interest, I'm quite sure "the foggy dew" is adapted from an English folk tune originally.

I post under "bjewell" honoring my wonderful grandfather Bertram E. Jewell (b:1888) who did some incredible things in his life. But I'm a Quinn and for the most part Irish, with a mix of Scots, Welsh, English and German like so many other Americans.

It's a slippery slope when we talk about Americans vs. Celts as many, many if not most "Americans" have a substantial amount of Celt blood in their veins, regardless of skin color. One of the little known facts is that the English were selling Irish slaves in the Caribbean before they went on to Africa. The starvations of the mid-18th Century were horrific and those Irish lucky enough to board a boat, not die on the journey or perish in the New World have a deep longing for the roots that were cut by the English.

I've had Irish guys make snide remarks about the "plastic Irish" of the USA while living in Tokyo. And I saw one of those fine fellows get his butt kicked by an American of Irish descent who took great exception to the gentleman’s smirky patter in a bar one night.

So-called "Celt" music seems more often than not played by non-Celts. The Japanese have some terrific so-called Celt bands. I've seen many different peoples play the same 50 tunes in California. And you are right; most "Celt" music is hippie Bee-Ess...

[neil argonaut]

Yeah don't get me wrong, I wasn't by any means trying to have a dig at Americans of Irish or Scottish descent generally, but rather at those here who pander to the Americans (whether of Scottish/Irish descent or not) who think we all wear kilts and run about in castles all the time, who misrepresent and warp the culture to try and make money out of tourism.

[Loretta Callahan]

I'm with you on being able to relate to the Blues, BlindBard. Same with Appalachian, Texas Swing, Bluegrass, and Cajun music. Like food, that music feeds me ... feeds my soul, if you will. It comes from land that I understand and feel. (16 generations before me are all from the South). My listening and playing favorite genre, however, since it was introduced to me, is Irish Traditional. I don't use the word Celtic because I don't really know what it means.

Irish Traditional, along with Scottish and a bit of Norwegian tunes speak to me directly ... in a way I really get ... in the same way I understand the blues, etc.. Those Irish tunes trigger music that's already living in my body and head. The historical connection to me has to do with how it rattles my DNA. It's like my ancestors are talking to me.

Don't want to rain on anybody else's parade, but the harpy, Enya, synthesizer type of music ... even if it's played on a fiddle, bouzouki or a flute makes my skin crawl. If Irish trad doesn't stay within a certain kind rhythm, nuance, and lilt, etc. (I don't have the talent to describe technically what those things are) ... it can migrate to the very insipid ... which throws me into a severe sugar shock. If that music came from my ancestors ... heaven help them .... my meaner ancestors just might have done bad things to them.

[Perry Babasin]

Martin Carthy

[M.Marmot]

Martin Carthy

Martin Carthy?

I'll see your Martin Carthy and raise you one Dave Swarbrick

[TheBlindBard]

I left for the day to go bowling (Meh,) and come back to a wonderful topic, where to begin...
I am glad that so many people have enjoyed the topic, and now that I'm reading through it, really enjoying allt he experiences and stories people have shared.
As far as tunes over songs go, I'd like to look into that a little more. Are there any strictly instrumental tunes people would recommend (Irish or not) and their personal interpretations of these tunes?
The only tune I can truly play well: For the Star of County Down, to me, the tune feels like something you could dance to, just, the mental image I get in my head when playing this is a beautiful girl dancing down a dirt road with a guy just shocked at his fortune to love somebody so beautiful. The first few parts (the deeper ones), to me, seem a bit like, something trial and error, the guy's trying to impress this girl, perhaps. The part when it gets higher-pitched makes me think of joy, a happy little jig, then to come back around, feeling genuinely content.

Reading topics like this truly make me proud to be a musician and have the ability to play a couple of instruments. There's just something beautiful about it, far better than painting.

[Beanzy]

Projecting yourself into the frame of mind of those of another time or place can be helpful in getting you to hone in on the essential elements of a genre, but it always runs the danger of being just an exercise in romantic fantasy and self-projection.
If we were to really experience music just as previous times and other cultures would have we would need to find a way to shed our other experiences and knowledge that we have accumulated in our modern existence. Could you ever 'unhear' the blues or the sophistication of modern musical craftsmanship once heard? It is a very useful exercise to try when listening to any music but the result will always be a personal interpretation through your past experiences and knowledge.

I think it's really important to understand how short the historical in music goes and how important it is not to attach too much weight to 'authenticity' in any one genre.
Lyrics go back further than tunes in terms of the accuracy of our knowledge but both are often based on best guesses of academic study. Given even the interpretation of the earliest written chants is based on modern re-interpretations, we have no authentic way of hearing the actual tunes grabbed the Ancient Greeks, rocked the Roman Empire, and have not heard the ditties that distracted the Dark Ages. Our various musical genres are a result of much of it, but the modern interpretation and adaption is what we have for real.
History is important for understanding and emotionally / intellectually satisfying, but I've yet to tap my foot to a thesis (I bet I could to some)

The way I see it every spring the pretty flowers will grow in the mulch from last years dead ones.
Although it takes a good soil to grow beautifully scented flowers, I wouldn't be bending down to sniff the dirt they grow in unless I was a horticulturalist.

As with scent a tune will conjure up images and emotions for you and that is when the real timeless magic happens.
I don't think those human reactions will have changed much for an awful long time and they seem to be shared across cultures.
However some people will prefer the lightly scented wild flowers in their natural surroundings and others the full-bodied blooms cultivated by the specialist and that is the same with music.

We're at an interesting place in history in being pioneers in being able to accurately access the experiences of others who are separated by vast distances or even dead and gone. We're making connections and cross-pollinating in directions no one else has been able to up to the modern era.

[TheBlindBard]

... you put it so beautifully, and I agree with everything you said above. Many good points.
Thank you for such a beautiful and poetic response

[Tobin]

Don't want to be overly pedantic, but some Irish folk do wear kilts; admittedly not nearly as many as scottish folk, but I have seen Irish marching bands wearing them, and as far as I know I think it used to be common in Irish dancing too.

These Irish kilts are an adaptation of Scottish national dress, as an attempt to reinvent and reinvigorate Gaelic culture in Ireland. The driving force behind it was Irish nationalism, and a desire to establish some sense of separation from English culture. There is ample research and documentation showing that this was a politically-motivated campaign, with the main players behind it being very well known. Here is a decent primer on the invention of the Irish kilt.

So yes, you will see an occasional Irish kilt, especially with military or civic pipe bands. But it is a fairly recent invention, and not part of traditional Irish culture. The same applies to much of the music that is foisted upon the ears of modern listeners of "Celtic" music.

Of course, it should not dissuade people from enjoying good music. If it's good music, it doesn't matter where it came from. But as this thread is about "historical connection and significance", I do think it is always in the best interest of posterity to understand what's real and what's not.

[Randi Gormley]

The folk music of the past (the Dark Ages, the Greeks etc) may be a closed book, but the official music occasionally survives; I'd like to think that some of the prayers I chant when I indulge in religion go back to the beginning thousands of years before; when I was in college, I took up for a short time with a music group that sang (and taught you how to read) Gregorian (and other) chants from original manuscripts from the Middle Ages. There is a sense of history when you look at and make music from some of these things, to my mind.

[Polecat]

I'm about as comfortable with the word "Authentic" as I am with "Celtic" (see my last post): I am reliably informed that Mozart's contemporaries would have recognized "Rondo a la turca" as "Turkish Music" (and after all, Austrians of the period had had direct if somewhat reluctant contact with Turks on various occasions). If I compare Mozart's composition with my idea of Turkish music (and I've discussed it with a couple of Turkish acquaintances - they're not uncommon in my part of Germany), I find little resemblance, either with the classical or any of the vernacular music I've come across. Does that make "Rondo a la turca" inauthentic? its authentic Amadeus alright. Same goes for Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk" - I find the connection to Mozart very tenuous, if at all present, but it's a fine piece of cool jazz (if a trifle frantic). Authenticity depends upon the stated aims of the music (and who does that?) for me, the point of the music I play is to affect others emotionally, be it to make them get up and dance or shut up and listen. I'll use any device or trick I know to achieve this aim - whether or not it is "legit" within the genre. By all accounts, Billmon Roe was not above adopting the same strategy (that's one genre I don't attempt to play, Bluegrass), and Robert Johnson, for all that he is revered as "King of the Delta Bluesmen" saw himself first and foremost as a singer and entertainer (songs like "Malted Milk" or "Red Hot" could not by any stretch defined as "Blues", to my way of thinking). Does it matter? I don't think so. Any music that is competently executed and comes from the Heart is valid.
At the same time, the more you know, stylistically, culturally and historically, the better equipped you will be to realize your vision of music. And that vision is very personal - compare, for example, the acoustic styles of two white englishmen, Eric Clapton and Harry Manx, who both play music which has its roots in the Mississipi Delta, one through a study of "early blues style" which is so intense as to be almost academic, the other through learning from some indian dude (I don't mean that in any derogatory sense). Both produce emotionally charged music, but which is closer to the source? And who cares?
On a slightly pedantic note, the kilt was actually invented by a lancastrian (=english) industrialist for his imported scottish workforce because he judged their traditional garb (the plaid) too dangerous to wear in a factory.

[SincereCorgi]

The folk music of the past (the Dark Ages, the Greeks etc) may be a closed book, but the official music occasionally survives...

While we have some notation for some early liturgical music, it unfortunately can tell us little about basic things like tempo, pronunciation and timbre. One interesting medieval musicology experiment I read about was a fella who trained his group of singers in contemporary Macedonian shepherd music, then recorded a lot of early polyphony using those inflections. The idea was that whatever things sounded like in the middle ages, it would be so completely foreign to modern ears that this might at least capture some of the strangeness.

[M.Marmot]

In terms of musical recreations - i do like Benjamin Bagby and Sequentia's attempts to revitalise Medieval and Early music.

I was more than impressed by Mr Bagby's take on 'Beowulf' - where he retells the story of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon, just himself on stage, storytelling and improvising with an early Anglo-Saxon harp.

I know that for some it may all sound a bit pretentious - but apparently the resulting performance is as visceral and entertaining as anything else you may imagine.

http://bagbybeowulf.com/press/index.html

[JeffD]

One of the things I like about old time music is that it is not all that bluesy. I especially like the stuff that came into being before most musicians were exposed to the blues. Our culture is so saturated with blues progressions and riffs - its ubiquitous. Its lost its impact for becoming familiar. At least to me.

When the music I like is called "corny" or hokey, what is really meant is that there is a distinct lack of any overtly blues progressions. I think the Carter Family original Wildwood Flower perfectly catches this. There is so much that is beautiful and wonderful about that tune that you can see and hear and feel because without the garlic of the blues the subtle flavors, the dill and cilantro, come through.

[Gelsenbury]

I'd tend to agree the "celtic" label is widely misused by and aimed at certain americans, but I can see also how it's easier to say than "music from Ireland, Scotland, north of England and sometimes Galicia, Bretagne, etc" and I suppose it's more accurate than using "Irish Traditional Music" to refer to music that's often from Scotland.

That's exactly how I feel too. It may be best not to open the can of worms about whether Northumbrian music is more English or more Scottish. The Celtic label is hugely problematic when you try to define it intellectually. But it will do the job if you just want to impart a feel for what kind of tune you mean.

Don't want to rain on anybody else's parade, but the harpy, Enya, synthesizer type of music ... even if it's played on a fiddle, bouzouki or a flute makes my skin crawl.

The thing is that Enya, by virtue of her own CV, probably has more right to defend what she does as traditionally inspired than almost any of us. We can be sure that the people who originally played these melodies didn't have synthesizers. But nor did they have mandolins. Folk music gets reinvented by everyone who plays it - that's just its nature. And it's not just about which instruments you use. More than once, I have read on these pages that there is a current trend to play Celtic (there's that word again) dance tunes faster than used to be the case. I'm sure there are parallel debates about the lilt of the rhythm, phrasing, even different keys or variations on the melody. But all the comparisons we can make are relatively short-term because we simply have no audio recording of O'Carolan or his contemporaries. Enya and the Dubliners are both modern interpreters of folk music, as is anyone else who plays these tunes.

By the way, I even feel nostalgic when people talk about "synthesizers". There's a musical tradition there too, albeit a much more recent one.

[M.Marmot]

By the way, I even feel nostalgic when people talk about "synthesizers". There's a musical tradition there too, albeit a much more recent one.

You are not alone - there has been a revival of synth bands in recent years and various electronic dance musicians/producers have been ladling on the synths on their tracks, attempting to catch some of that old time (or should that be new order?) feel.

I don't know why but i went through a spell a few months ago of hunting down various albums that employed synths - anything from Kraftwerk to Kavinsky... it was a blast.