FireFly

A Glib Glossary
Author's Introduction
Dedication

1. Horning and Hollering into Hystery
• Their Origins and Where They Ended Up
2. Magic, Mythology, Meaning, Messed-Up
• Celtic Subjects and Predilections
• Magical Mankind
• The Bard is In Session
3. McHymns, McHums and McHoliness Galore
• Celtic Music Meets Christianity
4. Instrumental Voices
• Celtic-cultural Singing Specialties
5. Carrying that Tune
• Rhythms, Multicultural Measures, Reels, Jigs and Airs, Ornamentations, Dancing and Prancing
6. MultiCeltural Instruments, Part 1
• Bagpipes and Byblows
7. MultiCeltural Insturments, Part 2
• Strung-out, Percussed and Perverted
8. Craic in the Community
• From Bardic Circles to Big Festivals
9. Palaces, Patronage and Politics
• How Higher-Ups Affected Musicians
10. More Craic Composers and Composters
• Bards with Vision, Ladies a la Moan and More
11. The Great Celtic Collection Agency
• Hystery's Song Collectors and Competitors
12. Celtacholia: The Songs
• Song History, Themes, Incarnations and Trivia
13. Come West, Young Celt: Oh Canada!
• 17th-to-20th-Century Emigration to Canada, and Music from Cape Breton to Athabasca
14. Come West, Young Celt: Americay!
• 17th-to-20th-Century Emigration to the U.S., The Routes of Modern Country Music
15. Classi-Celts
• Celtophilic Classical Composers, from Mendelssohn to Macmillan
16. Celtic Night at the Movies
• Celt-infused Film Soundtrack 1930s to 2004
17. Rock 'n' Reel in the Homelands
• The Explosion of the Modern Celtic Music Scene in Britain, Ireland, Europe and Beyond
18. Rock 'n' Reel, New World: Celts are U.S.
• The Excitement of the Modern Celtic Music Scene throughout America
19. Rock 'N' Reel, New World: Can-Celts
• The Exhalation of the Modern Celtic Music Scene in Canada -- Cape Breton and Beyond
20. Riverdancing into the Future
• The Story and Tidal Wave of Riverdance, Michael Flatley's Transformation into Lord of the Dance, Competing Celtathons
• Closing: A Look Back, A Look Ahead

Index
About the Author
Copyright Notice
Other Sound and Vision books
Note from the Publisher

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Horning and Hollering into Hystery

Some time before 1000 BCE, the Celts rose up out of the headwaters of the Eastern European Danuvius or Danube River, named after the mother-goddess Danu. They shook themselves off before the sun, invented some weapons, tried out their voices, stamped their feet, drank a toast for posterity and were off.

This motley collection of Indo-European tribes with horned helmets and horrendous warhorns began to thunder and reel over most of the known world, stopping off for a role in Biblical times. In Paul's letter to the Galatians, Celts who had settled in Gaul, he urged them to "avoid idolatry, sorcery, hatred and murder." In other words, all the stuff that made for really good songs. Fortunately, the Celts seem to have ignored Paul's pleas, and musicians and music-lovers, parading pipe bands and dancers everywhere are reaping the benefits of that rebellion.

The ancient Celts were whooping it up in places like France, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Greece, possibly Africa and even China, but they left the longest-running musical evidence in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, The Isle of Man, Brittany and Celtic Spain, as well as ultimately in North America, from Newfoundland to Nashville.

Still, it's obvious the Celts were "doing it" with whomever they came across in their multicultural hystery tour. How else to explain the similarity of the mystical terms siddhartha (Hindu/Buddhist) and siddhe (hinterland-Irish)? Or the fact that the bad guy in Lord of the Dance is called Don Dorcha (dark lord), same way Brando was bowed to as Don Corleone in The Godfather?

First-century BCE scholar Diodorus thought the Celts were great dramatists if noisy and other people think they're just noisy, but they've given us a legacy of music that's universal, timeless, endlessly re-invented -- and does have some Ps and Qs. In Celtic linguistics, P stands for the Celtic "Brythonic" languages of Welsh, Cornish and Breton, and Q for Celtic "Goidelic" of Scottish, Irish and Manx, while Celtic-Spanish stands alone. There's a lot to be said about any of these lands, but a potty history follows, starting with:

IRELAND

Also known as Eire, Eireann, Em and Aisling, it first was settled by Celts called Milesians from Spain and Egypt and is famous for stepdancing, fairies called sidhe (shee), harps on beer bottles and warrior heroes known for their great lays, or ballads.

Music was a relative thing, with families like the O'Dalys, who were higher than anyone else in the 12th century, because they went back to Conn of the Hundred Battles in the second century. The O'Dalys were the type to split someone's head with an axe, then immediately sing a poem about it, and nothing could better illustrate the Celts' dual war-and-literature leanings.

This also was due to the parti-influences of Vikings and French knights who came muscling in to create some Pan-Celtic. By the 14th century or so, this musical melting pot began to suffer, when the Crown started passing statutes to clamp down on any music remotely Celtic, a recurring theme throughout this history.

It didn't quite work, and by the 18th century Irish music was a knotty tapestry of fiddling, piping and planxties, a kind of song blind harper Turlough O'Carolan wrote for his patrons. Many a modern Celt musician can thank Big Tur for his efforts, which were rescued by the great 19th-century song-collection agencies.

You'll hear stuff like this in the seisiun or "session," where musicians get together, often in a pub, and play their hearts out with whatever they can lay their hands on. This kind of thing, and get-togethers called ceilis (kay-lees), make for especially good craic.

SCOTLAND

It's the land of the Scotch measure, strathspey and Highland bagpipes. The first is a kind of rhythm (as well as a drink and a dirty look), the second both a tune and dance, and the third an instrument intended to make up for the country's ongoing lack of battle strategy.

The Scots came from Irish rovers known as Scotti who needed more space, so sailed east to end up in a place named Dalriada, after an early Irish king. Alternative history says Milesius of the Milesians wed an Egyptian princess named Scota, who had a child called Goidel, thus Scotland and Goidelism. Others pushed north from what's now England. However it came to be, they pounded down an identity in a welter of horns, harps and hysterics.

Occasionally warring with indigenous tribe the Picts, they became so musical that one 12th-century Norman news correspondent, Giraldus Cambrensis, thought the Scots actually excelled over Ireland in music. This was in spite of the fact they got hold of the bagpipes. These figure prominently in the history of the Scottish Stuart kings, and people like 18th-century Robert Burns, a poet who periodically remained sober enough to piece together songs for us to enjoy today.

Today there are plenty of Highland pipes, small-pipes, border pipes and reel pipes, and they've all found their way into the country's rock 'n' reel musical movement. If you'd prefer, you can go for the old parlor songs like Donald, Where's Yer Troosers? The Scots always did like an irrational anthem.

WALES

They may have wailed as they were pushed west over 1,000 years ago by successive waves of German-Saxons and French-Normans, but the Welsh -- Weahlas for "foreigners," as the Saxons called them -- got over it and just went on making music.

Inevitably, they came under the eye and ear of that itinerant archivist, Giraldus Cambrensis, who actually had some Welsh blood. Though he criticized his half-kin's houses, hair and the way they brushed their teeth, he had to admit they had the song-and-prophecy thing wrapped up.

One of Wales' biggest contributions to musical history is the grand Eisteddfod festival, where almost everything is unpronounceable. It almost died for all time when King Henry VIII pulled out his 1536 Act of Union to kill Welsh culture and language. The later Puritan-cum-Nonconformist religion movement also tried to shut everyone up.

In the 18th century, there was a revival in London, of all places. The Eisteddfod came back home, a national society was allowed to form around it, and the rest is hystery. Backing it was the long-running Welsh peculiarity of a harpers' genealogy, which has nothing to do with blood, but is more a continuity with the magical style of the old harpers. It's a certain something called tinc, you either have it or you don't, and it's the kind of movement that can't be obliterated.

Wales was given equality with England by the Welsh Language Act of 1973, but even before that they were learning some music from books (unlike their Irish and Scottish kith), so it's no wonder their wails are so well preserved.

CORNWALL; ENGLAND

The Cornish are another group pushed as far west as they could go, right to the southwest cutoff point of Land's End. Their mythology is full of islands that sank eons ago, and from which, if you're lucky, you can hear watery strains of music issuing forth.

On land, Cornwall has a few good works like its Bewnans Meriasek (Life of St. Meriasek). It's full of musical references like "Pipers, blow quickiy. We will, every son of a breast, go to dance." Thought to be the oldest surviving life of a Celtic saint in any Celtic language, it's a bright spot in a Cornish existence of getting called names, murdered, and driven to the sea. By the 1540s, these people also were told they had to speak, write and sing only in English, and then the Methodists got going on their holy cleaning sprees.

There were the inevitable stubborn holdouts, and that handy thing called "folk memory," so we do have some authentic Cornish music-and-miracle stuff left today. The Cornish Gorsedd High Seat festival is a gathering of bards who just can't keep quiet, because they've managed to resurrect something that died off around the 11th century. Troyls are musical get-togethers people took over from the trolls. And today, in amongst plenty of Cornish radical-trad stuff, there's a lot of ancient dancing. With metal-plated clog-bottoms on slate floors, you're guaranteed to make as much noise as possible. See? Definitely not "Seltic."

And as Cornwall is in England, we might as well mention that the rest of England is debatably Celtic. It did get some ancient Celts, Brigantes, who came from an old god-king named Breogan in what's now Spain, but it also is full of the descendents of invaders who drove the Celts west and north. Still, some Irish and others did come back centuries later in an immigration state of forgiveness, and put down roots music. The northeast region of Northumbria even invented its own bagpipes. The debate of England's Celticness is ongoing, but let's just say it's difficult to avoid being somewhat Celtic when you have Scotland, Ireland and Wales hemming you in, anyway.

ISLE OF MAN

Considering it's the oldest self-governing Celtic nation in the world, it's a shame the music hasn't been better known. But that's what you get when you're small and way out off the mainland. Still, as the Manx have gone through a bewildering array of Welsh, Scandinavian and Scottish rulers, it stands to reason they got all the musical influences.

The Isle of Man has a particular body of popular sacred music, Carvalyn Gajickagh, which sounds like your throat does after a night of festivities. Some of these carols are over 60 verses long. It's a good thing there's anything left at all, because the same old English Only rule came to be applied here in the mid 1800s. But when you have a Scotched-up Norse legacy and are named after the Celtic ocean god Manannan Mac Lir, you find a way to get around all this.

The Manx made merry with music all right, though one of their most famous songs, Ny Kiree fo Niaghtey, is not exactly a go-ahead-get-happy ditty -- it's about the loss of over 2,000 sheep during a bad winter storm. But sad or sassy, the Marix songs impressed the Scottish poet Burns enough to rave about them to a friend in 1794. It's not recorded how he felt about the idle piper on the island who apparently dreamed up the "Scottish" tearjerker All Ye Banks and Braes 0'Bonny Doon. Today you'll still find some Scotch dribbled throughout the resurgence of Manx music.

BRITTANY

Also known as Armorica - which got mixed up with "America" in various diasporas -- this ancient land of Breizh in northwest France was overrun with fifth-century Celts hot-tailing it out of Britain. Soon known as Lesser Britain, it tried to be independent, but successive waves of Vikings and Frenchmen were a real wet blanket. Breton minstrels called conteurs tried to keep things going.

Under the ongoing stamp of the French, Brittany simmered away until the 19th century, when it finally remembered the things it had in common with Wales, and the fact that it was, after all, Little Britain. The time was ripe for cultural revival and that included music. The Bretons also heard what was happening in Ireland. Some ceilis are just so boisterous they couldn't help it.

Then 19th-century Breton nobleman Hersart de Villemarque began gathering old tunes, and it's a good thing he did, because otherwise we'd have hardly any published Breton song entries. A lot of them haul in Brittany's other linguistic specialty, the Z language. You'll see this in Hersart's Barzaz Breizh, a big book of traditional songs and poetry from the early 1800s, and hear all about it at gatherings like the fest-noz, where things really drone on.

Today you'll find Breton music, with its biniou-pipes and blown-away bombardes, that blends jazzy, Bulgarian and African rhythms. We're getting closer, here, to more exotic lands like...

CELTIC SPAIN - Galicia, Asturias:

Mix Irish beer with Spanish wine and there you are. Nauseated, maybe, but also in the region of northwest Spain that can boast a Celtic presence from 600 BCE or thereabouts. Not surprising, as much of the coastline is similar to that of Scotland, where many Celts did head to become full-flung Gaels.

The Romans muscled in around 100 CE, Germanic, Portuguese and African Moorish came to visit, and one day it was decided that Jesus' apostle St. James had been buried at Compostela. The 13th-century Galician poet Martin Codax's Cantigas de amor and amigo songs also upped the tourist factor. So did song-loving sailors like embattled Irish chief Red Hugh O'Donnell, who fled here after the Battle of Kinsale in Ireland, 1601. Full circle, really, as the Irish had come from Spain in the first place.

Galicians make noise with the gaita (bagpipe), drums and tambourines, and the payella, a frying pan with a long rough handle scraped with a key. The scythe is an instrument to die for, and the people love aturuxo, which means "screaming and shouting." From all this, you can get some picture of the liveliness of Galician music.

Dig around certain parts of Italy, Turkey and the like, and you'll also hear Celtic stuff, the fallout of Keltoi wanderings and the Internet. And, because the Celts were "Indo-European" peoples and have a lot of things in common with India, don't be surprised to get Sanskrit stuff blended amongst the bonny doons. In general, Celtic music is one big melding pot.

 

Charming... fascinating and funny.
- Jann Howell  Music Educators Journal  2006 05

Runs the gamut from the origins of the Celtic peoples... to such present-day incarnations as the step-dancing of... Michael Flatley.
- Desmond Maley  Canadian Book Review Annual  2004

I would urge anyone with a modicum of interest in Celts music or history to buy, read and enjoy this book... full of wondrous facts.
- Nicky Rossiter  Rambles: A Cultural Arts Magazine  2005 10 22

A humorous spin on the history, mystery, magic, mythology, musicians, musical instruments, and multiculturalism of Celtic music.
-   International Musician  2005 01

A well researched and irreverent history of Celtic music... I highly recommend this book for its sense of humor, fast pace, in-depth research and passion. It will delight all who read it.
- J. Lynn Fraser  Surface and Symbol  2005 03