ok, possibly a stupid ques but i wa wondering if there was a musical difference between STM and ITM or if its just one comes from scotland, the other from ireland. think i play a mixture but never really been sure if there was a particular difference in style that i should have noticed! any help would be greatly appreciated!!
There are no stupid questions! It’s only stupid not to ask if you don’t know something.
There are a million differences, and also a million similarities.
If you really want to know the answers you will have to listen to both until you can tell the difference for yourself. You will probably find this easier to do if you listen to individual players at the more traditional end of the scale than to, say, innovative bands - although the differences are still there, even then.
Most of us who have been around one or both styles for a long time can tell both where the player (or at least their style) comes from as soon as we hear them. And quite often you can also tell where a tune (or at least a version of a tune) comes from, too. So that proves there is a difference. Define it for yourself, is my advice. Or sit down with someone who has a good collection of recordings and can take you through it and point out the differences.
That’s s good reply. And if you concentrate your search on the traditional players of both idioms, it will be easier for you. Bear in mind though that it’s not as simple as two traditions. For example, some Donegal music is closer to east coast Scottish music than music from Kerry.
Kris, you said “If you really want to know the answers you will have to listen to both”, but i suposse not millions of cds. so… can you tell us the most representative players of each one…
And, the most ones of the main styles of irish one??
I’m so interested…
(I know, I know… I must learn English…)
umm… no, not millions of CDs - but ultimately probably dozens. I’ll go with fiddlers and accordionists - since I know most about them.
Caution: this list is biased toward my own knowledge and preferences! Players are not listed in order of importance!
Irish fiddlers -
Michael Coleman
Bobby Casey
Kevin Burke
Tommy Peoples
Eugene O’Donnell
Irish box players -
Tony MacMahon
Jackie Daly
Mairtin O’Connor
Alan Kelly
Scottish fiddlers -
Angus Grant Snr.
MacKenzie Murdoch
Alasdair Fraser
Alasdair Hardie
Scottish box players -
Bobby MacLeod
Fergie MacDonald
Freeland Barbour
Curly MacKay
That was painful - in an effort to only list a few I feel I’ve left so many important ones out. Oh, well. And I didn’t cover regional styles at all. Sorry!
I’ll probably get shot down for this, but in my experience Scottish dance tunes are *generally* more pointed and angular, rhythmically, whereas Irish tunes are more “round” if that makes any sense. Somebody said earlier that Irish tunes are Scottish tunes with the corners knocked off, and that seems to fit.
The extreme example being that Strathspey, a dance form nativve to Scotland but not Ireland (Except as an import).
Hey Kris!! Thanks!!
17 it’s enough to start with the exercise of dicriminatyn styles by ear….
🙂
Given the amount of shared tunes in the two traditions, can there be much difference in the tunes?
Isn’t the difference only in how you play the tunes?
As a English / American / Scottishdancer / caller / recent Irish Set Dancer I find Irish tunes are more down on the ground (heel sounds with bounce) while Scottish tunes for dancing aim to get the dancer off the floor to set or travel. Some tunes are common but are played differently to achieve these ends.
Yes and no, geoff. You can take a Scots jig - change it about a bit, play it “round” instead of “pointed” (undotted instead of dotted rhythm) chuck in a few rolls and it will sound more Irish than when you started. It’s still the same tune, sort of, but in many cases there will still be a certain something that a number of players will hear and say “I bet that’s a Scottish tune.” And it works the other way, too, of course.
What are the certain somethings? Hard for most of us to pinpoint, I think, but the fact that we can hear it means a lot. A good ethnomusicilogist would be able to point out various “markers” which help to identify origins of jig or reels. They won’t be infallable, though. If I wasn’t so tired I might be able to remember what some of them are, myself, but I’d probably be on shakey ground.
Kris
From my viewpoint (just fiddle) I think the Scots playing is ‘cleaner’, sort of more of classical feel to it, whereas Irish styles tend to be more florid in ornamentation and bowing patterns. Also Scots players seem to put more emphasis on playing a quality instrument.
Jim
Many Scottish tunes had a low C which was thrown out when the pipers and fluters in Ireland took them up. The original form of the pipes had a chanter with a low C, provided by a removable “foot-joint,” late in the 18th century this was removed and the chanter re-tooled to work without it. With the foot-joint the piper couldn’t play staccato, as the chanter was too long as a result to get at the regulator - they were probably only using one regulator at this point. They removed the foot-joint and no longer could play the low C, but now could play staccato - and the technique for this evolved very quickly. Also the note with the right pinky up now became D#, which was now used as a grace note on the back D, which pipers call the “ghost D,” another characteristic technique.
So with the loss of the low C pipers remodeled many tunes to work without it. If you look at old printed versions of the March of the King of Laois, for instance, it was printed with a low C at the end of the parts up until about the early 19th century, after that pipers sent that C up an octave, and you hear the version such as that played by Paddy Moloney and the Chieftains, for instance.
Or Rakish Paddy. This was an old tune for the big pipes called the Caber Feidh, which means Deer’s Horns. It began in its original form on the low C, but the Irish pipers sent that note up an octave when they lost the foot joint, and made various other changes as well.
The Copperplate is said to be another variant of this, in a major key instead of a modal one. Copperplate is supposed to be a corruption of CaberFeidh.
These were some of the historical factors at work. You should know that the pipes were the instrument in the 18th and 19th centuries (up until the Famine). Fiddlers got short shrift, and whistle/fluters were even more contemptible and common.
Another thing I notice in Scottish fiddle music is the movement from the note at the top of the octave to the note an octave below, the low note usually ornamented with a triplet. Some tunes in Irish music feature this - the Mason’s Apron, or the Pure Drop. But it is far less prevalent - and the Mason’s Apron is decidedly a fiddler’s tune - when played in A, that is - pipers used to play it in G and leave out the sudden movement between the octaves, which is difficult on the chanter. And the Pure Drop is a real piper’s tune - the movement from middle D to low D IS easy on the chanter.
The Mason’s Apron is a Scottish tune.
I didn’t say it wasn’t, originally. In its Irish genesis it still displays some of its heritage, as I was saying - although Seamus Ennis’s playing of that tune sounds very little like the fiddle versions that are heard. I think it’s printed in Ceol Rince Vol. 4 or 5 too, from Jack Wade, another old Dublin piper.
I can still remember the first time I heard a tune I knew how to play in a scottish setting played in an Irish one. It was Kevin Burke’s version of Maudubawn Chapel on his live in concert album - the man has a penchant for smooth, silky slides and slurrs (amoung other things). It shattered my *feel* for the tune becasue I liked his version so much better and couldn’t for the life of me make it happen, AH! I hated how I played it after that…A very rude awakening I must say. Up until that moment I had really only been exposed to to players that played in more Scottish settings. Yeesh.
Perhaps we should look at STM and ITM as two different ‘dialects’ that share the same language. Like Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic, lots of similarities, and lots of things both can understand, but with a some words, phrases and accents exclusive to each.
Not sure if this analogy will hold true on closer scrutiny, as I only have a limited exposure to Gaelic--what do others think?
Going along with Kevin’s post about the pipe chanters, the “Great Foot Change” didn’t happen in Scotland. . .IE, on the hilghand pipes. GHB’s play in A Mixolydian, but the lowest note you can play is a low G (flattened 7th) below the A. COnsequently, many, many Scottish tunes derived from piping have that low flattened 7th. You can play that note on, say, a keyless flute or whistle, but you have to transpose the tune up a 5th from the same position it would be on a GHB chanter. Those of us who have crossed over find this to be a minor challenge.
I believe Scottish schools taught sol-fa notation in the 19th century (so that children could learn hymns) and so many ordinary people could learn and keep tunes in written form - and so they could be more exact and more complicated.
it sounds different
as far as piping is concerned…one particular difference i’ve noticed is with the cran (not sure if they call a ‘cran’ in the Scotch tradition). As far as the cran is concerned, there exists more “swing” in modern Irish tradion and more rigidness…more “read the dots as written” in modern Scotch tradition…IMHO (if that please you).
Er, I’m not sure Highland pipers actually have anything quite like a cran. For one thing, GHB pipers play ornamentation heavily on G, D, and E, (which are equivalent to C, G, and A on Upipes). The high gracenotes sound very different from the Irish equivalents.
In many situations where a Upiper (or a fluter, in my case) would play a cran, a GHB player would do a “birl,” which is a double strike on the low G, performed with the pinky. I really miss that low note on the flute sometimes. Other times, GHB players would do a Taorluath, which is a lot like a cran except the “closed note” is, again, the low G (like a low C would be if it existed on UPipes).
Sorry if that made little sense whatsoever.
But the point about precision in musical notation is a good one. Highland Piping is basically military band music, and there’s consequentially less room for individual interpretation. Even in civilian bands, everybody theoretically plays *exactly* the same thing in perfect unison. GHB notation will subdivide up a bar much more carefully in a reel, for instance, to reflect swing. If you deviate from the notated ornamentation, let alone melody notes, in an individual competition, the judge may dock you some points.