Cultural origins Gaelic Culture | ||
Typical instruments Accordion
– Acoustic guitar
– Bagpipes – Banjo
– Bodhrán – Fiddle – Flute – Harp – Tin whistle | ||
Traditional Gaelic music is the folk music of Goidelic language-speaking communities, often including lyrics in those languages.
Contents
Relation with Brythonic music
The six Celtic nationalities are divided into two musical groups, Gaelic and Brythonic, which according to Alan Stivell 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".
Cape Breton
The emigration of Scottish Gaels to Cape Breton has also resulted in a unique strain of Gaelic music evolving there.
Performance
The session is a common setting for Gaelic music, where musicians from a given locality gather to play music in a public setting. Gaelic music is also commonly heard at folk festivals, by pipe bands and at competitions such as mods and the Fleadh Cheoil.
Keys and modes
In Traditional Gaelic music, the Ionian, Dorian, Mixolydian and Aeolian modes dominate, with the keys of D Ionian, G Ionian, A Dorian and E Dorian among those popular with session musicians.
Harmonization
Unlike Classical and Jazz music, Gaelic triad avoids diminished chords, as seen below for the seventh scale degree of the major scale. Seventh chords are generally limited to the II and the V positions of the chord scale.