CEOL - OR IS IT “IRISH SOUL”?

By Brian McGowan

Rethinking Irish 5

You may recall prior mention of a singing style called sean-nós.  What, you may be asking, is this sean-nós singing?  Quickly said, sean-nós is a highly ornamented style of solo, unaccompanied singing defined by one authority, Tomás Ó Canainn, as a complex way of singing in Gaelic, with a highly ornamented melodic line, and varying greatly in ornamentation depending upon where in Ireland where the singer hails from, either the South (Munster), the West (Connacht) or the North (Ulster), three of the four “provinces” of Ireland.  The fourth province, Leinster, in the east and southeast of the island, and holding Dublin, capital of the 26-county Republic of Ireland, was historically called “The Pale”, that region of Ireland centered on Dublin where English law and authority prevailed in the centuries following the 12^th Century Norman invasion.  The other three provinces retained their Gaelic identities, and were referred to as “beyond the Pale.”  Now, there’s a phrase you have no doubt heard, and maybe puzzled over, maybe not.  Either way, that’s where it comes from, and what it means.

Back to sean-nós.  For those of you who would like to understand Irish music deeper than the rest of the pack, Ó Canainn has this advice: “No aspect of Irish music can be fully understood without a deep appreciation of sean-nós singing.  It is the key which opens every lock.”  We’ll do it more justice down the road.

Building in the main upon fairly standard melodic outlines, the true beauty of the music lies in the brilliant ornamentation each musician imparts on his own, unfettered by rigid rules as is the case in other genres, such as the ceol mór (literally “big music”) of the Great Highland Bagpipe.  In Irish trad, as long as a musician stays within a certain framework, he can morph a tune however he may like, using various methods of ornamentation and variation, making it truly his or her own.  When you listen long and hard enough to particular players, you can often identify a player on the radio within the first dozen notes of a tune.  “Ah, that’s Eileen Ivers!”  Of course, mistakes can be made.  “No, wait, that’s…”