Irish music is often in Dorian mode and Scottish in Myxalodean. Sorry for the spelling thing. I find Scottish music very interesting, despite the fact that I was born in Ireland. But I find that all that dotted note stuff just makes thing more complicated to learn. And after i learn it I don’t feel like playing it. I’ll leave it to the Scots to learn and play and I’ll enjoy listening.
Assuming his research was accurate when he compiled his survey, there’s no guarantee that it still is. I love finding tunes I’m familiar with in Victorian collections and seeing how different the tonality sometimes is.
Really fun. Thanks for this video.
Yep, and to me the difference is very obvious but I can’t describe it much with words. For some reason I’m very fond of irish music and I’m having a hard time listening to scottish or Cape Breton/East Coast fiddle music. Just a matter of taste, of course I’m not saying any style is better than the other. When I try to listen to scottish music (again, on fiddle) it sounds to me like a series of “ta-ca-ta-ca-ta-ca” a bit like machine gun style, the bowing is more ‘abrupt’ as if there were more bow movement, but then I know nothing about fiddle technique so I don’t know what really causes this… but it’s all about the phrasing, to me that’s the only real difference between scottish and irish music, not the keys and tunes, but the way they’re phrased.
Interestingly, being a big County Clare style fan, the more “north” you go in Ireland, the more the phrasing (to my ears) will approach the things I’m not crazy about in scottish music. East Galway would be my second favorite style I’d say, then I like Sligo but the playing is getting a bit ‘aggressive’ for my taste, especially on the flute… I’m not a big fan of Donegal music, and to me Donegal music is a mix of irish and scottish… (sorry if it’s blasphemy for some!).
I must be quite narrow minded I admit because I don’t like french canadian music (and I’m from Quebec!) for other reasons. I like the phrasing but basically don’t like the tunes! They’re played too aggressively and mostly in major keys, they’re too happy and cheerful and lack the melancoly found in irish music, or the power many minor reels have. Sigh.
I wonder if he might have had a bias…certainly in what he ascribes as Irish. Still, that is interesting, and of course you’re spot on as to the difficulty of coming to any exact conclusion.
I think it’s rather simple in concept – it doesn’t matter where the tune originates; all that matters is where it’s played. You “just” need a census of tunes played for some period of time. So count up all the tunes that everyone playing in the Scottish tradition plays for a year, and then compare that to all the tunes that everyone playing in the Irish tradition plays for a year, and weight them by frequency.
I’ll get started on that right away 
Let us know when you finish…