Irish (and Gailge na hAlban too) in my experience presents unique challenges to the English speaker. Just using an Irish dictionary can be quite tricky, especially with the older written Irish (modern language was simplified a couple of times last century). It’s not just archaic words that give trouble, it’s loads of case declensions that transform even nouns into forms unrecognizable unless you are familiar with now-obsolete case declension rules. [edited to add: case declension isn’t totally obsolete of course, but the number of cases in modern Irish usage has been reduced]
You’re right that Irish is phonetic, at least, but the rules are so disjoint with English phonetics that it’s harder than with other European languages. I’ve tried learning Irish off and on for many years, and I’m still slogging away at it. In short, I don’t think it’s a language that yields much from casual examination.
[edited to add: I do think that the idea of studying airs alongside a dictionary is helpful, I don’t mean to imply that there is nothing to be gained, only to say that it is more difficult than attempting the same for, say, a romance language or germanic language]
language is always a fascinating topic for me, and as it applies to this topic, what djm is bringing up does not surprise me in the least. The interpretation of a piece IMHO must stem from the understanding of its roots. As a new student of irish trad, I’m finding slow airs are not what I previously thought them to be . . . just slow.
So my question is, once the learner has immersed his/herself in learning the language, what then is the next step?
I would do some reading about the sean-nos singing tradition. In my first post there are some links for reading. (In some of the C&F links the topic is one thing and then “slow airs” come up later.) Also, I found that the book Music in Ireland by Dorothea E. Hast and Stanley Scott had a lot more about singing than some books. In all this reading I’m sure there are many things that would be disagreed with by different people. It’s just to get a rough idea about the main points.
I would start listening to sean-nos singing. In my first post there is a good CD which Peter Laban recommended to me some time back. And there are recommendations for listening in one or more of the C & F links I posted.
I found this singing very strange at first. I didn’t think I would be able to listen to it and enjoy it at first. It was very foreign to my ears. I decided to listen to the CD a lot before I went to sleep when there were no distracting noises and not to try to figure anything out about the songs and not to try to like them. I just passively listened. I just let them go to my ears. I did look at the translations to get an idea of what the songs were about, but I didn’t get all intense about it. I started liking the songs a lot and hearing more and gradually became an active, if not very knowledgeable, listener.
Just my two cents. (Well, maybe this is more like 25 cents .)
On Seamus Ennis’s album Return From Fingal, there are a few tracks where he sings the melody and they plays it on the pipes. He does it with Ned of the Hill, for instance.
Perhaps my suggestion is something that particularly suits me. I only have any degree of fluency in English, but I can feel my way around the literature of a few languages (Welsh, French, German, Ancient Greek, Coptic) with a crib, with some languages just enough to get a feel of what is happening in the original language, and with others I can translate a poem with a dictionary by my side. The vocabulary of songs and folk poetry is often fairly specialised and limited.
I haven’t attempted learning Irish yet, but I do have an idea of the difficulties of Irish orthography from talking to my wife and studying Irish literature in English. The ways that the sounds change (but not the way they are written) are often similar to Welsh mutations. For instance, I grew up in a town called Penarth, but the initial letter changes depending on various rules–“to Penarth” is “i Benarth”, “in Penarth” is “ym Mhenarth”, “and Penarth” is “a Phenarth.” But Welsh has lost many more of its archaic features than Irish has.
Still, just a couple of months study of Irish would help anyone who is studying sean nos singing, and help to decide whether to continue the language study.
There are lots of “slow airs” that are not sean nós! These would include all of the “Oirish” parlour/concert hall stuff that came from the US (e.g. I’ll take you home again Kathleen, etc), and I suppose also the slow airs of Turlogh O’ Carolyn - e.g. Blind Mary. Maybe we need to stop using “slow airs” as a synonym for “sean nós”.
I understand that many songs are sung slowly, so therefore their airs would be played slowly.
But my understanding was that they are only referred to as “slow airs” if they are part of the sean-nos repertoire. And the air to a fast song in the sean-nos repertoire would also be called a “slow air”.
I thought that the airs to other songs, regardless of the speed at which they are played, were simply called “airs” as in, “I will now play the air The Old Triangle.”
So I thought that what was supposed to be stopped was using the term “slow air” for airs not in the sean-nos repertoire.
I will be very happy to be corrected here or have the terminology clarified, believe me.
I suppose we could define it as you suggest. But most of the classic collections of irish music (e.g. O’Neill) lump everything “slow” under “slow airs”, but we could agree to disagree with that sort of classification.
I’ve heard the air ‘taimse im chodladh’ played a million and one different ways (in terms of timing and phrasing) - on recordings and live - and also sung by Sean O’Riada (I think) on this really old vinyl LP from the 1950s (name of which I forget). Of all the pipe versions I’ve heard of it, only one matched almost identically the way O’Riada sang it - Liam O’FLynn’s version on ‘Words and Music’.
Are all the other pipe verisons not correct then?
Taimse im Chodladh seems to be treated as old-hat in Ireland, so its hard to find many people who sing it any more, but there are a few recordings, and its worth listening to the sung versions. This is where we come to the nub of this issue - is an instrumental version wrong because it bears little resemblance to the the sung version? If the player has no idea how the sung version goes, or does not understand how the Irish language dictates what and where the ornamentation goes, it becomes apparent very quickly to those who know the lyrics. If the listeners don’t know any better, and the player doesn’t know any better, is the version wrong? Just don’t show up in front of a knowledgeable crowd if you don’t know what you’re doing.
I’m just saying what I understood to be meant in what I had read and in discussions where advanced people were answering questions. I wouldn’t feel I had enough experience to be suggesting we do anything let alone disagree with how O’Neill classified his collection . I haven’t heard that situation be addressed. I think I need to do some more reading.
ausdag—I guess I would expect each person’s version to be different in terms of timing and ornamentation—I thought these were the main things that would be varied by sean-nos singers. I don’t know about how different the phrasing could be if there were originally words. Words seem to sort of dictate phrasing it seems, but I am getting over my head there.
I didn’t think the piper was expected or desired to match the way a sean-nos singer sings the song. I thought that there was a sort of skeleton of the song that the singer had taken and presented in an individual way by adding her own embellishment, meter changes, phrasing within the constraints of the meaning of the words, etc. So each singer would be singing the song quite differently—much more so than two singers singing, oh, Jingle Bells.
And the piper would do the same. He wouldn’t just copy the singer or another piper, because the singer has put his own personal additions and feelings into the song. I thought the piper would want to learn the skeleton of the song and likewise put his own personal additions into his unique rendition of the song. So there wouldn’t be one correct rendition it seems like.
If you are saying that there is phrasing that doesn’t make sense when the words of the song are considered, well JES said he thought it was supposed to be like you are singing the song, and I was under that impression as well. I did read somewhere that the playing of a “slow air”, if it is being judged in some competition, has to be able to have the words sung to it—it can’t have been changed to the point that the words no longer fit. I don’t know about the “slow airs” that don’t have words.
I am just mentioning the competition thing to show that there is a fairly objective standard that could be applied to part of the rendition. I’m not saying this is the only important thing, the most important thing, that competitions are good, that the judges are fair or unfair, that competition music is good or bad, or anything like that.
It seems like ethically the player should know what the tradition is with these particular songs, and then if the player is departing from the tradition he should tell that to the audience.
In Sean Nos there are two ways to go about it properly. One is to preserve and interpret the tune and the other is to preserve and interpret the lyrics. The poetry in some Sean Nos songs is astoundingly beautiful and if you can get a good translation by someone with a poet’s sensibilities by all means do it. In my opinion you don’t have to know the whole song word for word to get the feel for what it is about. Knowing whether it’s a comic piece or a well-loved Keene is important though.
The real trick to playing a slow air on the pipes is to understand the Irish slow air aesthetic. You have to listen historically which means listen to the Piobh Mhor then the Harp then the Singers and so on. You will begin to hear the bubbly bits and holdy bits and slides and other little tricks that make a song sound like an Irish Slow Air.
The piece that really clicked with me and was that Ah Ha moment was Paddy Keenan’s Factory Girl on his Port an Phiobaire CD. The way he played it differently each time through was a real tutor in Slow Air style.
.)