Lilting a tune seems to be a fairly obscure bit of ITM, but one that I’m getting more and more interested in as my singing improves (and not just because you can sing at 75mph without any greater danger of a wreck than not singing, unlike certain other forms of music production… )
Anyway, I’ve only run into lilting in three places thus far… 1 singer of airs & ballads at slow session who tried to lilt but with rather poor timing, informal (err… more informal than playing, even, really there’s such a thing…) lilting of a tune by musicians trying to explain a melody without getting out the instrument ('You know, the one that goes ‘daa-nnnn-de-a-day-daa-ahhh-mmmm’ … ') which is usually, but not always, good enough to convey the general idea, and finally, the Paddy Rafferty’s Favorite on Matt Malloy’s CD, which is about the only good example of lilting I’ve heard (but I liked the less than great lilting I’ve heard -anyway-… voices can’t help being expressive, while with a bit of work one can make an instrument fail to be expressive… )
Anyway, the purpose of this post, other than burdening you all with my thoughts, is to ask if anyone knows of any recording or ‘performing’ (in the sense of touring) or Northeast USA sessioning lilters…
I know, I know, they’re probably slightly less welcome than Bodhran players for much the same reason (the ‘oh, I can do that!’ influx-of-amateurs problem…) but still, if anyone has knowledge of this rare species of ITM, in captivity or in the wild, I’d like to try to catch sight of them.
–Chris
(Perhaps today I need -less- coffee? Nah, I must be needing more, that’s it… )
Chris,
There’s a good CD called “Celtic Mouth Music” that’s about the best album I’ve found for lilting (even with that dreaded “C” word in the title). Some of the better known artists on it are Dolores Keane & John Faulkner, Tommy Gunn, Josie McDermott (also my favourite flute player) and Paddy Tunney. Cathal McConnell does something called “A Hurricane of Reels” on his last album (Long Expectant Comes At Last) where he sings the titles of several reels and then lilts some of them as a chorus.
I am under the impression that most people who lilt well usually play an instrument, and I think there won’t be many people who just lilt only. There are All-Ireland lilting competitions though.
I met Paddy Maloney a couple of months back when the Chieftains came to perform, and we were working out which tunes to thread together in a set. He didn’t have his instrument with him then so he lilted all the tunes we considered pretty nicely - I was pretty impressed.
I’ve got Josie McDermott’s “Darby’s Farewell” CD and its got a lovely lilting track as well (The Collier’s Reel and The Bank of Ireland). Might be the same tunes lilted by McDermott on the CD Paul mentioned.
[ This Message was edited by: Eldarion on 2002-08-08 03:07 ]
There was a recognised lilter featured on the Chieftains 3 album (only on one or maybe two tracks) and I think he did some touring with the Chieftains at the time. I think his name was Pat Kilduff, and he was still on the go a couple of years ago.
In Irish lilting, the syllables are entirely random, though “diddley-i”, which is commonly used obviously represents a triplet and has long been used in sophisticated Ireland as a contemptuous name for ITM - “Diddley-i music”. Lilting is also known - especially among country people and slightly jokingly but without any negative value judgement - as “gob [i.e. mouth] music”.
The Scottish equivalent is known as porta béil (sp?), meaning mouth music, and as far as I know it uses some specific syllables to represent particular bagpipe ornamentation.
I like lilting very much. I remember reading in Packie Manus Byrne’s A Dossan of Heather that when he grew up in Donegal in the early part of the last century that practically all dance music was lilted. It was a special occasion to have a fiddler come by. Folk would gather in a kitchen, some would lilt the tunes, others dance. (Whistles, btw, were regarded as toys and not fit to be played for dancing.)
This little story is significant because it shows that lilting is at the very heart of the music and the tradition, and that instrumental dance music flows from it. When I was fortunate enough to take a lesson with Bill Ochs, he asked me to lilt a tune that we were working on. He said that lilting tunes is very important in learning them (learn to lilt a tune before you try to play it on your instrument) and very important stilistically: Says Bill, if you just try to play the tune on the whistle as you would lilt it, you won’t be far off stylistically. (He also said that many of his students stare at him blankly or as if he had just asked them to take off all their clothes and run across Times Square when he asked them to lilt for him. )
I listened to an interesting sample once, field recordings from the fifties and sixties, called “Traditional Songs of Ireland”, I think. Had a lot of Margret Barry and so forth. On it was a song, I don’t know by whom, and after finishing the song, the singer went on to whistle The Rights of Man. And I don’t mean that he played it on a whistle. It’s the only instance of “lip” whistling I’ve come across.
Interesting that you should mention the Scottish form of lilting, Roger. My pipe instructor told me that before the Jacobite uprisings, the piobreach melodies actually were taught and memorized via mouth “diddling”, ornamentations and all. Only once a piper could lilt a musical piece(“tune” seems so belittling a word for piobreach) was he allowed to play it on the pipes.
The oral teaching for piobaireachd is canntaireachd. Since I was a lone piper living on an island when I played GHB’s, piob. was about the only type of music I played. It’s certainly an aquired taste, but well worth the study and work. I took lessons with an elderly teacher that taught only in the canntaireachd tradition. He wasn’t quite so strict with me as to make me be able to recite the whole tune that way. Which is just as well! It’s a pretty amazing music form.
My favorite bit of lilting is part of the song “The Hurricane of Reels”, which is also one of my favorite Irish songs.
I was talking about Cathal McConnell’s version to a bunch of people on the chat channel a while ago, and I’ve still got it available if you want to give a listen:
On 2002-08-09 00:50, energy wrote:
Teri-K, I just had an idea. Do you think you could record some canntaireachd and post it on Clips & Snips? I would love to hear some.
Nate
[ This Message was edited by: energy on 2002-08-09 00:51 ]
Yikes, not with this voice! I’ll see if I can find an example though.
Last night I ended up in a singer’s session somewhere around the back end of Feakle [well, a group of us was invited, that I stepped into my backdoor at 5.30 this morning should tell you something about the sort of night it was]. Coincidentally the song Rich mentions above came up and allthough I heard the song several times before it remains a most hilarious one [this came without the lilting bit though].
I was also reminded of another bit of lilting I have on tape by the presence of Spancil Hill based singer Robbie McMahon at the session last night. It is a recording of himself lilting the [Barney McKenna version of]The Mason’s Apron. It is a virtuoso piece of music by any standard and he makes a hilarious job of it, at some point imitationg the banjo-players ornaments in great vocal style. So, while sometimes born out of neccessity and sometimes serious business [Breathnach describes lilters being ousted from the competitions for putting in a ‘da’ instead of a ‘dum’]it is also highly entertaining and a great change from the usual diddly-ay.
[ This Message was edited by: Peter Laban on 2002-08-10 09:22 ]
On 2002-08-08 09:03, Kevin Popejoy wrote:
There’s a nice bit of lilting on Colm O’Donnell’s “Farewell to Evening Dances”. If you don’t have this one you should. Very fine whistle, flute, and singing throughout.
Kevin Popejoy
I concur, it’s a wonderful cd.
There’s also some lilting on Mike + Mary Raffety’s cd’s “old fireside music” and the new who’s name escapes me.
Cheers,
jb
For the academic interest in the lilting/lip whistling phenomenon I am not going to make fair use of an older field recording. The tunes are The Blackbird and Rights of Man. The man is given as Francis McKearn or Francis McKeown, from Garrison, Co. Fermanagh. (Source: Traditional Songs of Ireland, Saydisc Records. Field recording by Peter Kennedy/Folktracks, 1952)
I’ll keep this up for a few days. Let me know what you think. And has anyone heard of Francis from Garrison?
Best
/bloomfield
[ This Message was edited by: Bloomfield on 2002-08-20 23:32 ]
I was lucky enough to get to hear a piper do just what Teri-K is talking about when I was at the North American Academy of Piping and Drumming last month. (I was studying my drumming). He sang the tune,explaining that there are specific sylables for each note on the pipes, like HA or Hey. Anyway after he sang it, he played it on pipes. Quite a demonstration. This is one of the ways they kept the tunes alive after the outlawing of piping.
I was lucky enough to be able to interview Buddy MacMaster for The Celtic Cafe last year. We talked about lilting a bit, before and during the interview. Mr. MacMaster said that “jigging” (apparently they don’t call it lilting there) was a way for a musical person to give music out without being able to play an instrument. He talked about his grandmother: “My mother’s mother, she was great at jigging or lilting–whatever you want to call it–or mouth music we call it sometimes. She used to jig tunes for her kids, she enjoyed that, watching kids dancing. She was a very joyful person, she was very musical, though she didn’t play any instrument. The music was in her, you know.”
I’ve also heard that the lilters saved a great many of the tunes when playing the music was banned in Ireland, and also that when an area didn’t have its own musicians, it was the lilters who sang for dancers and the dancing at parties and other celebrations.
I work with quite a few beginning players as I help to run a tune-learning session once a week. It’s almost impossible for me to tell if a player who isn’t particularly facile on their instrument has got a tune if they won’t sing it back to me (as often times they don’t have the skill to get a tune out of the instrument even though they have learned the tune). My own teachers, Matt and Shannon Heaton, felt that every player should be able to sing their tunes through, even if it’s not pretty.
Zina
[ This Message was edited by: zlee on 2002-08-23 14:36 ]
[ This Message was edited by: zlee on 2002-08-23 14:37 ]
On 2002-08-22 22:27, cowtime wrote:
He sang the tune,explaining that there are specific sylables for each note on the pipes, like HA or Hey.
Would that mean it’s more a form of solmization rather than scat?
I see, from Roger O’Keeffe’s post, that the pipers’ solmization form is Scottish, whereas Irish lilting is random.
Reasonable Person W a l d e n
Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.—Thoreau
[ This Message was edited by: Walden on 2002-08-24 01:42 ]
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