The more I am hearing traditional jigs, reels, hornpipes, polkas, etc. of whistling, I hear a close resemblence to medieval and early renassaince music. Is there a connection between these styles? Perhaps a similar time period? Does anyone else hear the resemblence or is it just me??
Hey, ofloyd. Try the Irish Traditional Music Forum that we have here. You might get some better discussion on the subject.
No. it isn’t just you. No, no direct time overlap - most of the “traditional” material is post 1700 and much of it really post mid-C19th, in so far as can be shown from written records, but it is all derived from the general pool of Western European dance music of the Renaissance and earlier. Also it is almost all modal, as was the Med/Ren stuff, hence similar sounds… Many of the dance forms also share the same heritage - unsurprisingly! There is a huge degree of cross-fertilisation, direct transfer of material and general inter-cultural influence too right across Europe and over to North America.
My bad, I didn’t look to see that there was a forum for this subject.
Good, I’m glad it’s not just me who hears this. Probably a reason why I like trad irish music so much because I am also a fan of med / ren stuff.
One of the interesting things about it, in my experience, is listening to instrumental music in, say, a Chinese restaurant and clearly hearing IT tunes. 
Music is music, after all… like any other language, it carries bits and pieces of its vast history in ever direction.
I came at ITM backwards…I played early music on recorders and traverso first.
There is a great deal of overlap between ITM and not only Medieval and Rennaissance but also Baroque dance music.
One thing I enjoy doing (in private…it’s not something I’d force anyone else to listen to) is to take a Baroque or Ren piece and “Irish it up.” 
–James
Blasphemy!!! Just kidding. I can actually imagine that would sound good. I also got my start in the recorder with Baroque and then moved to more Renaissance dance. Now I find myself here and loving it . . .
Yeah, me too. When I started playing flute and then sort of playing whistles and recorders, it was partly inspired by David Munrow and I experimented (at a beginnerish/amateurish level only with family and school friends) with Renaissance material, especially Susato and Praetorius, before gradually getting into first English traditional song and dance music and then, as I began to hear it by dint of being involved with “Folk Music” generally, ITM and then WTM… I even go back to some of it occasionally - not often enough really.
Naturally, since it grew out of the same sources - one can see Baroque Art music as one major branch of a tree and the various traditional dance music genres as another, with their national or regional divisions as subsidiary branches, all coming from the trunk of Med/Ren music which had quite a mix of peasant “folk” music with church music and courtly music intertwined. But of course the branches growing and splitting on down through time also kept reaching out to and overlapping and rubbing against each other, so no one ever really became totally separate from or uninfluenced by at least some of the others - viz the way dances originally from the Italian and French courts found their way to Ireland or Scandinavia and into “folk” forms, or indeed that “rustic” forms got taken up and spread by the higher echelons of society, like the waltz!
But I love 3/4 time:)
Have you heard the tune ‘Morgan Magan’? The Chieftains do a great version of it and it most certainly sounds very Irish but also very medieval. There are many others, but that one sticks out in my mind.
The blind harpist O’Carolan’s music is another source where you can hear the connection. Oh, I think Morgan Magan may be an O’Carolan tune.(?)
I also think that many John Playford’s tunes would fit well with an irish twist to them.
Some of Playford’s tunes have Irish origins - and Welsh/Scottish/French as well as English - he was a collector, not a composer! Much of the material he published was already quite old and in common usage. Also, whilst I do believe that there are distinguishing national or regional flavours to be discerned in traditional music, many of the assumptions or claims about uniqueness and special identity don’t really stand up well to close scrutiny of the historical record - have a look at sourcing information in, for example, The Fiddler’s Companion.
Ha, I never knew this. Did he collect them fro just street players and stamp his name on them, or did the original composers get any credit? I guess copywrite laws meant nothing back then.
No such thing as copyright then, nor for a couple of hundred years after! I’m not an expert on Playford by any stretch of the imagination - Google or Wiki him - sure to be plenty out there. I know nothing about his sources, but some of his material was undoubtedly “traditional” in that it was in common usage at his time and original composers would have been forgotten. I don’t think he was a collector in the sense of later “ethnographic” type collectors. He was, I believe, primarily a publisher looking to turn a profit. His sources were probably the Dancing Masters of the time, some of whom probably wrote out their material for him and some of whom may have composed some of the tunes…