| Celtic music |
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| Asturias |
| Brittany |
| Cornwall |
| Galicia |
| Ireland |
| Isle of Man |
| Scotland |
| Wales |
| Celtic US |
| Celtic Canada |
Irish, Scottish and Welsh music have long been a major part of American music, at least as far back as the 18th century. Beginning in the 1960s, performers like the Clancy Brothers became stars in the Irish music scene, which dates back to at least the colonial era, when many Irish immigrants arrived. These included many Scots-Irish Presbyterians, whose music was most "closely related to a Lowland Scottish style" .
The most significant impact of Celtic music on American styles, however, is undoubtedly that on the evolution of country music, a style which blends Anglo-Celtic traditions with "sacred hymns and African American spirituals". Country music's roots come from "Americanized interpretations of English, Scottish and Scots-Irish traditional music, shaped by containing vestiges of (19th century) popular song, especially (minstrel songs)" .
Celtic-Americans have also been influential in the creation of Celtic fusion, a set of genres which combine traditional Celtic music with contemporary influences.
Irish traditional music in the United States has a long and varied history, both in recording culture and by live performances. Emigrants from Ireland have brought their instruments and repertoire to the United States since the earliest days of European colonization of the New World.
The history of Irish musicians from Ireland taking up residency in New York and beyond is one side of the story. Another is the learning and playing of Irish music by first and second generation Irish-Americans. And then yet another is the widespread interest in the music by Americans from every background.
Masters of the tradition have come to live in the United States. Chief O'Neill in Chicago was a major promoter of musicianship and tune collection, greatly impacting the tradition beyond his own day and place of re-settlement. In the late nineteenth century and long after that, Patsy Touhey from Loughrea was a popular touring artist.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the classic recordings of Irish traditional music were made in New York by Michael Coleman, Packie Dolan, Hughie Gillespie, Jim Morrison and many others. This recording culture continues to the present day.
In the wake of the Depression and World War, Irish traditional music in New York was belittled by showband culture, and performers like Jack Coen, Paddy O'Brien of Tipperary, Larry Redican, and Paddy Reynolds kept the tradition alive in the United States, and were teachers of the music to Irish Americans.
Many great Irish American performers like Andy McGann, Brian Conway, Joannie Madden, Jerry O'Sullivan, Liz Carroll and Billy McComiskey would rise to achieve a level of accomplishment in the traditional music usually associated with native Irish.
Later Irish emigration to New York and beyond by James Keane, Mick Moloney, Paddy Keenan, Paddy O'Brien of Offaly, Martin Hayes and others through the 1960s, 1970s and 80s, ensured the music performed in America stayed connected to Ireland.
Recent[ when? ] emigration by Ivan Goff and Cillian Vallely to New York has kept the stream of native players strong, and the American scene rich with native talent.
While Irish American players like Patrick Mangan continue to prove Irish American culture is strongly connected to the roots.
Many Welsh songs have been adopted into American music culture, such as "Ar Hyd y Nos" ("All Through the Night", performed by Sheryl Crow, among others); "Suo Gân" (featured in the film Empire of the Sun ), and "Lisa Lân" (featured in the film Crash ).
Irish immigrants created a large number of emigrant ballads once in the United States. These were usually "sad laments, steeped in nostalgia, and self-pity, and singing the praises... of their native soil while bitterly condemning the land of the stranger" . These songs include famous songs like "Thousands Are Sailing to America" and "By the Hush", though "Shamrock Shore" may be the most well known in the field.
Francis O'Neill was a Chicago police chief who collected the single largest collection of Irish traditional music ever published. He was a flautist, fiddler and piper who was part of a vibrant Irish community in Chicago at the time, one that included some forty thousand people, including musicians from "all thirty-two counties of Ireland", according to Nicholas Carolan, who referred to O'Neill as "the greatest individual influence on the evolution of Irish traditional dance music in the twentieth century" .
In the 1890s, Irish music entered a "golden age", centered on the vibrant scene in New York City[ citation needed ]. This produced legendary fiddlers like James Morrison and Michael Coleman, and a number of popular dance bands that played pop standards and dances like the foxtrot and quicksteps; these bands slowly grew larger, adding brass and reed instruments in a big band style . Though this golden age ended by the Great Depression, the 1950s saw a flowering of Irish music, aided by the foundation of the City Center Ballroom in New York City [ citation needed ]. It was later joined by a roots revival in Ireland and the foundation of Mick Moloney's Green Fields of America, a Philadelphia-based organization that promotes Irish music .
During the late 20th century came the rise of Celtic inspired rock groups like Flogging Molly, who reside in Los Angeles, Black 47 from New York City, The Shillaly Brothers, also from Los Angeles and the Dropkick Murphys from Boston.
Dynamic identities contribute to Benedict Anderson’s notions of nationalism and nationality. The Celtic identities constructed in America contribute to the dynamic being of American nationalism that we are founded upon. Freedom, a foundational principle of American society, was encouraged by the Celtic influence in Appalachia through their contribution to Union forces during the Civil War. The Union was a more democratizing entity and more willing to accept pluralism in American society compared to their Confederate counterparts who were more bent on maintaining a separatist identity
According to Benedict Anderson, “nationality” was formed from the accumulation of cultural artifacts that were able to be transplanted to an array of environments and societies and merge with a wide variety of political and ideological frameworks. This imagined nationality as Benedict calls it, is a constantly shifting and dynamic entity. “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion.” (Anderson, 6). Celtic identity is one such imagined community. The diaspora of Celts from other areas of the world to America is representative of the imagined community.
The cultural diaspora from the British Isles, specifically Scotland and Ireland, landed primarily in the Appalachian region of the United States. Thousands of immigrants sailed and maintained and improved on agricultural pursuits to better improve their lives. The British brought with them cultural elements such as music, dress, and ideology. Among these Brits were those defined as Celts, or people who resided in or spoke the languages of Ireland, Wales, Scotland, or cornwall and Brittany. The Celtic identity is complex: A large portion of this Celticness rested on musical practices, both spoken word and instrumental, that constructs the distinct identity. Layered regional and national identities were assembled over time in the Celtic-speaking world, centered on practices of both modern and historic Celtic instruments.
American Bluegrass and Folk music styles have roots in Appalachian cultures linked to Scottish, Irish, or Celts. Layers of American identity were constructed by the influence of a new musical style. Culture was formed and community was created. Regional identity flourished. This concept of nation building in America is particularly true for the Scots and stems in part from the vast territory that led to development of family autonomy, or Clans, in Scotland and influenced the role of the individual. New layers of identity were created by the influx of Celts to America.
Identity is composed of characteristics and values that contribute to individuals and communities. Identities combine to form a distinct sense of nationalism.
Michael Dietler asserts that Celtic identity, which rose within Celtic speaking regions such as Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Brittany, is itself an “imagined community” possessing its own nationalist ideals constructed from regional and individual cultural identities. The sense of nationalism that Celts possess is what Dietler refers to as Celticism, “self-conscious attempts to construct ethnicized forms of collective memory and communal identity that are territorially bounded and imbedded in overt political projects and ideologies.” (Dietler 239). He continues to define Celtitude as the feeling felt by those who draw ethnic ties to Celtic life. They feel a sense of ethno-nostalgia for Scottish or Irish heritage. Celticity is centered on a global spiritual connection to the idea of Celtic identity. This is composed of people who wish to identify as something other than white.
Dietler’s theories on identity suggest that music and cultural identities have overlapped. Celtic styles merge with other styles and move toward a role as “World Music”: many can relate to world music and Celtic styles create solidarity among those who wish to identify as Celtic.
Celtic music is a broad grouping of music genres that evolved out of the folk music traditions of the Celtic people of Northwestern Europe. It refers to both orally-transmitted traditional music and recorded music and the styles vary considerably to include everything from traditional music to a wide range of hybrids.
The Celts or Celtic peoples were a collection of Indo-European peoples in Europe and Anatolia, identified by their use of Celtic languages and other cultural similarities. Major Celtic groups included the Gauls; the Celtiberians and Gallaeci of Iberia; the Britons and Gaels of Britain and Ireland; the Boii; and the Galatians. The relation between ethnicity, language and culture in the Celtic world is unclear and debated; for example over the ways in which the Iron Age people of Britain and Ireland should be called Celts. In current scholarship, 'Celt' primarily refers to 'speakers of Celtic languages' rather than to a single ethnic group.
A roots revival is a trend which includes young performers popularizing the traditional musical styles of their ancestors. Often, roots revivals include an addition of newly composed songs with socially and politically aware lyrics, as well as a general modernization of the folk sound.
Turlough O'Carolan was a blind Celtic harper, composer and singer in Ireland whose great fame is due to his gift for melodic composition.
Irish music is music that has been created in various genres on the island of Ireland.
The Chieftains are a traditional Irish folk band formed in Dublin in 1962, by Paddy Moloney, Seán Potts and Michael Tubridy. Their sound, which is almost entirely instrumental and largely built around uilleann pipes, has become synonymous with traditional Irish music. They are regarded as having helped popularise Irish music around the world. They have won six Grammy Awards during their career and they were given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2002 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Some music experts have credited The Chieftains with bringing traditional Irish music to a worldwide audience, so much so that the Irish government awarded them the honorary title of 'Ireland's Musical Ambassadors' in 1989.
The Celtic Revival is a variety of movements and trends in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries that see a renewed interest in aspects of Celtic culture. Artists and writers drew on the traditions of Gaelic literature, Welsh-language literature, and Celtic art—what historians call insular art. Although the revival was complex and multifaceted, occurring across many fields and in various countries in Northwest Europe, its best known incarnation is probably the Irish Literary Revival. Irish writers including William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, "Æ" Russell, Edward Martyn, Alice Milligan and Edward Plunkett stimulated a new appreciation of traditional Irish literature and Irish poetry in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Paddy Moloney was an Irish musician, composer, and record producer. He co-founded and led the Irish musical group the Chieftains, playing on all of their 44 albums. He was particularly associated with the revival of the uilleann pipes.
The modern Celts are a related group of ethnicities who share similar Celtic languages, cultures and artistic histories, and who live in or descend from one of the regions on the western extremities of Europe populated by the Celts.
George Derek Fleetwood Bell, MBE was a Northern Irish harpist, pianist, oboist, musicologist and composer who was best known for his accompaniment work on various instruments with The Chieftains.
Pan-Celticism, also known as Celticism or Celtic nationalism is a political, social and cultural movement advocating solidarity and cooperation between Celtic nations and the modern Celts in Northwestern Europe. Some pan-Celtic organisations advocate the Celtic nations seceding from the United Kingdom and France and forming their own separate federal state together, while others simply advocate very close cooperation between independent sovereign Celtic nations, in the form of Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scottish, and Welsh nationalism.
Celtic music is primarily associated with the folk traditions of Ireland, Scotland, Brittany and Wales, as well as the popular styles derived from folk culture. In addition, a number of other areas of the world are known for the use of Celtic musical styles and techniques, including Newfoundland, and much of the folk music of Canada's Maritimes, especially on Cape Breton Island and Prince Edward Island.
Celtic rock is a genre of folk rock, as well as a form of Celtic fusion which incorporates Celtic music, instrumentation and themes into a rock music context. It has been extremely prolific since the early 1970s and can be seen as a key foundation of the development of highly successful mainstream Celtic bands and popular musical performers, as well as creating important derivatives through further fusions. It has played a major role in the maintenance and definition of regional and national identities and in fostering a pan-Celtic culture. It has also helped to communicate those cultures to external audiences.
Celtic fusion is an umbrella term for any modern music which incorporates influences considered "Celtic", or Celtic music which incorporates modern music. It is a syncretic musical tradition which borrows freely from the perceived "Celtic" musical traditions of all the Celtic nations, as well as from all styles of popular music, it is thus sometimes associated with the Pan-Celtic movement. Celtic fusion may or may not include authentic traditional music from any one tradition under the Celtic umbrella, but its common characteristic is the inspiration by Celtic identity.
Celtic punk is punk rock mixed with traditional Celtic music.
Irish Heartbeat is the eighteenth studio album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison and is a collaboration with the traditional Irish musical group the Chieftains, released in 1988. It was recorded at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin, Ireland, and reached number 18 in the UK album charts.
The Celtic nations or Celtic countries are a cultural area and collection of geographical regions in Northwestern Europe where the Celtic languages and cultural traits have survived. The term nation is used in its original sense to mean a people who share a common identity and culture and are identified with a traditional territory.
Irish traditional music is a genre of folk music that developed in Ireland.
The Chieftains Live! is the first album by the Chieftains which was recorded live. It was recorded on tour in December 1976 at Symphony Hall in Boston and Massey Hall in Toronto.
Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin is an Irish ethnomusicologist, author, musician and historian specialising in Irish music, diaspora, cultural and memory studies.
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