The didgeridoo is a wind instrument, played with vibrating lips to produce a continuous drone while using a special breathing technique called circular breathing. The didgeridoo was developed by Aboriginal peoples of northern Australia at least 1,000 years ago, and is now in use around the world, though still most strongly associated with Indigenous Australian music. In the Yolŋu languages of the indigenous people of northeast Arnhem Land the name for the instrument is the yiḏaki, or more recently by some, mandapul. In the Bininj Kunwok language of West Arnhem Land it is known as mako.
The French horn is a brass instrument made of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. The double horn in F/B♭ is the horn most often used by players in professional orchestras and bands, although the descant and triple horn have become increasingly popular. A musician who plays a horn is known as a horn player or hornist.
The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitched one octave below the standard B♭ or C trumpet.
Fionn mac Cumhaill, often anglicized Finn McCool or MacCool, is a hero in Irish mythology, as well as in later Scottish and Manx folklore. He is the leader of the Fianna bands of young roving hunter-warriors, as well as being a seer and poet. He is said to have a magic thumb that bestows him with great wisdom. He is often depicted hunting with his hounds Bran and Sceólang, and fighting with his spear and sword. The tales of Fionn and his fiann form the Fianna Cycle or Fenian Cycle, much of it narrated by Fionn's son, the poet Oisín.
Fianna were small warrior-hunter bands in Gaelic Ireland during the Iron Age and early Middle Ages. A fian was made up of freeborn young males, often from the Gaelic nobility of Ireland, "who had left fosterage but had not yet inherited the property needed to settle down as full landowning members of the túath". For most of the year they lived in the wild, hunting, cattle raiding other Irish clans, training, and fighting as mercenaries. Scholars believe the fian was a rite of passage into manhood, and have linked fianna with similar young warrior bands in other early European cultures
A lur, also lure or lurr, is a long natural blowing horn without finger holes that is played with a brass-type embouchure. Lurs can be straight or curved in various shapes. The purpose of the curves was to make long instruments easier to carry and to avoid directing the loud noise at nearby people.
The Gaelic revival was the late-nineteenth-century national revival of interest in the Irish language and Irish Gaelic culture. Irish had diminished as a spoken tongue, remaining the main daily language only in isolated rural areas, with English having become the dominant language in the majority of Ireland.
The Fenian Cycle, Fianna Cycle or Finn Cycle is a body of early Irish literature focusing on the exploits of the mythical hero Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill and his warrior band the Fianna. Sometimes called the Ossianic Cycle after its narrator Oisín, it is one of the four groupings of Irish mythology along with the Mythological Cycle, the Ulster Cycle, and the Kings' Cycles. Timewise, the Fenian cycle is the third, between the Ulster and Kings' cycles. The cycle also contains stories about other famous Fianna members, including Diarmuid, Caílte, Oisín's son Oscar, and Fionn's rival Goll mac Morna.
A signal instrument is a musical instrument which is not only used for music as such, but also fit to give sound signals as a form of auditive communication, usually in the open air. Signal instruments are often contrasted with melodic and diatonic or chromatic instruments. To make the message audible at a distance, percussion and brass instruments, which are generally loud, are chiefly used for this purpose. There are contemporary instruments which evolved from signal instruments, such as the natural horn evolving to the trumpet.
The oldest musical signaling instrument is the drum. Signal drums are still used in parts of Africa, although more as a kind of newspaper than military device...The African [slit] drum does not communicate by rhythm or beat, but rather by tone [relative pitch and/or timbre]...As early as 500 BCE, the Persians used kettle drums both to control cavalry formation and frighten their enemies. [In Europe,] The snare drum was the standard battlefield infantry communications device from the 1700s until well into the 1860s...Trumpets, horns, and drums were used in ancient Greek and Roman armies and navies...By the reign of Alexander the Great, trumpets and fifes...were used to control the phalanx of his army. Perhaps the earliest recorded use of specific signals via musical tones were...used by Genghis Khan's Mongol cavalry in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries...Trumpets are undoubtedly the longest-used military musical signal instrument.
Whisky Supper is the fifth album released by the Wicked Tinkers
Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830–1883) was an Irish poet, writer, and collector of traditional Irish music.
Óró, sé do bheatha abhaile or Óró, sé do bheatha 'bhaile is a traditional Irish song, that came to be known as a rebel song in the early 20th century. Óró is a cheer, while sé do bheatha 'bhaile means "welcome home".
The prehistory of Ireland has been pieced together from archaeological evidence, which has grown at an increasing rate over the last decades. It begins with the first evidence of permanent human residence in Ireland around 10,500 BC and finishes with the start of the historical record around 400 AD. Both the beginning and end dates of the period are later than for much of Europe and all of the Near East. The prehistoric period covers the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age societies of Ireland. For much of Europe, the historical record begins when the Romans invaded; as Ireland was not invaded by the Romans its historical record starts later, with the coming of Christianity.
The chromatic trumpet of Western tradition is a fairly recent invention, but primitive trumpets of one form or another have been in existence for millennia; some of the predecessors of the modern instrument are now known to date back to the Neolithic era. The earliest of these primordial trumpets were adapted from animal horns and sea shells, and were common throughout Europe, Africa, India and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East. Primitive trumpets eventually found their way to most parts of the globe, though even today indigenous varieties are quite rare in the Americas, the Far East and South-East Asia. Some species of primitive trumpets can still be found in remote places, where they have remained largely untouched by the passage of time.
A musical instrument is a device created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. A person who plays a musical instrument is known as an instrumentalist. The history of musical instruments dates to the beginnings of human culture. Early musical instruments may have been used for rituals, such as a horn to signal success on the hunt, or a drum in a religious ceremony. Cultures eventually developed composition and performance of melodies for entertainment. Musical instruments evolved in step with changing applications and technologies.
The Ossianic Society was an Irish literary society founded in Dublin on St. Patrick's Day, 1853, taking its name from the poetic material associated with the ancient narrator Oisín.
A horn is any of a family of musical instruments made of a tube, usually made of metal and often curved in various ways, with one narrow end into which the musician blows, and a wide end from which sound emerges. In horns, unlike some other brass instruments such as the trumpet, the bore gradually increases in width through most of its length—that is to say, it is conical rather than cylindrical. In jazz and popular-music contexts, the word may be used loosely to refer to any wind instrument, and a section of brass or woodwind instruments, or a mixture of the two, is called a horn section in these contexts.
Nafir, also nfīr, plural anfār, Turkish nefir, is a slender shrill-sounding straight natural trumpet with a cylindrical tube and a conical metal bell, producing one or two notes. It was used as a military signaling instrument and as a ceremonial instrument in countries shaped by Islamic culture in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. In Ottoman, Persian and Mugulin miniatures, the nafīr is depicted in battle scenes.
Trumpet found on the bottom of Loughnashade (Loch na Séad in Irish, 'Lake of Treasures').
Loughnashade trumpet, 1st century B.C.
Tip of Loughnashade trumpet.
