CELTIC FOLK MUSIC

Do you like folk music? Turned out that I do :D

One day I started to play Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy and plunged into the atmosphere of Ireland. The soundtrack carried me to this country which I always wanted to visit, these vivid sounds of pipes, fiddle and mandolin perfectly suited my mood and I fell in love with this music.
Прослушать или скачать The Haunting of Castle Malloy - бесплатно на Простоплеер
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I remembered this and now, due to having a blog where

I can collect all interesting information, decided to learn something.

Celtic music is a term used by artists, record companies, music stores and music magazines to describe a broad grouping of musical genres that evolved out of the folk musical traditions of the Celtic peoples. These traditions include Irish, Scottish, Manx, Cornish, Welsh, Breton traditions. Asturian and galician music is often included, though there is no significant research showing that this has any close musical relationship.

(c) Wikipedia

Прослушать или скачать Irish Folk Music Ev Sistr бесплатно на Простоплеер

So, now I understand that I like not exactly Irish, but Celtic music in general. 

What are the major features of Celtic folk music?

Let's start with traditional types of instruments. Personally I don't have any musical education, so all I could distinguish were a flute and pipes. Obviously, there are a bit more than that :)

Fiddle (listen)                       Flute and whistle (listen)                     Harp (listen)

  

Uilleann pipes (listen)                      Banjo (listen)                           Accordion (listen)  

Mandolin (listen)                            Bouzouki (listen)                        Bodhrán (listen)  

There must be something special in this kind of music that characterize it.

Identifying "common characteristics" of Celtic music is problematic. Most of the popular musical forms now thought of as characteristically "Celtic" were once common in many places in Western Europe. There is debate over whether jigs were adapted from the Italian gigue, a common form of the baroque era, for example, while polkas have their origin in Czech and Polish tradition.
On the other hand, there are musical genres and styles specific to each Celtic country, due in part to the influence of individual song traditions and the characteristics of specific languages. Strathspeys are specific to Highland Scotland, for example, and it has been hypothesized that they mimic the rhythms of the Scottish Gaelic language.

 (c) Wikipedia

Well, I'm sure most people hear Celtic motives very often, but they just don't pay any attention to it. Even though this type of music appeared centuries ago, it is still popular with lots of nowaday musicians. Here some songs you might've heard. Enjoy! :)


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