Traditional Irish Music

Irish traditional music has been popular in Erris for a long, long time and there are still a lot of people in Erris who continue it today. In the years before gramophones, radio or television people had to make up their own entertainment. In every area in the country, there were local musicians, lilters, singers and dancers. Traditional music survived best and for longer in isolated areas like this because there weren’t many visitors from outside into the place and the people were too poor to travel for entertainment or to buy gramophones or radios. As a result of this each area in the country has what’s called it’s own style. Even today with everybody listening to everybody else people can still tell which part of the country it came from.

The most common traditional Irish music instruments are the fiddle, button key accordion, melodeon, concertina, tin whistle, uileann pipes, harp and bodhrán. If nobody had an instrument, somebody would lilt a tune so that people would dance. Sometimes people would use spoons, bones or a comb with piece of paper pulled over the teeth as accompaniments to keep in tune with the music. Sometimes the musicians in an area would gather together for a session where they would play the same tune with different instruments then they would stop playing start singing. Traditional singing is in both the Irish and English language. In English, there are ballads, which tell a story. Irish traditional singing is called Sean nós. It is a very old type of singing and it has been handed down from generation to generation. Sean nós singers sing without any musical instrument accompanying them.

On Tuesday the 16^th of January 2001 I interviewed our tin whistle teacher Angela Deane-Masterson who comes to the school once a week to teach us. Through the interview, I found out a lot more about her. I found out that not only does she play the tin whistle but she also plays the button key and piano accordion and the concert flute. Her favourite instrument is the tin whistle. She became a tin whistle teacher by doing a course in Dublin for teaching music. She has won Mayo and Connaught Fleadh Cheoils and the All Ireland Fleadh Cheoil. She has no favourite tune because she knows so many. She learnt music from listening to music in her house when she was younger and on radio. When she was four or five her dad bought her a tin whistle. Her favourite musicians are Mary Burgan, Joe Burke and Seamus Tansy.

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