Introduction                                                                                                                             5

music by the Bothy Band, to whose sound the rich and innovative harmonies of Michael O Domh-
naill and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill were vital.
      In many tunes the melody itself consists mostly of broken chords, as in No. 7. Otherwise the har-
mony is not so obvious. Chord progressions from the circle of fifths (for example, E minor A D
G) are often effective where the melody allows them.
      Irish melodies are often described as "modal". In fact, they use the major and the (natural) minor
scales, as well as the major scale with a flat-seventh ("Mixolydian") and the minor scale with a sharp
sixth ("Dorian"). A device often used in these modes is to play a chord that harmonizes with the un-
usual note but otherwise does not belong to the prevailing "key", such as the F chord accompanying
the C natural in the D "Mixolydian" tune No. 1 or the F# minor chord accompanying the C# in the
E "Dorian" tune No. 26. Like everything else, this trick can easily be overused to the point of cliche.

Ornaments

      The performance of Irish traditional dance music (like those of other Irish art forms, book illumi-
nation and step dancing) consists of bewildering detail within a strongly disciplined external struc-
ture. A good traditional player will deck out every repetition of every part of a tune in a unique way
using ornaments, as in the following selected realizations of a typical reel measure:


      The cran was developed to ornament the lowest note available on the pipes, where a roll would ob-
viously be impossible. However, it is often heard on fiddles and on other notes than the lowest, as here.
      The notations in this book are bare skeletons, allowing each player to decorate them as he or she
pleases. A curved mark on a note indicates a likely candidate for rolling or cranning, as in No. 27.
      Ornamentation can be overdone to the detriment of the music, particularly when one is just
learning a tune. In a session it is better to play a tune in time without ornaments than exquisitely
ornamented in uncertain tempo.

"The Same Tune"

      The variations that ornaments make possible, as well as the folk process of transmission by ear
and memory (with or without the aid of adult beverages), make it inevitable that tunes will evolve
into other tunes and form families, as already mentioned in the discussion of the slide and the polka.
How and in what sense can two tunes be "the same tune"?
      In this book two tunes will be called "the same tune" if one can be transformed into the other
by (1) changing the rhythm, lengthening some notes or shortening others, but keeping the distribu-
tion of stresses among the notes the same; (2) replacing a figure that could be an ornament with
a different ornamental figure on the same underlying note; (3) replacing a segment with a different
segment that implies the same harmony; (4) a simple mode shift. The principal stressed notes at ca-
dences must correspond. By these rules, No. 10 and No. 110 are "the same tune," despite their very
different rhythms, and so are Nos. 37 and 79, whereas No. 32 and No. 33 are not.