Edward Huws Jones searches for The Celtic Fiddle
(July 2003)
B&H has just published The Celtic Fiddler, in Edward Huws Jones' best-selling Fiddle Collection series, authentic folk fiddle music in easy to play arrangements for solo or ensemble strings.
Edward Huws Jones talks about his search for The Celtic Fiddle:
"The idea of the Celts captures the imagination. Scattered along the western seaboard of Europe, from the Atlantic coast of Spain to the islands of Scotland, the Celts are brought together by their languages, their art, their politics - and, of course, their music. The big Celtic festivals - and festivals don’t come much bigger than the Festival Interceltique at Lorient in Brittany - are visited by tens of thousands of people every year and Celtic music pours from every imaginable venue, from tiny bars to huge stadia.
When I was a child my parents took us on a family holiday to Brittany. My father, who was originally Welsh speaking, was able to read the old Breton inscriptions in the churchyards. This was an early glimpse into the hidden world of the Celts and I have been fascinated by it ever since.
Recently I was invited to put together a collection of fiddle music from the far-flung Celtic countries. Here was a wonderful opportunity to explore the different Celtic traditions and also, perhaps, to discover what these styles had in common. Over the coming months I was to hear Scottish music in Galicia, Welsh music in Brittany and Irish music just about everywhere! It was the beginning of a search that would reveal extraordinary richness and diversity and yield some great musical delights - and a few surprises, too.
The planned book was to focus on seven Celtic countries: Galicia in north-west Spain, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man and Scotland. In an age of internet research and mail-order CDs it might seem unnecessary to actually travel to find out about world music. In fact, I can’t imagine doing this sort of research without going there. One has to hear how this music is being performed in context - and not just by the big names but also informal groups and buskers in the streets of Santiago and Lorient. Just as important, one needs to see how audiences react - how they listen and what they go for. Or perhaps I just wanted to eat my way round Europe (razor-shell clams in Galicia, laver bread in South Wales...).
My journey started in Galicia, the remote corner of Spain centred on Santiago de Compostela. Some purists would exclude Galicia from the list of Celtic countries because it no longer has a Celtic language: modern Galego is more akin to Portuguese. But this cuts no ice with the musicians and no Celtic festival would be complete without the sweet sound of the gaita, the Galician bagpipes.
Galician folk musicians revel in their membership of the wider Celtic family and some traditional bands (such as that of the amazing Carlos Nuñez) include Irish or Breton musicians. Concerts, recordings and published collections of the music place Scottish and Irish pieces alongside traditional Galician tunes. Having said this, listening to the music it is not always easy to hear the Celtic common denominator. It certainly has fire and rhythmic energy but most of the music is inescapably Iberian. The closest suggestion of Celticness is in the fast 6/8 dance known as the muiñeira; the Muiñeira de San Paio is an irresistibly jig-like example - and one surely meant for the fiddle.
My next journey was to Brittany. Here the landscape has much in common with Galicia,with dramatic limestone or granite cliffs falling away into the Atlantic. In all the Celtic lands there is this sense of standing at the very edge of the world and the place names reflect this: Fisterra in Galicia, Finistère in Brittany, Lands End in Cornwall, Pembroke (pen = head, bro = land) in Wales.
During the middle ages Brittany had close links with Wales and Cornwall, with which it shares a similar ‘P-Celtic’ language. And as in Galicia, today’s Breton musicians enthusiastically celebrate their Celticness. The harpist Alan Stivell, one of the great ambassadors of Breton music, plays Scottish reels and Welsh airs together with Breton dance music, and folk groups will often include the Irish bodhran as a rhythm section. But the music itself turns out to defy any Celtic label and has a character all its own. Traditionally played by a duo of bombarde (high shawm) and biniou (bagpipes), short melodic phrases are passed to and fro between the players. With its modal tonality and static harmonies the music seems to have come straight out of a medieval time warp.
The violin was a late arrival in Brittany, introduce as the area was opened up during the Napoleonic wars and the industrial revolution. Fiddlers played the traditional Breton repertoire along with the newer dance forms such as gavotte, polka and waltz.
Cornwall is a relatively short hop across from Brittany and at one time the Cornish peninsula supported a rich Celtic culture. However, it was so accessible - and strategically important - that it soon became annexed to England and its Celticness withered: the last native speaker of the Cornish language died in 1777.
The surviving Cornish music mostly comes from the 18th and 19th centuries, the product of vibrant mining and sea-faring communities. It is great fiddle music, but Celtic it surely is not. With its jaunty hornpipes and morris dances and clear-cut major tonality the music feels unambiguously English.
And so on to Wales. One of the great delights of this search for Celtic fiddle music was for me the discovery of the treasury of Welsh dance music. When I was growing up in South Wales in the 1950s there simply wasn’t any: it was folk songs and hymns or nothing. But a new generation of players has unearthed the tradition (kept alive through the early 20th century partly by Welsh gypsies) and now the Welsh fiddle scene is buzzing.
This was brought home to me last summer when I visited my all-time favourite folk festival on the tiny island of Tatihou in Normandy. This is an eccentric festival: the whole audience wades out to the island as the tide ebbs, enjoys a three-hour concert and then hurries back to the mainland before getting cut off for the night. At one concert I was amazed to find there were two Welsh bands, singing in Welsh and with some nice fiddling, too. The Welsh repertoire has more than a hint of Irish in it - which is only natural when you consider the centuries of cultural exchange and migration. You can hear it in the implied modal harmonies in ‘Nyth y gwcw’ (‘The cuckoo’s nest’).
Irish music is so familiar that little more needs to be said. It is widely regarded as the quintessential Celtic music. Indeed, Irish music has become to Celtic music what salsa is to Latin American: an international musical language, played and enjoyed virtually everywhere. Which is not to say that a Parisian - or Japanese - ceilidh band will necessarily play the same as one that is Irish born and bred. One of the best young bands I heard on my recent travels, and one featuring some exciting fiddling, was the incredibly virtuosic Irish band Danu. Musicians like these demonstrate that the authentic Irish tradition is very much alive and kicking.
The music of the Isle of Man deserves more than a passing mention. I happened to sit next to a Manx musician at a concert in the Lorient festival and we ended up swapping e-mail addresses. The richness of the music was one of the surprises of my Celtic quest. Situated in the middle of the Irish Sea, Man was for centuries the perfect stop off between Ireland and Scotland. Its music is, predictably, a blend of both - but with its own distinctive spin on almost every tune.
And finally to Scotland. I spent a week in Orkney last year, working with 60 or so young players on a variety of different fiddle styles - bluegrass, klezmer, gypsy - which they played with the same fluency, lightness of bow and innate sense of pulse which they bring to their own traditional music. Scottish music, like Irish, is a Celtic lingua franca. But there are always fresh delights and surprises and I have Alastair Hardie (of the Hardie Press in Edinburgh) to thank for introducing me to the lyrical ‘Gin ye kiss my wife’.
Coming to the end of this journey the obvious question arises: is there really any such thing as Celtic music? Certainly the Irish-Scottish musical axis, together with its spin-offs in Wales and the Isle of Man, has a clear identity. But as far as the music of Cornwall and the vast and rich musical cultures of Brittany and Galicia are concerned, we are hard put to find any unifying thread. One could point to the modal tonalities or the implied drone accompaniments (as of bagpipes, hurdy-gurdy or crwth) in some of the older tunes, but these are common to folk music throughout Europe.
That Galicia and Brittany should have developed along their own independent lines is hardly surprising. After the Romans drove the Celts to their mountainous and sea-bound strongholds at the extremities of Europe they were bound to go their own way. So when Irish and Galician or Breton musicians come together to play each others’ music it is not really about discovering a shared musical identity. In fact, it is more about musical fusion - which is of course just as valid and creative as exploring common musical roots.
A couple of weeks ago I went down to London to deliver the manuscript of The Celtic Fiddler to the publishers and sort out some of the final details of the book. On the tube back to Kings Cross I found myself standing next to a man carrying a large triangular object in a canvas cover. I asked him if it was a Celtic harp (my fiddle case was a bit more of a give-away) and we got talking. As we arrived at Kings Cross he took out a new cellophane-wrapped CD - his latest recording of Celtic harp music - and put it in my hand as the doors closed.
There is a hidden community of Celticness - and you don’t have to have Celtic blood to belong to it! It struck me then that the big thing about our Celtic quest is not necessarily that it should have a rock-solid musicological base. The real point of the whole exercise is the pursuit of certain musical qualities: spontaneity, directness of communication, informality and emotional integrity.
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