Sean-nós Singing

Sean-nós singing ( , ; Irish for "old style") is unaccompanied traditional Irish vocal music usually performed in the Irish language. Sean-nós singing usually involves very long melodic phrases with highly ornamented and melismatic melodic lines, differing greatly from traditional folk singing elsewhere in Ireland, although there is significant regional variation within Ireland. Sean-nós songs cover a range of genres, from love song to lament to lullaby, traditionally with a strong focus on conveying the relevant emotion of the given song. The term ''sean-nós'', which simply means "in the old way", is a vague term that can also refer to various other traditional activities, musical and non-musical.

The musician and academic Tomás Ó Canainn said:

''...no aspect of Irish music can be fully understood without a deep appreciation of sean-nós singing. It is the key which opens every lock.''

The origins of sean-nós singing are unknown, but it is probably at least seven centuries old. The perceived foreignness of the sound of sean-nós singing has led academics and amateurs alike to speculate that it has a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin.

History

Recorded history

If "sean-nós singing" is taken to mean "any traditional song sung in the Irish language", it could be said that the first sean-nós songs were sung when the Celts arrived in Ireland in 500BC. There is almost no mention of sean-nós songs in medieval Irish literature, but experts have speculated that sean-nós singing has existed in a similar form since the thirteenth century. Many of the songs sung today can be traced back to the 16th century.

In early Irish history, poets and bards had distinctly separate social roles from musicians. However, the Tudor and Cromwellian conquests of Ireland led to a suppression of traditional Irish culture, and the 1662 Act of Settlement, which banished Irish Catholic landowners to Connacht, meant that the remains of these once complex social and regional styles combined. The once lowly bard became the nonprofessional composer of "street poetry" (''sráid éigse''), and the strict, professionally composed meters of older Irish ballads were replaced with the far more accessible ''amhrán'' ("song") meters.

The tradition of the sean-nós song was exclusively oral and remains customarily so, however, a few songs were known to have been conveyed to script as early as the 16th century. A songbook for Elizabeth I contained English interpretations of sean-nós songs. Songs started to be more extensively written down in the eighteenth century and distributed in print from then on.

The Irish antiquarian Thomas Crofton Croker described an elderly female sean-nós singer he encountered in the early 1800s known for her "skill in keening":

"''This woman, whose name was Harrington, led a wandering kind of life, travelling from cottage to cottage about the country, and though in fact subsisting on charity, found everywhere not merely a welcome, but had numerous invitations on account of the vast store of Irish verses she had collected and could repeat. Her memory was indeed extraordinary; and the clearness, quickness, and elegance with which she translated from the Irish into English, though unable to read or write, is almost incredible. Before she commenced repeating, she mumbled for a short time, probably the beginning of each stanza, to assure herself of the arrangement, with her eyes closed, rocking her body backwards and forward, as if keeping time to the measure of the verse, She then began in a kind of whining recitation, but as she proceeded, and as the composition acquired it, her voice assumed a variety of deep and fine tones, and the energy with which many passages were delivered, proved her perfect comprehension and strong feeling of the subject.''"

The first recordings of sean-nós singing were made in 1905 by Richard Henebry (Risteard De Hindeberg) in An Rinn (Ring) and Cill Ghobnait (Kilgobnet), County Waterford, all of which have been digitised and made available online via the ITMA website. In 1907, the Austrian ethnologist Rudolf Trebitsch made several recordings in Waterford, Kerry, Donegal and Dublin. Later in the twentieth century, particularly during the folk revival, some sean-nós singers gained popularity in international folk music circles. The most notable of these was the Connemara singer Seosamh Ó hÉanaí (Joe Heaney), who toured America, performing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 before then settling in New York City. Others, including Bess Cronin of West Cork, were visited and recorded by song collectors and their recordings inspired future generations of musicians.

The use of the term "sean-nós" ("old style") to describe traditional Irish language singing was coined in the early 1940s at the Gaelic League Oireachtas. It was coined as part of the Gaelic Revival in an attempt to distinguish the genre from "less authentic" styles of music.

Possible origins in Iberia, Galicia or the Arab world

To many listeners, sean-nós singing sounds "foreign", or more specifically Arabic. Similarities can also be heard with the sacred music of the Oriental Orthodox Churches of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Sean-nós singers have noticed similarities with their style and the styles of Bedouin music and Spanish '' cante jondo''.

The ethnomusicologist Joan Rimmer suggested that the music of the Arab world, Southern Europe and Ireland are all linked. The famous folklorist Alan Lomax said:

'' have long considered Ireland to be part of the Old Southern Mediterranean-Middle Eastern family of style that I call bardic – highly