Exploring Melodic Hybridity in the Irish Song Tradition

This chapter applies concepts of hybridity and cultural transfer to the development of Irish vernacular music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By exploring the evidence of printed collections from the period, the chapter observes the transfer of Irish-language song airs into a new genre of instrumental air playing practiced in very different ways by both musically literate urbanites and aurally trained rural musicians. As the penal laws were gradually repealed around the turn of the nineteenth century, some of these tunes began to make their way into new contexts again, in the regiments of the British Army as Catholic recruits flocked to sign up for the Napoleonic Wars. Finally, with English the dominant language of Ireland by the mid-nineteenth century, the chapter explores how composers of English language ballads used their own newly composed tunes for multiple purposes