Banna de Dhá and the Pubs of Ireland

When I was first accepted to Agnes Scott College’s Literary Ireland study abroad program, I knew I wanted music to be a part of my experience. So, when I heard that a traditional Irish band, Banna de Dhá, would be offering a master class at my school, I jumped at the chance to hear what they had to say about Ireland’s music. During the class, fiddler Tom Morley and guitarist Hazel Ketchum discussed their experiences with traditional Irish music, particularly what it is like to perform it. I assumed that what they said about performance practice in Ireland was true, but I was still eager to see exactly how true it was. After witnessing music all over Ireland, I can comfortably say that Tom and Hazel were right on the money about how performance works there.

First, Tom mentioned that performers playing melodies often string many different tunes together with no break between them, and these melodies are played from memory. Hazel told us that accompanists, on the other hand, usually find chords that match the melodies by ear. I witnessed this blend of memorization and improvisation in pubs all across Ireland. At Sheehan’s pub in Killarney (left), the band rarely stopped between songs, not even when keys or rhythms changed. When the band invited me to perform with them, all I needed to tell the guitarist was which key I sang in, and he improvised his own chords as the songs progressed. None of them used sheet music or even had chords sketched out on a napkin.

Tom also shed some light on the nature of improvisation for rhythm instruments in traditional Irish music. He said that accompanists sometimes have to improvise different parts depending on the number and types of instruments present in a performance. For guitarists like Hazel and myself, this could mean anything from changing the strumming pattern to give rhythmic variety to filling in a simple bass line. What a guitarist must do to add to the rhythm depends a great deal on the other instruments.

In Ireland, guitarists

were present in almost every performance I saw, and always as rhythm performers, but what they played varied just as Tom said they would. For example, the band at Peadar O’Donnell’s in Derry (right) had a guitar and a bhódran (“BOH-rahn”), a traditional Irish drum, for its rhythm section. Since there were two rhythm instruments, the guitarist did not need to add much variety to his rhythms. When the guitar is the main or only rhythmic instrument in a performance, however, the guitarist must be more creative in order to hold the band together and add variety. This was the case with the bands at OliverSt. John Gogarty’s in Dublin, Sheehan’s, and Tigh Coili in Galway City. In each of these bands, the guitarist was the main rhythm carrier, and each guitarist added a little something extra to his rhythm, such as improvising a melody that fitted with the main tune (Gogarty’s) or swapping strum patterns to mark the beginnings of new songs (Tigh Coili).

Musicians performing in Ireland felt much more group-oriented than I am accustomed to. There was no clear leader in any of the groups mentioned above. Each member of the group helped support the others and cue them in when something changed in the songs. Music, for them, was definitely a group endeavor!