Accompaniment in Irish Traditional Music

Adrian Scahill's seminal study traces the evolution of the accompaniment of instrumental Irish traditional music from its roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the highly refined and classicized music of the contemporary tradition. A key theme of the text is that the hybridity evident in accompaniment is not novel in itself, but related to the hybrid nature of the melodic tradition. The book is structured in two parts: the first concentrates on printed sources; the second on the recorded repertoire. The central objective of the book is to focus on accompaniment as part of the 'primary text' (to borrow from Allan F. Moore) of instrumental traditional music. It considers how the development of accompanimental techniques is closely related to changing musical styles and performance contexts, and reveals that these techniques are created through a process of assemblage, which draws on a wide range of musical sources from both inside and outside the tradition.