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The Bodhrán: Experimentation, Innovation, and the Traditional Irish Frame Drum (Charles K. Wolfe Music Series)
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About The Bodhrán: Experimentation, Innovation, And The
Product Description In the past fifty years, the bodhrán, or traditional Irish circular frame drum, has undergone a rapid evolution in development. Traditionally, it is a shallow drum ranging from ten to twenty-six inches in diameter, covered in goatskin on the top (or drum) side and open on the other. Unlike any other instrument associated with Irish traditional music, the bodhrán has been dramatically altered by its confrontation with modern instrument design, performance techniques, and musical practice. Colin Harte’s The Bodhrán: Experimentation, Innovation, and the Traditional Irish Frame Drum presents a definitive history of the bodhrán from its early origins to its present-day resurgence in Irish American folk music. The bodhrán has global roots and bears many characteristics of older drums from northern Africa and the Middle East. Harte picks up on these basic similarities and embarks on an engaging tour of the instrument’s historical and organological development, gradual evolution in playing styles, and more recent history of performative practice. Drawing from a host of interviews over a multi-year period with participants primarily located in Europe and North America, this work provides a platform for multiple perspectives regarding the bodhrán. Participants include bodhrán makers, professional performers, educators, amateur musicians, historians, and enthusiasts. Growing out of rich ethnographic interviews, this book serves as the definitive reference for understanding and navigating the developments in the bodhrán’s history, organology, performance practices, and repertoire. About the Author COLIN HARTE received his PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Florida. He currently teaches music at Kappa International High School in the Bronx and for CUNY-Irish Studies. He is also an active bodhrán player in the Irish traditional music communities of New York City. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. As a number of musicians quietly collect themselves, moving their chairs into a circle, a bit of conversation begins to bubble in a lively pub. These musicians have gathered to perform Irish traditional music in an informal context known as a session. The resident leader of the session is an accordionist seated next to a fiddler, flautist, and guitarist. The last musician to arrive is a man holding a circular bag containing a bodhrán and several tippers. After a brief greeting, the music commences. Reels and jigs are organized into sets rapidly following one another interspersed with snippets of conversation pertaining to local politics, new recordings, humorous stories, and personal anecdotes. The accordionist, fiddler, and flautist provide the melodic content, the guitarist offers harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment, and the bodhrán player offers percussive rhythmic accompaniment. The pub patrons continue eating and drinking. Occasionally a heated musical moment captures their attention only to be shortly redirected back to their conversation. This musical context is familiar to Irish traditional musicians and enthusiasts alike and serves as one of the most common performance contexts for the bodhrán. Unlike any other instrument associated with Irish traditional music, the bodhrán in the last fifty years has been significantly altered in design, performance techniques, and music contextual practices. The bodhrán is the Irish circular frame drum, which has experienced a rapid period of development and expansion spurred on by professionalization, bodhrán maker innovation, performer creativity, acoustic analysis, and organological experimentation. In part, this text tries to make sense of the myriad changes in organology (the study of musical instruments), performative practices, pedagogy, and repertory. It also examines the historical development of the bodhrán including an analysis of the changing role and function of the instrument in Irish traditional music and culture
