The term Celtic music encompasses Irish traditional music and traditional musics of Scotland; Cape Breton Island and Maritime Canada; Quebec; Wales; the Isle of Man; Northumberland (northern England); Brittany (northwestern France); Cornwall; and Galicia (northwestern Spain). The term, though widely used, is eschewed by many traditionalists.
At issue is the lack of many common threads uniting the "Celtic" peoples listed above. While the ancient Celts undoubtedly had their own musical styles, these have grown and evolved to the point where considering any modern styles reminiscent of ancient Celtic music is misleading. There is also tremendous variation between "Celtic" regions. Ireland and Scotland, for example, have living traditions of language and music, whereas Cornwall and the Isle of Man, in contrast, have only revivalist movements that have yet to take hold. Galicia has had little or no Celtic musical influence for several centuries, but is still grouped with the others. Thus, traditionalists, and most musicological scholars dispute that the "Celtic" lands have any folk connections to each other.
On the other hand, it is indisputable that related musical styles have been recorded and performed by and for persons living in all the "Celtic" lands, and thus there is such a thing a musical tradition uniting these areas -- it is simply a form of popular music instead of folk music; whether or not this distinction is important is a matter of taste. Many critics of the idea of modern Celtic music claim that the idea is the creation of modern marketing designed to stimulate regional identity in the creation of a consumer niche.
Common characteristic Celtic musical forms include jigs, reels, hornpipes, polkas, strathspeys (Scotland) and slow airs. Much of the music is typified by strong, repeating melodies in a set rhythm, which reflects a background as music to dance to. Ballads are also common. Largely through the immigration of the Scotch-Irish, Celtic music was the foundation for Appalachian folk music in the United States.
The Celtic music scene involves a large number of music festivals. Some of the most prominent include Celtic Colors (Nova Scotia), Celtic Connections (Glasgow) and Festival Interceltique (Lorient, Brittany).
The Breton musician Alan Stivell claimed (translation by Steve Winick)
- As on the linguistic plane, there are two branches, the Gaelic branch and the Brythonic branch, which differentiate themselves mostly by the extended range (sometimes more than two octaves) of Irish and Scottish melodies and the closed range of Breton and Welsh melodies (often reduced to a half-octave), and by the frequent use of the pure pentatonic scale in Gaelic music.
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