Reel Innovation: How Irish Dance Music Changed Its Tune

Taken from Issue 001 of The Irish Dance Globe. Purchase any remaining copies here while stocks last.

Irish dancing has changed so much over the last century, from céilí at the crossroads to the worldwide explosion of shows like Riverdance. But while the locations, costumes, technology, and approaches to Irish dance evolve, the core of how we dance and what we dance to has remained the same, as has the reason we dance — a sheer passion for the art form.

The music we dance to has been on its own journey of transformation. We dance to jigs, reels, and hornpipes, of which there are a dizzying variety — and the core of Irish dance music repertoire is comfortingly steadfast and predictable. But what we hear and how we hear it has changed substantially.

Some of the scene’s top feis musicians — Sean O’Brien, Cormac O’Sé, Brian O’Sullivan, and Liam “Sully” O’Sullivan — have been at the forefront of this innovation. Speaking to the musicians over Zoom about these changes and their own experiences in the world of Irish dance music, the passion they have for playing comes to the forefront, as do their connections as musical partners and best mates. “There’s nothing for me that can replace the high of an hour, two-hour, three-hour, five-hour session where you’re locked in with someone, and you’re both in the zone,” Sully says. “You’re playing with someone who’s amazing, respective skill set; there’s nothing like it when it’s on fire. You don’t want the day to end.”

As an Irish dancer who started in the mid-1990s, took a 20-year break, then came back to it in the 2010s, I personally found the difference in the sonics of feis music to be astonishing. My feet were still dancing the same jig rising step, but I definitely was not hearing the accordion sounds I had encountered as a child. Brian confirms this, sharing that the tuning of the piano accordion has indeed shifted substantially. The sound used to be “a big Italian accordion with a very wide musette,” he says, noting that this was the sound that Scottish musicians, such as his father Seamus O’Sullivan, used. As Cormac quips, “You were playing G, and you’re also playing F sharp! All at the same time!” Today, a sound that is often described as “dry” or “tight” is what can be heard on most piano accordions.

The piano accordion is the most common instrument today in the feis music scene. As its sound has changed, so has the feis music vibe. How the piano is played — or more specifically, the electric keyboard — both as melody and accompaniment, has also progressed substantially. As an accompanying melody instrument that fleshes out harmonies and helps to lock the melody player into the rhythm and tempo of the tune, piano backings used to be sparse. It was similar to what you might hear on old recordings of céilí band music, according to Cormac.

Today’s accompaniment does its basic job of providing chords to match the melody, but they often select these chords from outside what would have been considered standard in traditional Irish music. If you want an example of what this sounds like, pull up any Anton and Sully slow hornpipe tune on the Feis App — the chords Anton plays would more typically be found in jazz piano than Irish, and it transforms and enhances the mood and feel of the melody Sully performs on the button accordion.

The biggest instrumental change, though, is the use of the keyboard to create what the feis musicians somewhat jokingly call the “feis machine”. The resulting panpipe or organ-style sound has admirers and detractors in equal measure. Brian theorises that this sound arose from the fact that accordion samples on the keyboard weren’t ideal on their own, so the layering of different sounds became a way to make the use of the keyboard a strong melody instrument by itself.

The “machine” aspect, Sean says, comes from the automated accompaniment that is programmed by the musician into the keyboard — you press a key or basic chord, and the accompaniment is triggered until the next chord change. This style made it possible to play both melody and accompaniment in one go at feiseanna. And although it may sound easy to have this played by a computer, in reality the execution of the feis machine is complex, requiring the musician to keep track of melody, chords, and the desired accompanying style all in real time.

In the early 1990s, CLRG set specific tempos for tunes to be performed to, in order to fight against the trend of substantially slowing the music down, as well as allowing dancers to anticipate exactly how fast or slow they would be dancing at a competition. Before this, dancers would stand on stage and wave up or down to the musician to set their speed during their eight-bar introduction, a fascinating piece of oral history as told to me by many musicians during interviews I conducted at the 2016 North American Nationals in New Orleans, Louisiana. In order to make sure they were playing at the required speed, musicians began using metronomes during performances. Today, most musicians use a drum machine which provides a heavy and easy to hear backbeat that is programmed for each specific type of tune.

The idea of feis music as its own separate genre is a recent development, and is a result of the aforementioned changes, which helped mark a separation from trad session music to music specifically played for a feis. As a result, many other changes came with these, such as adapting Scottish tunes and piano accompaniment (‘Glasgow Reel’, anyone?) and influences from composers like Riverdance’s Bill Whelan. How we listen to feis music in practice has even changed along with music technology, from records to streaming apps like the Feis App, which has drastically fast-tracked experimentation with different types of feis tunes.

Tradition is a loaded word with so much meaning, and is often used as a rallying cry in which people insist things should remain the same. But tradition is actually the opposite: it requires change and evolution in order to continue. As music scholar Jennifer Matsue says, tradition is “creative transformation within continuity”. Within the regulations imposed by the requirements of Irish dancing — 48 bars of music, reels at 113, 40 set dances, and so on — feis musicians are continually finding ways to push the creative boundaries of what they play, crafting music that inspires us to get up and move with everything we’ve got.

At the same time, they form deep connections with the music they play and with each other. As Brian shares at the end of our chat, he draws particular musical and creative inspiration from playing the set dance rounds. “You’ve already got a few hours of triumph and pain behind you, and if the set round is really long, if you just get into that zone — or even hit the wall and go past it — there’s something magical there that I’ve never experienced in any other part of my life. You never want it to end.”