Puirt à beul — Singing for Dancing
Introduce yourself to a relatively little-known genre of traditional Celtic music
By Rick Anderson
Both Ireland and Scotland (and, by extension, Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, which serves basically as a musical arm of Scotland) have traditions of rhythmically intense unaccompanied singing. In Ireland, the practice is usually called “lilting,” and tends to involve either nonsense lyrics or scat-style non-meaningful vocal sounds.
In…