Irish Dance Music Structure: 2 x 8 Bar Phrases Fact-Checked

their website is a set of roughly 21,000 dance tune settings in ABC notation, a human-readable sym- bolic music data format in plain text. The ABC files are easily parsed and manipulated symbolically ... First we select from our dataset tunes which have the standard form of an A and a B section. We · consider only tunes with a number of bars in {16, 32, 64}: an individual A or B section usually has · 8 or 16 measures, or 16 or 32 after manually reduplicating out music that was contained in repeat

Irish dance music is isometric; is built around patterns of bar-long melodic phrases akin to call and response. A common pattern is A Phrase, B Phrase, A Phrase, Partial Resolution, A Phrase, B Phrase, A Phrase, Final Resolution, though this is not universal.

A report from 1600 mentions that some forms of Irish dances were similar in form to English country dances, and later references mention the "rinnce fada", also known as the "long dance" or "fading". This dance, performed to a jig tune though not to any particular piece of music, became the customary conclusion to balls held in Ireland towards the end of the seventeenth century.

The phrase for this whole movement is: "hop, hop back, hop back 2-3." To do the step on the left foot, reverse the left and right directions. Slip jigs are in 9 8 time. Because of the longer measures, they are longer than the reel and the light jig, with the same number of bars to the music. The dance is performed high on the toes, and is often considered the "ballet of Irish ...

In the vast majority of tunes each part is made up of two phrases. The common pattern is a single phrase repeated with some slight modification, with the phrases falling naturally into half-phrases of two bars each.”Footnote 40 · The reel ...

Céili bands were formed possibly ... structure in the past consisted of 2/8 bar phrases called parts usually repeated or sub-divided into 2/4 bar sub-phases....

Homepage of the Sean Reid Society, dedicated to the study and preservation of Irish Uilleann/Union pipes and piping

@greg: i think that most tunes already have a structure which phrasing and dancing is based. why do dancers wait 8 bars into the tune to start rather than 7? i wrote a tune when i was 12 that had an uneven number of measures, and just by listening my grandma said that “you couldn’t dance to it.” i also remember very distinctly hearing james kelly saying “a phrase in irish music is two measures.” i could have misinterpreted him, but it was my interpretation is that this is how he thinks about and approaches music.