Trad meets Baroque

Written by Tadhg Sudlow, violinist and violist from Perth, who has recently completed a Masters in Early Music at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, studying with Antoinette Lehman and Shunske Sato, and wrote a thesis on Irish music in the 18th century. Tadhg performs with historically informed ensembles across Europe and with Sydney’s Australian Brandenburg Orchestra.

22nd July 2025.

I grew up learning Irish traditional music with Seán Doherty through Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. Irish trad music has continued to play an important role throughout my adult life. When I started studying baroque violin, I noticed similarities in the way that baroque and Irish music is conceptualised. The ornamental freedoms and styles were familiar, while rhythmic flexibility like that described in French inégal practices share similarities with Irish jig and hornpipe rhythms. The concepts were so recognisable but executing them in performances was like speaking a new language. I knew how I wanted them to sound and what to express, but the pronunciation was difficult, and just like with a new language it takes a lot of practice to become fluent!

I continued searching for this fluency within different areas of baroque playing, a theme constantly recurring throughout my studies in Amsterdam. Antoinette is from a folk music background, and really helped me to connect my Irish trad instincts to my classical knowledge. Shunske also often asked me to play an Irish tune, or to play something as though it was Irish to engage that part of my brain and to improve my sound, relaxation, and creativity. But within this progress, I still struggled to tangibly define the stylistic elements shared between Irish and baroque traditions. This led to my master’s thesis topic and the Trad meets Baroque concerts. In 2024 I presented this concert four times, once in Perth. Each performance shaped my understanding of how to blend the stylistic elements, informing my approach through experimentation and reflection. The incredible musicians that I worked with all influenced this processing, especially Krista and James in Perth! It is so exciting to perform similar music with many different combinations of ensemble, and we have always had a lot of fun with the music. This video has clips from each concert that demonstrate the style progression.

 

 

I anticipated that the oral and written traditions in eighteenth century Ireland were not opposing forces, but that they coexisted, and even influenced each other. Irish traditional music, though orally transmitted, eventually entered the world of printed notation and was undeniably altered in the process. Meanwhile, Baroque musicians adopted Irish idioms, resulting in a mutual exchange rather than a simple one-sided appropriation.

This cultural interplay unfolded amongst a complex backdrop. C.T. Grenville summarised the way Ireland was thought of by English politicians in 1784:

“Ireland is too great to be unconnected with us and too near to be dependent on a foreign state and too little to be independent.”

Centuries of English colonisation culminated in Protestant settlements in the 17th century and escalating religious tensions. Despite the Penal laws aimed at suppressing Catholic life in the 18th century, underground Gaelic Irish networks flourished: Hedge schools, seanachais (traditional story tellers), poets, dancing masters, and the last great generations of bardic harpers preserved Irish culture and language. Irish was the dominant language everywhere except in Ulster and the Pale. Church services and Irish traditions endured in secret, with increasing tolerance as the century progressed, balancing the fragile peace.

It is very important to note that the Irish Traveller community, an ethnically distinct and nomadic community, has been marginalized and omitted from nationalist narratives. Professor Gibbons reflects that “conservative minded nationalists sought to impose a coherent narrative form on the amorphous mass of Irish history.” Much of Irish music today has been shaped by the strong traditions of the traveller community, especially the uilleann pipe styles in the early 20th century.

Learning Irish traditional music is an immersive, lifelong journey. Ornamentation and nuance must be internalized, not taught mechanically. Rigid teaching frameworks initially help beginners, but fluency comes through conscious listening. Unlike classical music's dependence on written scores, trad music thrives on shared experiences. Style is absorbed through repetition, not rules. Portaireacht bhéil (lilting) remains a key element of Ireland’s musical tradition, emphasising the centrality of internalised musical memory and vocal expression. One often-cited legend attributes the origins of the tradition to the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, during which time traditional instruments were allegedly confiscated or destroyed. While evidence proving this specific claim is unclear, the extensive history of cultural suppression and the parallel emergence of hedge-schools supports the plausibility of lilting as a tool to maintain tradition during the loss of formal musical infrastructures. In contemporary practice, lilting persists in performance and as a memory aid. At competitions such as the Fleadh Cheoil, skilled lilters have developed remarkable accuracy in emulating a variety of instruments.

Three categories can divide Irish music in the 18th century: Harp music (The art music of Ireland), dance/folk music (pipes and fiddles), and song (closely tied to Irish poetry and storytelling). Fiddles and pipes were more associated with rural and working-class contexts and the dancing masters, whereas the harp symbolized the old elite Irish culture. 

‘I protest I could never hear an Irish Jigg, well played upon the Bagpipes, that I had not an Inclination to dance to it, and have often catched myself dancing in my Chair without Thought, by the mere Power of the Music.’

Surprisingly fluid musical boundaries between the Anglo elite and the common piper are demonstrated in the above quote from an English lady travelling in Ireland, printed in 1751, and in Arthur O'Neill’s memoirs where he recounted 46 musicians gathering at a house in Sligo. 32 were gentlemen, 3 of the host’s daughters playing the piano, alongside O’Neill on harp and 10 common pipers.

The English emphasis on notation and the increasing proliferation of printed folk music throughout the 18th century raises questions about cultural ownership. Writing down music grants it permanence, legitimacy, and control, especially under colonial systems. Oral traditions celebrate fluidity and shared experience, resisting commodification. This role of notation, both as a preserver of tradition and as a transformer of it, is a recurring theme. While traditional music’s style is at odds with the certainty of printed notation, eighteenth-century collections of notated Irish music do represent crucial points of contact between oral and literate cultures.

The underexplored written sources that I am most excited about are Pádraig O Neill’s notebooks at the National Library of Ireland, containing a mixture of manuscript and printed traditional Irish and Baroque music. A hedge-school educated miller and musician from rural Kilkenny, O Neill documented a unique intersection of Irish oral and written music, notating Italian concertos, collecting comic opera prints, as well as writing out hundreds of Irish airs and tunes, many with Irish language titles. These are the oldest known musical manuscripts written by a Gaelic Irish person, documenting a rare perspective on the tangible cross-over between musical styles. These manuscripts form the basis of our Trad meets Baroque performance in Dublin HandelFest 2025 coming up on the 16th August, where I am joined by Irish fiddle player Cillian Ó Cathasaigh and harp player Tara Viscardi to perform the music found in Pádraig O Neill’s music books. https://www.dublinhandelfest.com/tradmeetsbaroque 

Six collections of Irish melodies are known to have been published in Ireland during the eighteenth century:

1. 1724 John and William Neal A Collection of the most Celebrated Irish Tunes

2. 1748 Dennis Connor 61 Pieces of Musick agreed with Mr. Carolan’s son, the compositions of his late father Turlogh Carolan

3. 1780 John Lee A favourite collection of the so much admired old Irish tunes

4. 1785 Tommaso Giordani Overture and Irish medley to the Island of the Saints

5. 1786 John Walker Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards

6. 1795 Cooke’s Selection of Twenty One Favourite Original Irish Airs

Irish tunes were also printed in England and Scotland, often bundled with other national melodies as "folk" or "country dances." They were mostly arrangements or direct copies of already printed material, with some exceptions. The Hibernian Muse A Collection of Irish Airs… published in London in 1786 is an interesting source containing Essay on Irish Music; and memoirs of Carolan. The essay quotes Joseph Walker’s Historical Memoirs, presenting a surprisingly positive take on Irish music, a vastly changed perspective for a book published in London.

One of the best-known figures in Irish melody collecting is Edward Bunting, whose publications only included a quarter of the tunes that he collected in his personal notebooks, preserved at Queens University in Belfast. Bunting was commissioned to notate tunes at the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival, giving a unique insight into this last great generation of Irish harp players. Bunting’s description of Irish language musical terms explained by the harp players present provides a unique insight into how music was conceptualised. Although the harp players were from different masters and regions of the country, they all showed perfect agreement in their understanding. Instead of meter, tempo, and tonality, each element has as a character. The name describes its effect, or the string’s role within the tuning of the instrument. Instead of tempo, they describe feelings. The keys are not major or minor but greater, lesser, or of a single sound. These frameworks are not without precedent in broader European traditions. Affect based categorisation appear with rhetorical approaches to performance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly within earlier German and treatises. This terminology may have also functioned as a practical pedagogical tool, aiding memory, interpretation, and performance within the oral tradition.

Baroque composers such as Francesco Geminiani and František Kočvara included Irish melodies in their published compositions. Geminiani in the form of variations on an Irish Tune, and Kočvara using the melody for Molli Astore in the slow movement of his second viola sonata. Both lived in Ireland for some years, Geminiani in Dublin and Kočvara in both Cork and Dublin. Handel also notated an Irish tune titled Der Arme Irische Junge (The Poor Irish Boy) in his Dublin Messiah manuscript whilst visiting for the season. This shows a general interest and awareness of Irish traditional music within European baroque circles that were visiting.

Turlogh O’Carolan’s Concerto is a tune that appears in countless tune books throughout the eighteenth century. It is an example of an Irish harp player embracing influences from baroque music coming to Ireland, influences that he was most likely exposed to through his Anglo-Irish patrons. O’Carolan has had a vast range of tune styles attributed to him, from very old traditional style airs to more baroque influenced character pieces named after his patrons. His music has been notated extensively due to his fame since the first publication of Irish music in Ireland in 1624. Notation plays a double role, as a preserver and transformer. It prioritizes fixed elements like pitch and duration, but neglects character and rhythmic nuance. This limitation, familiar to Baroque musicians learning from skeletal scores and diminution treatises, mirrors challenges faced by traditional musicians today.

There is always a difficulty in approaching research led performances with oral traditions and limited sources. My teacher in Amsterdam, Antoinette Lohmann, has thought in depth about these issues relating to her own group Fidelkråm. She highlighted the expressive individuality of folk fiddle styles in contrast with the formalised expectations of modern classical training, emphasising that much of 17th and 18th century music making, especially among beerfiddler traditions was rooted in oral, non-notated practice. Lohmann also discusses the challenges of sourcing reliable material, the pejorative tone of historical descriptions of folk players, and the lack of surviving documentation. She warns against overreliance on elite written sources in reconstructing early music. Ultimately, she describes Fidelkråm’s approach as a historically inspired yet creative practice, drawing from fragments of the past, regional traditions, and modern sensibilities to shape their own “beerfiddler” identity. This attitude of enjoying living in the unknown areas of style is very relevant for Trad meets Baroque and inspires me to keep questioning everything in preparing these concerts.

At the end of the day, Trad Meets Baroque concerts serve as a reflective outcome of this research as well as actively contributing to it, engaging with the historical material through interpretation, dialogue, and performance. These concerts do not attempt to reconstruct authentic sound, but instead explore the interpretive possibilities that arise when historically informed Baroque practice meets Irish music traditions. As well as this year’s Dublin HandelFest concert, I will perform Trad meets Baroque as a duo with Xander Baker for Blasiuskonzerte Reihe "Alte Musik" in Kaufberen, Germany on the 31st August 2025. Tickets are available here. https://www.ticket-regional.de/events_info.php?eventID=235257 

Also keep an eye out for the Irish Baroque Orchestra’s 2026 program, as we are working towards some very exciting Trad meets Baroque and adjacent projects next year!

References:

Bartlett, Thomas. Ireland and the British Empire. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Bunting, Edward. The ancient music of Ireland, vol. 3. W. Power & Co., 1796.

Geminiani, Francesco. Rules for Playing in a True Taste, Op.8. London, 1748.

Gibbons, Luke. Transformations in Irish Culture. University of Notre Dam Press, 1996. https://archive.org/details/transformationsi0000gibb_d8g0/page/154/mode/2up?q=amorphous 

M.N.M. “As the following Letter gave universal Satisfaction in London, we shall make no Apology for its publication,” Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, October 5-8, 1751, 1. https://www.irishnewsarchive.com/.

Moody, T. W. and F. X. Martin. The Course of Irish History. Mercier Press, 1994.

National Library of Ireland, “O Neill, Patrick, 1765-1832, collector and scribe”, Author. Accessed May 2nd. https://catalogue.nli.ie/Author/Home?author=O+Neill%2C+Patrick%2C+1765-1832%2C+collector+and+scribe. 

Queens University Belfast, Edward Bunting, Digital Special Collections and Archives. Accessed April 25th. https://digital-library.qub.ac.uk/digital/collection/p15979coll9/search 

Wire Strung Harp, “Memoires of Arthur O’Nail”, The Queens University of Belfast Library, MS4/14. Accessed January 28th. https://www.wirestrungharp.com/library/oneill-memoir_ms4-14/