- Ceolas Celtic Music Archive – The home of celtic music on the net, with reviews, biographies, guides, audio samples, hundreds of links to real-world and internet resources, tunes, schedules, and instrument guides.
- Ancient Music of Ireland – This page discusses Ancient Irish music with an emphasis on the Bunting Collection of harp music (1792). There are several good MIDI files.
- Celtic Music – Wikipedia article explores the difficulty in defining a genre which includes the traditional musics of the Celtic peoples, and recorded popular music with only a superficial resemblance to folk styles.
- Celtic Music – New Zealand – A resource for Celtic (Irish & Scots) musicians and performers. Information about events and sessions, teachers, and a tune collection.
- Celtic Roots – BBC Scotland site covering Celtic, traditional and folk music from Scotland and beyond. Includes gig listings, reviews and programme information.
- CelticTV – Celtic website which includes live webcasts, audio, restaurant and pub guide and band links from around the world.
- CelticWonder – Glorifying Irish music in its entirety with RealAudio clips from Clannad, Anuna, Riverdance, Loreena McKennitt and others, as well as graphics, MIDI files, and a discussion board.
- The Irish Music Forum – A bulletin board site dedicated to Irish Music.
- soc.culture.scottish: Newsgroup FAQ – 220+ pages, 485+K information. Updated daily. The most popular site on the internet for Scottish cultural information: history, arts, language, food, news, tartans, festivals, politics, education, sport; Links.
- Traditional Celtic Music – Resource for San Francisco and Monterey Bay area Celtic music. Includes information on the traditional Celtic music of Ireland, Scotland, Cape Breton and Brittany, with event calendar, local resources, CD reviews, suggested first purchases, and musician links.
- Celtic Roots Festival – Annual heritage festival celebrating the folk music, dance and craft art traditions of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and other countries including Canada. Includes details of the schedule, performers, and information for visitors. [Ontario, Canada]
- Hebridean Celtic Festival – Traditional and contemporary music on the Isle of Lewis in July. Programme, competition, and booking details. [Scotland, UK]
- Pan Celtic 2006 – An annual festival of Celtic arts, music, and culture to be held in Letterkenny, Ireland in 2006. Information about program, competitions, for visitors, and merchandise.
- Celtic Colours International Festival – Annual Celtic festival of music and Celtic culture held on Cape Breton Island. Information about the schedules, artists, and pictures of past events.
- Féis An Eilein – Annual festival of Gaelic song, music and dance on Christmas Island, Cape Breton; includes schedule, contact details, and information on their year-round activities.
Celtic music is a broad grouping of musical genres that evolved out of the folk musical traditions of the Celtic peoples of Western Europe. The term Celtic music may refer to both orally-transmitted traditional music and recorded popular music with only a superficial resemblance to folk styles of the Celtic peoples.
Most typically, the term Celtic music is applied to the music of Ireland and Scotland, because both places have produced well-known distinctive styles which actually have genuine commonality and clear mutual influences. The music of Wales, Cornwall, Isle of Man, Brittany, Northumbria and Galicia are also frequently considered a part of Celtic music, the Celtic tradition being particularly strong in Brittany, where Celtic festivals large and small take place throughout the year. Finally, the music of ethnically Celtic peoples abroad are also considered, especially in Canada and the United States.
In Celtic Music: A Complete Guide, June Skinner Sawyers acknowledges six Celtic nationalities divided into two groups according to their linguistic heritage. The Q-Celtic nationalities are the Irish, Scottish and Manx peoples, while the P-Celtic groups are the Cornish, Bretons and Welsh peoples. Sawyer also mentions the Celtiberian languages as part of P-Celtic.
The Breton musician Alan Stivell uses a similar dichotomy, between the Gaelic (Irish and Scottish) branch and the Brythonic (Breton and Welsh) group, which differentiate «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» [1].
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, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany have living traditions of language and music, whereas Cornwall and the Isle of Man have only revivalist movements that have yet to take hold. Galicia has no Celtic language (Galician is a Romance language closest to Portuguese), but Galician music is often claimed to be «Celtic.» Thus traditionalists and most musicological scholars dispute that the «Celtic» lands have any folk connections to each other. A strong case can be made that the similarities between the various musics called «Celtic» derive more from a common origin in the vernacular music of late mediaeval and early modern Europe than from any innate Celticity.
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; June Skinner Sawyers, for example, notes that «Celtic music is a marketing term that I am using, for the purposes of this book, as a matter of convenience, knowing full well the cultural baggage that comes with it».
Identifying «common characteristics» of Celtic music is problematic. Most of the popular musical forms now thought of as characteristically «Celtic» were once common in many places in Western Europe. Jigs were adapted from Italian music, for example, and polkas have their origin in Czech and Polish tradition.
On the other hand, there are musical genres and styles specific to each Celtic country, due in part to the influence of individual song traditions and the characteristics of specific languages. Strathspeys are specific to Highland Scotland, for example, and mimic the rhythms of the Scottish Gaelic language.
