Tuesday, July 14, 2015, My Turn • Bluegrass festival sends me on a journey of discovery

Publisher’s note: This My Turn originally appeared in the Tuesday, July 13, 2015, edition of the Lassen County Times.

I love the crazy things I get to ponder because I have a musician’s sensibilities. A case in point — the recent Susanville Bluegrass Festival relaunched my interest in traditional Irish music — not that bluegrass is especially Irish, but the music of the Emerald Isle can be found at the core of the bluegrass tradition — the fiddle tunes, various varieties of jigs (double jigs, slip jigs, slide jigs, etc.), reels, clog dances, hornpipes and even, I kid you not, polkas.

Now take a deep breath — I have no fantasy about becoming a master of those old fiddle tunes on guitar — I have neither the hands nor the necessary inclination, but I still remain fascinated by the music just the same.

To some folks, Irish music, like the blues sometimes, might seem incredibly repetitious and boring, but I can tell you it’s not the same song being played over and over. The melodies really do change, even though they are often based on similar modal scales and musical movements and are constructed to conform to a rigid pattern, usually AABB. They also generally stick pretty close to the rhythm required by a particular dance.

The Irish musical tradition recognizes the existence of two worlds — our world and a parallel usually unseen world populated by any number of fairies, leprechauns and other mystical creatures. These two worlds interact with each other— and usually the unseen world influences events in our world. Shakespeare himself, if you remember, wrote about this ancient tradition in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

In fact, Irish music’s greatest songwriter — Turlough O’Carolan (a blind harpist who lived between 1670 and 1738) — is said to have spent the night near a fairy fort and received the gift of ceol-sidhe (fairy music) in his dreams. It is said he remembered every single song, and he later played each one from memory. More than 200 of his songs survive to this day. He’s not the only one either. A number of Irish songwriters tell the same or a similar story about receiving the gift of music from the fairies.

Hey, I guess the bluesmen have their devil at the crossroads; the Irish have their fairies in the wilderness; and me, all I have is the crazed hipsters from the coffee houses in the 1960s.

Then I got caught up in tenor guitars, dual course tenor guitars, mandolas, octave mandolins, citterns, mandocellos and bouzoukis and all their assorted tunings and uses. Is there any end to it?

Finally, to my surprise, I discovered one approach to playing the octave mandolin uses “major/minor chords” — that is chords that include only the first and fifth notes of the scale without a third. (For those who have forgotten their music theory, a major chord uses a regular third and a minor chord uses a flatted third. These are often called open or 5 chords, as in A5.)

Now what’s fascinating about this discovery is the power chord, (nearly exactly the same thing as this newly discovered major/minor chord), allegedly was developed by the fledgling rock and rollers back in the middle part of the last century and later perfected by the British Invasion bands such as The Who and the Kinks.

But guess what? I just found out these Irish cats have using this kind of chord for who knows how many centuries! What a stunning revelation. I’m completely dumbstruck, and now I’m forced to consider those old modal harmonies and chord patterns in a completely different and thirdless context.

Wow, this is gonna be fun.