This document discusses different music genres including folk music, classical music, and country music. It focuses on Irish folk music, describing its origins and development in Ireland through oral tradition. The key characteristics of Irish folk music are also summarized, such as its binary form, use of instruments like fiddle and accordion, and notable exponents like Sharon Shannon and Ryan Molloy.

1. 5N1301 Music Performance
Answer:
Main Elements Of Musical Styles
The conventional categories of classification groups music with similar styles or
characteristics together. This classification is based on vocal tones and instrumental. Some
examples of music genres are; classical music, country music, and folk music. The
importance of having music genres is to organize and categorize music to identify and
locate. It also helps understand music as a form of art (Borthwick & Moy, 2020). Folk music
is a genre that refers to traditional music and modern contemporary music. Traditional folk
music is the original folk music passed down from one generation to another, while
contemporary music arose in the twentieth century in the United States (Rahman et al.,
2019). An example of folk songs is Irish traditional folk songs originating from Ireland. It
uses instruments such as harps, whistles, and banjo. Country music evolved from blues,
church music, and folk music in the United States of America's south eastern states in the
1920s. Country and Irish music is a type of Irish music that combines North American
country music with Irish elements (Panwar et al., 2017). Depression and WWII helped
spread the country music to other parts of the world through migration and displacement of
people. Classical music is the western world's formal musical heritage, different from
western folk or popular music customs. According to Ferwerda et al. (2017), this genre is
called classical music because it uses composing and writing down music notations so that
other musicians can play them. Classical music originated from the early Christian church in
the nineteenth century.
Development Of Folk Music
Irish folk, a genre developed in Ireland, is my favorite type of music. It is popularly known
as Irish trad or simply Irish traditional music. This genre comes with various names,
including; music with unknown composers and music about cultural or national identity.
Several collections of Irish trad have been around since the 18th century. Ballad printers
were established in Dublin in the following century. This genre of music has endured more
strongly against the forces of cinema. According to W.H. Grattan, in Gaelic Ireland, there
were at least ten musical instruments in use (O'Neill, 1910). They included the cruit and
clairseach, the timpani, the feadan, the buinne among others. Some of the features that

2. characterize this genre include the following. First, it was transmitted through oral
tradition; ordinary people memorized the songs since the majority were illiterate; thus, they
could not read or write to store such information. The music is directly related to natural
culture. It was usually used during the commemoration of certain events in society. The
songs have been passed over generations and are performed in customs (Mitchell, 2016).
Folk music does not have copyrights. Fusion of cultures is present in this genre as the songs
may evolve to incorporate and reflect the influences from disparate cultures. The tune
mostly used in American folk is AABB, also called binary form. This music was made by
common people while going about their day to day work or even leisure time. Manual labor
usually included singing as part of their activities to show comradeship or as a source of
inspiration. Work songs frequently feature call and response. These structures are designed
to enable laborers to coordinate their effort following the rhythm of the song. Some of the
current folk song legends include Sharon Shannon, popularly known for her famous album
"Christmas Time Again,” a seasonal folk genre featuring Wallis Bird.
Characteristics Of Irish Folk Music
In terms of composition, Irish music is built around patterns of bar-long melodic phrases
related to call and response. Tunes are in binary form, divided into two parts consisting of
eight bars each. Each part is played twice, and the entire tune is played three times like
AABB, AABB, AABB. Airs are played singly, while dance tunes are played in a medley of 2-4
tunes or sets. Ornamentation in Irish folk music is characterized by singers and
instrumentalists embellishing melodies' use of grace notes, cuts, rolls, or slides. Notable
musical instruments of Irish music include fiddle, tin whistle, ulilleann pipes, and flute.
Button accordion and concertina were synonymous with this genre during the nineteenth
century. Saxophones and pianos are used as an accompaniment dating back early 20th
century. A four-string tenor banjo is also played as a melody instrument by traditional
players of Irish origin and is commonly tuned GDAE, an octave below the fiddle.
Notable Exponents
Among the most successful artists of the Irish Folk is Sharon Shannon and Ryan Molly.
Sharon Shannon is a global celebrity recognized for her Traditional Irish Folks. She plays
button accordion, fiddle, and tin whistle. Her recordings contain various influences such as
reggae, Portuguese, Cajun, and French Canadian music. Ryan Molloy is a songwriter and a
performing artist of Irish Traditional Music. His songs have been performed in over four
continents across the globe throughout his one and half decades of his active years in a
music career (Murphy,2019). His major concerts were held at Lucerne Hall, National
Concert Hall in Ireland, and Hollywell Music Room in England. Several of Molloy's works
have been chosen to represent Ireland by the International Society for Contemporary Music,
like ISCM World New Music Day in Vancouver in 2017. In 2019, he produced his first solo
CD as a pianist called piano phony featuring Shauna Mullin, who is Donegal's traditional
singer.

3. List Of References
Borthwick, S. and Moy, R., 2020. Popular music genres: An introduction. Routledge.
Ferwerda, B., Tkalcic, M. and Schedl, M., 2017, July. Personality traits and music genres:
What do people prefer to listen to?. In Proceedings of the 25th conference on user modeling,
adaptation and personalization (pp. 285-288).
Mitchell, G. (2016). The North American folk music revival: Nation and identity in the
United States and Canada, 1945–1980. Routledge.
Murphy, B. T. (2019). Traditional Irish Musical Elements in the Solo-Piano Music of Ryan
Molloy (Doctoral dissertation, The University of Southern Mississippi).
O'Neill, F. (1910). Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby, with Some Account of Allied
Subjects Including O'Farrell's Treatise on the Irish Or Union Pipes and Touhey's Hints to
Amateur Pipers. Regan Printing House.
Panwar, S., Das, A., Roopaei, M. and Rad, P., 2017, June. A deep learning approach for
mapping music genres. In 2017 12th System of Systems Engineering Conference (SoSE) (pp.
1-5). IEEE.
Rahman, J.S., Gedeon, T., Caldwell, S., Jones, R., Hossain, M.Z. and Zhu, X., 2019, July.
Melodious micro-frissons: detecting music genres from skin response. In 2019 joint
international conference on neural networks (icon) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.