From: craig@festival.ed.ac.uk (Craig Cockburn)
Subject: Mouth music
Newsgroups: rec.music.celtic
Organization: Edinburgh University
Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1993 12:35:06 GMT

spp@zabriskie.eecs.berkeley.edu (Steve Pope) writes:

>Hi, fellow celtonerds.

>Could somebody describe to me what "mouth music" is.
>My general understanding is that it is of Celtic
>persuasion, and involves emitting guttural sounds from the
>vocal tract in lieu of instrumentation.

Mouth music, puirt a beul in Gaelic, is the music that arose
when music instruments were banned (presumably after the '45 
uprising). Gaels used to dance to musical instruments and 
when the instruments were banned, Mouth Music was invented
to replace the instruments. A lot of the lyrics are meaningless,
and the meaning behind the rest of the words is usually not
that deep either. However, it is not just mouth music that
has meaningless lyrics - waulking songs (songs for waulking tweed 
to) also have these meaningless lyrics (call vocables). The
vocables are important in many songs though, they give the song
its rhythm and this is why no two songs have the same vocables.
Puirt a beul comes in all forms, people tend to associate it with
reels, but it can also be associated with strathspeys. I started
to learn "Mor a' Cheannaich" last week, which is the Strathspey
part of next year's choral "puirt" competition at The Royal National
Mod. This song appears on the Capercaillie album "Crosswinds" and
is simply entitled "Puirt a beul". They also did another puirt on
the following album , that song is called "Fosgail an dorus" and
is on the "Sidewaulk album". The lead singer in Capercaillie , Karen
Matheson is very good at this sort of music, but the two albums I
mentioned are not predominantly puirt music. Sileas (Scotland's
premier harp duo) also do puirt and are very good - any of their
albums is worth getting. Catherine Ann-MacPhee also does a lot of
mouth music and there is even a band called "Mouth Music" who have
done an album entitled "Mouth Music", although they are very 
untraditional in sound. Mouth music these days is generally played
with music accompyment. 
-- 
Craig Cockburn, pronounced 'Coburn' M.Sc. Student, Napier University
Email: lss203@dcs.napier.ac.uk, Phone: +[44] (31) 556 9578
Sgri\obh thugam 'sa Ga\idhlig ma 'se do thoil e.

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Note from Chuck:  The Cajuns had a similar tradition which began during 
the Acadian migration.  Many Acadians didn't have instruments, not 
because they were banned, but because they were too poor.  Consequently, 
in early Louisiana Acadian times, the musical tradition of "reel a 
bouche" and "jig a bouche" (literally, "mouth reel" and "mouth jig") came 
to be.