Irish hornpipes
A hornpipe is written like a reel and played nothing like one. It is slower, it swings, and it almost always closes each part with three long notes. Learning one is the fastest way to understand that Irish notation only half describes the music.
- Time signature
- 4/4
- How you count it
- Four beats to the bar. Hold beats one and three slightly longer and clip two and four: ONE two THREE four.
- Session tempo
- 40 to 50 bars per minute (160 to 200 quarter notes)
- Structure
- 8 bars per part, AABB, usually ending each part with three long notes
- Share of the tradition
- 6.9% of all tunes, 7.2% of tunes played at sessions
Where the hornpipe came from
The hornpipe is English and older than the metre it now uses. Chaucer mentions it as a Cornish instrument, a 1609 pamphlet calls the dance a product of Lancashire, and Ben Jonson claims it for Nottingham and Derbyshire.
It began in triple metres. John Hawkins wrote in 1776 that "the measure of the Hornpipe is triple time of six crotchets in a bar". Only in the nineteenth century did it settle into common time. It then became a theatrical dance between acts, with tunes named after the performers who danced them, and by the 1800s being able to dance a hornpipe was part of any entertainer's basic kit.
How a hornpipe is built
Two 8-bar parts, each repeated. The reliable visual marker is the cadence: hornpipes usually finish each part with three quarter notes, followed by pickup notes into the repeat. Reels do not do that systematically, so it is something you can spot on the page before you have heard the tune.
Playing hornpipes on banjo and mandolin
Danny Carnahan gives the clearest published method. Dotted pairs keep straight down-up, so the downstroke always carries the long note. Triplets switch to jig picking, DUD followed by a downstroke on whatever comes next. The named failure is trying to hold strict alternate picking all the way through the bar, which flattens the swing. Carnahan's other instruction is simply to keep the tempo slower than whatever you use for reels. Enda Scahill calls the hornpipe the triplet tune type, and it is where most players first work on ornamentation seriously.
New hornpipes from players
Sent in by the people who play them, too new for the books this library is built from. Each one has notation, tab, playback and a metronome.
Every hornpipe in the library
291 hornpipes, each with tab already written. The 6 that turn up most often at sessions are first.
Showing all 291 hornpipes
Questions about Irish hornpipes
Both are in 4/4. Three things separate them. The hornpipe is slower, around 40 to 50 bars per minute against 50 to 62 for a reel. Its eighth notes are swung rather than even, so each pair sounds long then short. And it usually ends each part with three long notes. The honest caveat is that this is a spectrum: a hornpipe played fast and straight is a reel to the ear, and some tunes get played both ways.
Less than the notation suggests. Phil Berthoud makes the point that a written pair of eighth notes should sound like a quarter plus an eighth inside a triplet, a 2 to 1 relationship, not the 3 to 1 that dotted notation implies. Played exactly as written, a hornpipe sounds stiff and wrong.
Because notation has no good way of writing swing. The dots tell you the pairs are uneven; they do not tell you how uneven. Fiddlers tend to swing hornpipes harder than flute and accordion players, and American players have straightened them out considerably.
The Boys of Bluehill. It appears in more published session repertoires than any other hornpipe and is the tune most often recommended to beginners on the forums. Its slow tempo is the point: you can hear your own mistakes.
40 to 50 bars per minute, which is 160 to 200 quarter notes. Instructional recordings run slower, around 33 to 35 bars per minute. Set dancers want the top of the range.
The other tune types
Each one counts differently and runs at a different speed.
Tempo ranges, structure percentages and repertoire shares from Alan Ng,irishtune.info Irish Traditional Music Tune Index. Historical sources are named in the text.