Irish set dances
Set dances break the 8-bar rule on purpose. Each one is tied to a specific dance, so the tune follows the choreography instead of the other way round, and the parts come out at odd lengths. If a tune feels crooked, that is because it is.
- Time signature
- Usually 4/4 or 6/8
- How you count it
- As for a hornpipe or a jig, depending on the tune
- Structure
- Irregular. The A part carries the step, the longer B part carries the set
- Share of the tradition
- 0.6% of all tunes, 0.9% of tunes played at sessions
Where the set dance came from
O'Neill never used the term. He filed these under "Long Dances", which is why searching his 1903 collection for "set dance" finds nothing.
O'Keeffe and O'Brien's A Handbook of Irish Dances (1902) explains where they came from: the figure dances "appear also to have been the creation of the dancing-masters of the past century", built to tunes "which do not conform to the usual structure of regular jigs and reels". By 1800 there were at least three great schools of dancing in Ireland, in Kerry, Limerick and Cork.
How a set dance is built
O'Keeffe and O'Brien state the cause directly in 1902: set dances "are usually associated with tunes which are irregular in structure, that is, which do not consist of the usual two parts of eight bars each". Worked examples: King of the Fairies runs 8 plus 16, St Patrick's Day 8 plus 14, Rodney's Glory 8 plus 12. The Blackbird has an odd 2/4 bar at the end of each part.
Playing set dances on banjo and mandolin
Nothing is published for plectrum instruments specifically, and set dances are barely taught as a category at all. Enda Scahill's library of over 1,200 videos has no set dance section. The practical difficulty is counting rather than picking: you cannot rely on the 8-bar reflex that carries you through everything else.
New set dances 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 set dance in the library
29 set dances, each with tab already written. The 1 that turn up most often at sessions are first.
Showing all 29 set dances
Questions about Irish set dances
The term means three different things and the confusion is real. A set dance can be a solo hard-shoe dance performed to one fixed tune with fixed choreography. "Set dancing" also means the social form danced by four couples in a square. And "a set of tunes" just means two or three tunes played back to back.
Because the tune was built to fit a dance rather than to fit the usual 8-bar template. O'Keeffe and O'Brien wrote in 1902 that these tunes "do not consist of the usual two parts of eight bars each". The modern word players use is "crooked".
King of the Fairies, St Patrick's Day, The Blackbird, The Three Sea Captains, Job of Journeywork and Rodney's Glory. O'Neill has several of them, filed under Long Dances.
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.