Music of Northumbria

Here Northumbria is taken to mean Northumberland, the northernmost county of England, and County Durham. This area, together with Tweeddale, was the ancient British tribal kingdom of Bernicia (Bryneich) and is notable for the stable ancestry of its present indigenous population, which has been identified by DNA analysis to be an offshoot of the group Scotland, Cumbria and the North of Ireland, but not so closely related to the other peoples of the UK. The area was the core of the outstanding artistic culture that developed during the Northumbrian Golden Age of the 7th and 8th centuries; it would be unwise to suggest that the area did not have a flourishing musical culture at that time, or that it was not of similar sophistication - Bede makes reference to the playing of the harp. The traditional music of this area may be a tangible legacy of the Bernicians - given that little is known of the antiquity of Northumbrian music; though traditional Northumbrian instruments would have had their limitations. However, much surviving early modern Northumbrian music is similar in form to the music of the Scottish Lowlands, so Northumberland's position on the cultural frontier between England and Scotland has played a significant role. The modern era has seen Northumbrian traditional music artificially pigeon holed into national divisions, into which Northumbrian music simply will not fit. Likewise, the crude assumption that the font of all music of substance was in the west and north of the British isles has undermined considered appreciation of the local repertoire.The region possesses a distinctive style of folk music with a strong and continuing tradition. The region is particularly noted for its tradition of border ballads, the Northumbrian smallpipe (a form of bagpipe unique to north-east England) and also a strong fiddle tradition in the region that was already well established in the 1690s. Northumbrian music is characterised by considerable influence from other regions (and vice versa), particularly southern Scotland and other parts of the north of England.Irish tunes are also much played in the region, as they are elsewhere. There has been a continuous tradition of traditional and distinctive Northumbrian styles since the 18th century – there have also been 'revivals' in the late nineteenth century and again in the mid-twentieth. More recently, Northumbrian folk music, and particularly the use of the Northumbrian pipes, has become one of the liveliest and most widely known forms of folk music in Britain.

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