Would you mind a little essay on mouth music? It's a real passion of mine. A good friend did her doctoral dissertation on the subject, and another teaches it at The Gaelic College on Skye. I've been collecting and singing as much of it as I can in the last year, and have a great affection for many of it's styles.

There are actually many types of mouth music around the world, but since the question was specifically about Northern European mouth music, there are several styles even there. Their origins are as varied as their uses...

Puirt-a-beul (literally "tunes from the mouth") is one of the oldest Scottish forms, containing Gaelic verses interspersed with vocables (non-lexical syllables which are sometimes based on or related to Gaelic words). Some were connected to incantation, some to work songs, some for dance.

Working songs are another type of mouth music, each of which evolved relative to the kind of work being done. Chanties, milking songs, weaving songs and songs used while waulking wool each have their own traditional rules and formulas.

Mouth music for dance predates the Scottish ban on instruments, it had been used for centuries by folks who could not afford an instrument, or when musicians got tired, or when emigration made it impossible to carry along instruments. When instruments were banned or burned, though, mouth music played a critical role in history, by making it possible to keep traditional tunes alive.

Mouth music for dancers uses a very different set of vocables than you find in work songs. The rhythm of work songs is generally a little slower, usually includes verses as well as vocables, and there is often a call-and-response element. These factors make it easier to pace your breathing, and are less taxing on the singer.

When you sing for dancers the vocables in the tunes substitute for the fiddle or pipes, so every note has to be sung clearly and up to speed, including the ornaments typical to that instrument. It's a lot like singing a tounge-twister as fast as you can! Also, since an unbroken rhythm is critical for the dance, lots of attention has to be paid to where you can grab a breath so that you never miss a beat. There are sometimes Gaelic verses in a dance tune, and when there are you'll find some lovely internal rhymes and alliteration that complement the rhythm. The meaning of the words is less important than the rhythm, but some of the songs are cleverly written to tell a story as well. Most mouth music dance tunes, however, are all vocable-- especially in the Irish tradition. Diddling, lilting, cantering and jigging are Irish terms for this style of mouth music, or it's sometimes called nudling in the Cape Breton style.

Then there's the type of mouth music called canntaireachd. "Cantering" is singing for a dancer, using vocables to represent an instrument (usually fiddle-style). But "canntaireachd" is a much more codified set of vocables, used by pipers to teach tunes to each other. Rather than stressing the rhythm of the tune as you would for dancers, in canntaireachd a piper can sing or even write down each vocable that represents both the note and the technique used to play that note on the pipes. The vocable is constructed of the first sound, which can be a "releasing consonant" (e.g. "H" in HUN) or a "releasing vowel" (e.g. "E" in EYE) followed by a vowel that represents it's place on the scale (e.g. "U" in HUN) and an "arresting consonant" (e.g. "N" in HUN) or if it's an open vocable, an "arresting vowel" (e.g. "E" in DIE).

If a piper read HUN as the vocable, or heard someone sing HUN in canntaireachd, they would know exactly how that note was to be sounded on the pipe, and in what key. There are thousands of combinations of canntaireachd vocables, so it's like a little language of it's own!

All this is probably more than you're interested in hearing, but I find the tradition and singing of mouth music in all it's forms absolutely fascinating. I've been lucky to have some wonderful teachers to learn from and practice with, I'm especially grateful to Kim Hughes, Deborah White and Christine Primrose for their guidance and advice.

Thanks for indulging my little ramble here. If anyone's interested in more information, I can recommend some socko-boffo books and CDs...

Ho-ro-a-deedle-a-dum,
PJ