European Folk Music

European folk music is the umbrella for the continent's regional traditional musics: the song, dance and instrumental repertoires maintained by rural and minority communities from Ireland to the Balkans. It encompasses Celtic harp and pipe traditions, Nordic fiddle music, Balkan asymmetric dance rhythms, Mediterranean narrative song and the polyphonic singing of Georgia, Corsica, Sardinia and Bulgaria. Played on fiddles, bagpipes, accordions, lyres and frame drums, and sung in regional languages and dialects, these traditions function as local memory and social dance music. A twentieth-century revival carried them to concert stages without severing their community roots.