Electric Celtic (Cealtach Leictreach)

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Electric Celtic (in Irish "Cealtach Leictreach") is a genre of celtic music that developed in the early 1970s in Ireland, when artists started fusing Celtic folk music, pibroch, and Scottish pipe band music with electric instruments and synthesizers.

Composition
Cealtach leictreach is isometric and is built around the pibroch structure, which is a theme (Scottish Gaelic "ùrlar") with variations (for more information see: Pibroch (Ceòl Mòr)).

The theme will usually have one of several internal structures for the ordering of its musical phrases. The following are.

▪Irish folk form - The most common form in cealtach leictreach, taken from traditional Irish folk music, the ùrlar is composed of two four-bar phrases, A and B, played in the following order:

▪AABB

▪AABB

▪Secondary - The ùrlar is composed of four phrases, with A and B being one-bar phrases and C and D being two-bar phrases, and played in the following order:

▪ABCD

▪CBAD

▪CD

▪Irregular - The ùrlar does not fit into any of the structures above or below.

▪Primary - Referred as such because it was the primary form in pibroch from which the cealtach leictreach structure derives from, the ùrlar is composed of two two-bar phrases, A and B, played in the following order:

▪AABA

▪BBAB

Modes
Like Irish folk music, cealtach leictreach is modal, using pentatonic and hexatonic versions of Ionian, Aeolian, Dorian, and Mixolydian modes.

Ornamentation
Instrumentalists embellish melodies through ornamentation, using grace notes, rolls, cuts, crans, or slides.