There are so many tunes with titles like "Humours of Ballyconnell," "Humours of Lisheen," "Humours of Tooma," and on and on...what does humours mean in this context?
Susan
It is also my understanding that it could be considered the "juices of life". Bodily humours where things like blood and bile and other bodily excretions.
Tell us something.: A long time chatty Chiffer but have been absent for almost two decades. Returned in 2022 and still recognize some names! I also play anglo concertina now.
All these answers are pretty humoresque but my dictionary says that it is the "character, style or spirit (of a musical or literary composition, etc)". It also relates to mood or "mental disposition" as determined by the bodily humours. Thus The Humours of Whiskey would be the spirit of spirits.
When tunes began to be notated, and players didn't have names for them, it was common for the transcriber to invent names for them.
Often, this consisted of picking a placename (often one dear to the latter) and prefacing it with "The Humours of"... A lot of these names in O'Neill's compilations are from the area around Bantry, in Co. Cork, where he grew up, for example.
"Humours" is the English word very often used in song titles to translate the Irish Gaelic word "pléarácaí" which means revelry, merrymaking, carousing, etc.
On 2002-10-21 11:01, OutOfBreath wrote:
I thought that was "vapors"
Gas pains are vapors... Genteel southern ladies used to suffer from these if their corsets were too tightly laced. From what I know of medical antiquity, humours are "liquids of life", such as blood, etc. Perhaps there is a different meaning in the context of traditional music...
Andrea ~*~
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together. ~Anais Nin