Recordings of lots of tunes

So here is a link to a bunch of recordings that I made while I was in class at Blas. The teachers included Martin Hayes, John Carty, Eileen O Brien and Siobhan Peoples.

http://soundcloud.com/shimonsmith/sets/blas-2013

I have more recordings of the class working through the tunes slowly if anyone wants to try to learn some of them. 

So this is what we'll be learning first

So, if you're currently in the Mather Orchestra and would like to play some Irish Music with me when school starts up again in August, this is what we will learn first. This is the Connaughtman's Rambles (from an earlier post) in action in a Pub in Limerick. You might spot me on the left. If you look and listen you'll see guitars, concertina, fiddles, flutes and bodrahn. Near the end of the clip you can see the guy in the middle with glasses on turn around and call the next tune to the folks around him. This was his "set", he started it off with a different tune and was leading.

By the way, I'm sorry for the abrupt edit. I don't know why my camera did this. The jig comes in at the 17 second mark. I spend the first 16 seconds filming the feet of a dancer who was sitting next to me. There are a couple of different types of Irish dancing. The one that most everyone associates with Ireland is set dancing or step dancing. This is similar to what you might see in Riverdance. Everything is highly choreographed  and is often performed with multiple people. There is also Ceili dancing. I spoke of this in an earlier post. You might think of Ceili dancing as similar to square dancing. It is group dancing, often very complex, that is performed at social events.

My favorite type of dancing is Sean-nós dancing. Sean-nos means "old style" in Gaelic and reminds me of tap dancing. You can see sean-nos dancers with hard or soft shoes, but it is a much more improvised form with free arm movements. It is just as rhythmic as the other styles but much more individualized. This is what the girl sitting next to me was practicing. 

Irish sung at pub

So, even if you are a Mather student and have never been to a bar, you can imagine the scene at a crowded bar on a Friday night. People laughing, talking, drinking, having a good time. Maybe there's a jukebox playing. In the US, there is undoubtedly a TV going with a sporting event on. Well at this bar during a trad music session, it was much the same way. Until, as I mentioned in a previous post, someone stands up to sing. Everyone in the bar listens.

Give me a song

So this is a lovely part of the Irish vernacular that I have noticed. And, when I think of it, it is certainly indicative of the aural folk tradition.

While listening back to one of my fiddle lessons today, I noticed that Eileen O Brien kept saying, "Let me give you this one..." when referring to a song that we were about to learn. When the other, more experienced students in the class would play things she would often say, who gave you that or where did you get that. More often people would answer I got it from so and so in such and such a place. It was never where did you learn that it was always who gave it to you or who showed you how to play that. Not only does this harken to the times when the transmission of folk tunes was purely aural, there were no recordings and most people didn’t know how to read music, but it recognizes the fact that the tunes have a million different variations. A certain player in a certain region might play a song in a certain way with a specific embellishment or turn of phrase. I actually already saw this in practice during my limited experience. Eileen taught us a couple of polkas that she referred to as two Begley polkas after Seamus Begley (who played here in a concert on the final Thursday of the sesison). I played them at a session later in the week and the guitar player recognized one of them and said is this such and such a piece? I said no, it is Begley's polka. He kind of laughed and said that Begley was still alive (he’s coming to this program to play next week) and the polka actually had a name. Eileen had gotten the polka from Begley, but just couldn't place the name.