You might hear someone say "Erin go bragh" on St. Patrick's Day, which is Gaelic for "Ireland forever." music Irish Folk Music is the music and song in the national heritage. It includes older Irish songs and melodies, the Anglo-Irish songs and ballads of the countryside, and the rich vein of dance music. It relies on its melodic line for effect. In Gaelic speaking Ireland song entered into every aspect of life from birth to work to keening for the dead. The musical activity of the ruling class centered around Dublin. It was European music and very important at banquets and ceremonial occasions. Bagpipes Bagpipes, while not quite as ancient as the harp, have been played in Ireland three or four hundred years longer. The bagpipe features a bladder made of leather that is inflated through a pipe by the breath of the musician. The inflated bag is held under the
crowded pew enjoying a concert by the innovative jazz ensemble known as the Paul. Winter Consort. It's a hallmark of Winter's group to set their stage in unusual and atmospheric venues-canyons, beaches, old stone barns-to reflect the moody, reverent spirit of their music, which often blends their own live performances with the recorded songs of nature. Tonight's concert ... has included a lyrical duet with a school of singing humpback whales and a haunting serenade build around the keening of eagles. Now, as the evening draws to a close, Winter and his group are providing the instrumental accompaniment to the tape-recorded singing of a pack of free-roaming wolves. The rhythmic, otherworldly wolf serenade echoes eerily in the monumental quiet of the cathedral's soaring spaces. The wolves raise their voices in raw howls of sheer animal power, then let them soften to haunting, melancholy cries. [With Winter's moody soprano sax in call and response fashion, the effect is] to lift
face. He smiled in reaction before launching into more cross-examination. His questions were different now, though, not as easily answered. He wanted to know what I missed about home, insisting on descriptions of anything he wasn't familiar with. We sat in front of Charlie's house for hours, as the sky darkened and rain plummeted around us in a sudden deluge. I tried to describe impossible things like the scent of creosote -- bitter, slightly resinous, but still pleasant -- the high, keening sound of the cicadas in July, the feathery barrenness of the trees, the very size of the sky, extending white-blue from horizon to horizon, barely interrupted by the low mountains covered with purple volcanic rock. The hardest thing to explain was why it was so beautiful to me -- to justify a beauty that didn't depend on the sparse, spiny vegetation that often looked half dead, a beauty that had more to do with the exposed shape of the land, with the shallow bowls of valleys between the craggy
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