Siwsann George

Welsh singer Siwann George died on Friday May 6. Her album Traditional Songs of Wales, Traditional Songs of Wales
contains a great variety of familiar and less familiar material with a diverse selection of other musicians. The arrangements are always exciting and skillful yet traditional. Robin Huw Bowen and Ceri Rhys Matthews are among the musicians.
" Welsh singer Siwsann George died on Friday May 6th following a long battle with cancer. Siwsann, who was 49 and raised in the Rhondda Valley, was known as an ambassador for Welsh music. A founder member of Welsh groups Mabsant and Bedwen Haf, she also formed the Siwsann George Welsh Road Show (SGWRS) and played harp, guitar and concertina. She toured the world, often on behalf of The British Council, and her research, teaching, folksong publications and radio travel reports won her much acclaim. In 1992 she was adjudicator for the BBC's Song of Wales contest and for the Irish Celtavision in 1992 and 1993, and her voice can often be heard as theme music on film and television. Her 1994 solo CD Traditional Songs of Wales was a landmark in her own career and in the history of Welsh music. A small funeral will take place on Friday May 13th and a celebration of Welsh music will be held as a tribute to Siwsann later this year." http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/r2music/folk/news/
Another obituary appears here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/4527179.stm

Frank Hennessy's BBC Radio Wales programme Celtic Heartbeat has a program devoted to her that should be available on the Internet until May 21 or so. http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/celticheartbeat/playlists/20050514.shtml

A thread on Siwsann George here: http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=40397
A moving obituary thread here: http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=80961

Kennedy Millennium Center

The Kennedy Millennium Center has a selection of streaming videos of artists who have played there. I may have already mentioned the video of Crasdant, the Welsh group featuring triple harpist Robin Huw Bowen, but I've also been looking at the recordings of uilleann piper Peter Browne, who also has some educational comments on the pipes, and Paddy Keenan and Sean Tyrrell.

You have to go into their explorer app, which is in Flash or somesuch to find the videos.
http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/millennium/millennium.html

Dublin Trad Archive

More links: the Dublin Trad Archive
has quite a number of MP3s recorded at traditional music sessions in Dublin pubs. There's some great music there, including the uilleann piper Tommy Martin. The quality often isn't great, with chatting and clinking glasses too much in the foreground, but everything on it deserves at least one listen.

More Uilleann Pipes

Keeping up the uilleann pipes links I found the website of the South Western Association of Uilleann Pipers. This is the South-west of England, not Cork or San Diego.
http://www.swaup.org/

The site has a selection of MP3s by one of their players, plus PDFs of a reed-making guide, a Handbook for Uilleann Pipers, which is not a tutorial but contains lots of bits of useful information on the pipes. They also have Patsy Touhey's advice for amateur pipes. Touhey was a piper who played in America at the turn of the twentieth century and became quite well known. There's a bio page here http://www.irishheritagetrail.com/ptouhey.htm

Ross's music page has some MP3s of Touhey at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/music/index.html

The SWAUP club also has PDFs of a few tunes.

Interpreting Irish Airs

During the discussion of slow airs at the Chiff and Fipple, someone posted the following link.
http://www.irishflutes.net/mef/interpre.htm

It has a nice amount of disparate information on ornamented sean-nos singing (where did that accent go?) and the adaptation of this style to an instrument such as, in this case, the flute.

Séamus Ennis (don't expect these accents every time!)

While I remember, I've just found an interesting article on the renowned piper Séamus Ennis. http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/ennis.htm

"Having a prodigious memory and possessing a complete mastery of his instrument there were few limitations to his acquisition of tunes. He knew hundreds and hundreds and these he rendered in excellent musical taste. Even common-place tunes took a deft turn displaying his total mastery. Exploiting piping ornamentation to the full he never descended into gimmickry. The antics on the chanter indulged in by some younger players did not appeal to him and, more in sorrow than in anger, he would dismiss them with a nod of the head saying "My father would not have done that"."

Joe Heaney Again

An intriguing little excerpt from the interview:

EM: Now, this style of singing that you have with massive decoration that you put into it - you decorate pretty much all the time, don't you?

JH: Well I try to.

EM: You decorate in some songs more than in others, I've noticed. Some songs you leave fairly plain and some songs you do a great deal of decoration, like a song like The Bonny Bunch of Roses for example, you know, where you decorate continuously along the line. What tells you which songs to decorate and which to leave alone?

JH: Well, it all depends on the scope left for me in the lines of the song. If there's enough scope left for me in the line of a song to decorate, I do it. But if there isn't - you see, I probably can only decorate one line or two lines, maybe the second or the last. What I'm trying to say, if the words of the line don't allow me to decorate, I've got to sing the line. And this is the way I feel it, you see, if I think a line has a lot of words, well that won't let me do any decorations on the words of the line. Because I couldn't break up the sentence too much. But if it's a short line with not many words, that will always lead me to decorate a lot of the words. That's the way I feel it anyway.

Joe Heaney

The Chiff and Fipple site has an excellent forum for uilleann pipes discussion: http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewforum.php?f=6
I started a thread about slow airs. Here I might quote from Uilliam (sic) who defines a slow air as "Foinn Mhalla is........................................
A piece of music with no set metre in the accepted sense (ie.outwith of a song)with definite phrasing to ensure balance and expressive of the performers perceived view of the piece, which can then be conveyed to the listener with clarity, and, importantly,without mistakes in technique, which would distract entirely from the flow and the mood which is being created.
Most Foinn Mhalla have developed from historical events or poignant moments in the history of Ireland and convey in the Bardic Tradition through sean-nós singing and cheoil that same history.
It is an extremely potent and important means of communication and continuity of the tradition and should not be diluted with flippancy and tunes/songs better suited to the music halls .
That is not to say that the popular tunes are not pleasant.
But they are not and never where intended to be Foinn Mhalla....."

The brilliant modern piper Liam O'Flynn once commented that when he learns a slow air for the pipes he has a traditional sean-nós singer sing it for him first. Sean-nós singing isn't terribly available, but there are a good few CDs out there. One of the greatest was Joe Heaney. The following site has an extensive interview with Joe Heaney conducted by Ewan MacColl, the English/Scottish folk singer. The site also has embedded RealAudio clips of the songs.
http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/heaney.htm

Music

I should have quite a bit to post on Celtic music. I've been listening to a lot of Irish music, particularly uilleann pipes. The only two instruments I've ever really wanted to play are the harp and the uilleann pipes. I'm already learning to play harp and I have a Stoney End double harp, a harp with two rows of strings that is basically an adaptation of the Welsh triple harp minus the chromatic middle row. I have my heart set on a practice set of uilleann pipes, which is a set with bag, bellows and chanter--no drones or regulators. Once I'd got over the lack of aesthetic appeal of Dave Daye's synthetic chanter, I decided to purchase one of his practice sets. his "penny chanter" sounds great, plays easily and is (relatively) inexpensive. http://www.daye1.com/pennychanter.html

I have plenty of links to share. The following page contains some very old recordings of uilleann pipers: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/music/index.html

Some of the older pipers were virtuosos but are a little difficult to listen to after the elegant modern piping of someone like Liam O'Flynn. The aphorism, ‘seven years learning, seven years practising, seven years playing’ is often quoted with regard to learning the pipes. Once the noisiness of some of these players is got past, there is a lot to listen to and learn from.