3 posts tagged “irish music”
It'll be 7:30 in Rockville, and you can save $3 if you buy the tickets online ahead of time. I only found out about this yesterday, or I would have been hollering about this for a while now. This is my favorite band -- If you like Irish, folk, bluegrass, traditional or live music and are in the DC area, you should strongly consider getting up there to see the concert.
Ticket and performance information can be found on the link under the word "tonight" above. I've also linked to one of their songs under the word "plays," but I'm going to give you another song here from their first album:
I hope to see some friends there!
For starters, you might want to look back at a few of my recent posts to get the context for this. Anyway, flutestory claims that the tune of the Opera Reel I posted about earlier is the same as the tune on the second half of this track here:
To be honest, I don't hear it. Sure, the tunes have the same name, but that's about all of the similarity I'm willing to acknowledge. The tunes seem so different that I don't think they have the same source at all. Do any of you out there with a better ear for this kind of stuff want to weigh in? (Hey, Faireraven and Acroyear70! I'm looking squarely in your direction on this. Feel free to reply over on LJ.) I'm rather eager to see what other people think.
So I got a new CD on Sunday. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but that's okay. (In fact, there is a mildly funny series of misunderstandings I had relating to why I bought the CD, but it really would be diminished if I tried to write it down. Feel free to ask me about it sometime.) Anyway, I had a realization while listening to one of the tracks. Here, this might make more sense if you listen to it yourself first:
So, I start out really enjoying the novelty of listening to a standard instrumental melody getting "spelled out" by two or three voices. Then I started to notice what those voices were actually doing...
You see, they're actually including the ornamentations that they would normally include if they were playing their instruments -- but for the first time, I can actually hear the individual notes. (This is especially noticeable with the bass' ascending line about 25 seconds in.) Even better yet, I can actually parse out on the fly which voices happen to be on the melody and which ones are just trilling about. This has actually been a bit of a sticking point for me for a long time while listening to this kind of music. I can always more or less pick out the melody line, but the transitions between lines and tunes always sound like a jumbled mash of notes and I just can't figure out what's going on. (This also applies very frequently to the middle of the musical line as well if the players are particularly enthusiastic.) The net result of too many ornaments always gets parsed by my ear as "Splat!"
But now... It's actually starting to make sense. I finally understand how some of those little trills are supposed to go and how they relate to the main melodic line. Even when I listen to other tracks on the same CD, I can now hear the individual lines for the first time. It makes sense! It doesn't go "Splat" anymore!
All this from a CD that I might not have gotten if I had known what was on it...
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