Ón gCos go Cluas – From Dancing to Listening
Voices from the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention conference held in Derry City, 2012
Edited by Liz Doherty and Fintan Vallely
303 pages, ISBN 978-0-9511569-9-5
Available from March 1st, 2020
Traditional music has moved from a primary purpose of servicing dance, to expressing artistic preference. Further, the outer fringes of traditional melody-making now shade into other forms – jazz, contemporary classical, rock and pop – and indeed towards the antithesis of genre, so-called ‘world’ music. The chapters in this volume reflect on this visible re-orientation, exploring North Atlantic musics in terms of the shift of folk cultures’ interest from social process to aesthetic product.
Ón gCos go Cluas heard the voices of more than a hundred speakers from all regions of the North Atlantic, each of them a musician or music teacher; they covered many aspects of Traditional music in addition to the fiddle. Thirty two of their voices are published here.