http://www.santacecilia.it/italiano/archivi/etnomusicologico/esem99/musicspace/papers/park/park.htm#2
Check this out with Explorer as it won’t work with Netscape (or at least mine). This is an scholarly paper about music making in Ireland and you download MOVIES of very famous players including Bobby Casey and some of the Clare musicians Peter Laban has mentioned.
Be patient. It takes a while for the movie to load. With my Mac, it defaults to quicktime.
The thesis seems a little obscure! I got the info from IRTRAD.
Well (he said later), the first few played well with the Quicktime but the sessions came out on Real Player and not too well. But the paper itself is pretty fascinating.
Its an Italian site, publishing a paper by a Korean, about Irish music-making, written in English. There’s some diversity.
[ This Message was edited by: The Weekenders on 2002-06-07 01:28 ]
A korean woman, most likely the writer of this paper, spent a lot of time in Clare filming musicians talking to them etc. It was to phone her on the way back from Connamara that Micho Russell had his driver pull over at the petrol station in Kilcolgan that february night.
I was present at a session where she filmed and interviewed Paddy Killourhy. One week later I went to the Killourhy’s house only to find Paddy was in hospital with pneumonia. He was dead a few days later.
It’s good so some of the material is available, for some players it was the last recorded.
On reading the article I found the following description of a Crann in piping;
This is rendered by holding the three notes, mainly a note of d’, on the regulator with a melody part from the chanter.
A clear indication that it’s one thing to describe the use of space while playing the fiddle in thundering academic language and hold talks at international ethnomusicological symposia. Knowing the music’s basics is quite a different thing altogether.
[ This Message was edited by: Peter Laban on 2002-06-07 09:54 ]
Hmmm. Haven’t listened to the recordings yet, and they may be very valuable.
But this kind of stuff makes me even more nervous than I already was about the whole ethnomusicology thing. How long will it be before Americans, Germans, Japanese and others are being invited to spend a year and lots of euros in Limerick studying for a graduate diploma in session etiquette, which they will be required to present at the pub door before being allowed to join a session certified as “genuine” by the Irish Tourist Board?
To quote Noel Pocock, faced many years ago with a much more modest bit of intellectualising: “Just play the f***ing tune!”
I don’t know who Noel Pocock is, but I think I like him. 
Aw go on, Roger.
As long as there are universities, there will be people trying to skin the cat in as many different ways as possible. There will always be nutty thesis papers with occasional peripheral benefit.
This paper is so dang obscure that I notified you all before it disappeared.
I don’t think there will be an International flood of anal-retentive scholars show up on Peter’s doorstep. There may be some slight increase in foreigners in the pubs and they will never be the same. That may bother some, enrich others.
But I do think that they will try to re-create the sessions in their home countries and this can be quite fascinating.
You may not realize this but Japan went absolutely nuts for classical guitar several decades ago. In the 70s, there were more than 60, SIXTY, classical guitar schools in Tokyo! They had magazines the size of books coming out monthly there and a huge music publishing industry cranking out cl. gtr music in yet new editions. You can laugh at em or appreciate that they find value in something to the point of wishing to possess it.
The most negative thing that did indeed happen was that it drove the price of guitars much higher but eventually there was a contraction in the yen and they dropped back down some.
I haven’t yet really read the paper in detail but little bits of it penetrated my consciousness. I loved the passage about the Irish kitchen! Especially since I practice an hour in my kitchen every morning…
And I did like the observation about circular playing in session versus performing in a line. I always struggle with staging in my folk group because a straight line just never seemed right to me but sound guys and their stage monitors kind of prefer that, especially on a short stage.
Just enjoy it for what it is.