Compánach album
Purchasers of the Companion are offered a free download of the Compánach album. This is not an instruction manual, but is a recital of arranged music, as played live in a series that demonstrates the post-revival, Ó Riada formula of ensemble, trio, duet and solo performance. The instrumental music is accentuated by hard-shoe, sean-nós dance on many tracks, and by tambourine on others. The instruments played are those depicted in the earliest art image of traditional-music group performance, Daniel Maclise’s 1832 painting Snap Apple Night (p. 510)—fiddle, uilleann pipes, flute and tambourine, with dance.
The music selection within the album’s thirty tracks is that which is played in the Compánach concert, arranged in thirty mixed-tune-type and song sets that show the variety among them. The chosen music is itself an A-Z run through counties, as it contains pieces that are named for places in each of the 32 historic counties on the island of Ireland and for Irish diaspora regions abroad. The song is in English and in Irish, demonstrating various features such as ballad style and narrative, sean-nós melisma, emotional expression, and relation to place. All of the tracks are thus related to information in the book.
Thirteen tune-types that are notated in the book are on the album, and, overall, 54 tunes notated in the book are played. Full sleeve-notes follow, and the downloadable INDEX OF TUNES tables show on what page the tunes can be found in the book, and in what track they can be heard on the album. These lists can be printed off for convenience.
To get the download code Please send an email to [email protected] using CITM download in the subject line
INDEX OF TUNES ON THE ALBUM
Legal notice
This album is offered as a free download only to purchasers of the book Companion to Irish Traditional Music. The artistes benefit from this by arrangement. We expect only book purchasers to redeem the download, and would ask others wishing to hear it to log on to its publisher’s website – www.whinstone.net – for purchase details of either the download or the actual physical album.