September 7, 2010 by R. J. Donovan, special to the BIR
When a theatrical production truly connects with an audience, the emotional experience can be indescribable. That was the case this past April when Boston's Tir Na Theatre Company presented Mark Doherty's poignant comedy "Trad" to great success at the Boston Center for the Arts. Read more
September 1, 2010 by Sean Smith, special to the BIR
One of Greater Boston's most enduringly popular Irish music and cultural events will pass a significant milestone this month when the Irish Cultural Centre of New England (ICCNE) hosts the 20th annual Irish Festival at the ICCNE campus in Canton Sept. 17-19. Read more
September 1, 2010 by Sean Smith, special to the BIR
The September 2008 ICONS Festival was a memorable event in many ways - not least for the performances by Liam Clancy and Jerry Holland, among the last either would ever give - but particularly so for the Greater Boston-based "alt-trad" band Annalivia. Read more
September 1, 2010 by Sean Smith, special to the BIR
Irish traditional music will be the focus of the fall 2010 Gaelic Roots Music, Song, Dance, Workshop and Lecture Series at Boston College.
The series, sponsored by BC's Center for Irish Programs, has often featured music from Scotland, Cape Breton and Appalachia as well as Ireland. But there will be a distinctly Hibernian flavor to this fall's events, which take place at Connolly House (300 Hammond Street near BC's Chestnut Hill Campus) beginning at 6:30 p.m. All are free and open to the public. Read more
Just imagine if the band that inspired and influenced your youthful musical development invited you, years later, to join them. This fantasy - common to musician and non-musician alike - came true for Boston area native Eddie Dillon during the late 1990s, when he played with The Clancy Brothers, which at the time comprised original members Paddy and Bobby Clancy and Bobby's son Finbarr (Paddy died shortly thereafter, but the group kept performing until Bobby's death in 2002). Read more
August 2, 2010 by R. J. Donovan, special to the BIR
Ronan Tynan is a big man with a big heart. He's also one of Boston's newest residents. Having settled into his new home earlier this year, he'll be appearing locally at Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis on Aug. 6 and South Shore Music Circus in Cohasset the next night. Read more
August 2, 2010 by Matthew DeLuca, special to the BIR
In the early 19th century, Ireland's musical traditions were in a state of flux. Older practitioners and their music-making were passing away, and with them, some feared at the time, would go that sign of Ireland's culture and heritage - the harp. Read more
August 2, 2010 by Thomas O'Grady, special to the BIR
One of the many wonderful scenes in Flann O'Brien's novel At Swim-Two-Birds has Jem Casey, "the Poet of the Pick and the Bard of Booterstown," kneeling to assist the injured King Sweeny, a man of words in his own right: "poet on poet, a bard unthorning a fellow-bard," O'Brien inscribes that moment. Almost inevitably I thought of that scene when I finally sat down with Notes from His Contemporaries: A Tribute to Michael Hartnett, a substantial book of poems and prose that landed on my doorstep around a year ago. Read more
August 2, 2010 by Dave Palmater, special to the BIR
Over her long and storied career, Judy Collins has recorded everything from ancient English ballads to the latest Broadway show tunes, but her main musical influence was an Irish tenor: her father, Charles "Chuck" Collins.
The son of an Irish immigrant, Chuck was proud of his heritage, and named his first-born son Michael Collins. Though Chuck became blind at an early age, he never let it hold him back in any way up to, and including, driving a car. Read more
July 2, 2010 by By Thomas O’Grady, , special to the BIR
A particularly satisfying moment in James Joyce’s Ulysses occurs in the third episode of the novel, when Stephen Dedalus, unhappily sharing living quarters in a Martello tower in Sandycove with the irreverent Buck Mulligan and miserably holding down a teaching position in a private boys’ school in nearby Dalkey, recalls his sojourn in Paris cut short by a summons to his dying mother’s bedside back in Dublin almost a full year earlier: “My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other devil’s name? Paysayenn. P.C.N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boul’ Mich’, I used to.” In light of Stephen’s self-inflating assertion at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”—this self-deprecating musing on the bohemian pose he struck in Paris is truly refreshing, as he finally shows a capacity to look at himself with a healthy measure of the irony with which Joyce (the artist as an older man) viewed his quasi-autobiographical character in A Portrait. Read more
