Music shapes the pubs and clubs and festivals, and plays non stop for a month at Lisdoonvarna,during the September Matchmaking Fair,traditionally held at the end of the agricultural year when the farmers are looking for somewhere else to sow their seed!Beauty is traded for land in equal proportions, and that still is the universal prevailing exchange currency between women and men....or so it seems.
Peppers Pub in Feakle holds weekly sessions all year for locals and tourists. Martin Hayes, the great Clare fiddler now living in USA often returns to play impromptu and unpaid, for the sheer love of the session. If you are lucky you catch him,like recently he was back to get married and play music.
More difficult to find are the sessions in the middle of nowhere that happen without warning or advertisement.Driving down the lanes you get lost but hear fiddle music that seems to draw you in,like the old stories of bewitching fairy music.Its a fatal attraction and steals the night from you.
But the best hidden music of Ireland takes place spontaneously in ordinary households,a moment shared.Here are pictures of that happening in our house recently,my two girls with tin whistles and slip jigs arm in arm, and Amneris from Argentina singing Tango learnt from downtown Buenos Aires.We were so blessed to hear these two traditions of music,a richness beyond costing.
Odd to hear the shanos of Ireland with the Tango of Argentina.I dont think its a combination that happens very often.
