Playlist J (part 2) – The Irish Mandolin – a website from Aidan Crossey
I had fun coming up five trad music tracks related to the letter J.
Link tags: tradition
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A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph | Open Culture
I wrote a while back about one of my favourite photographs but this might just give it a run for its money.
It was only near the end of the 19th century that shutter speeds improved, as did emulsions, meaning that spontaneous moments could be captured. Still, smiling was not part of many cultures. It could be seen as unseemly or undignified, and many people rarely sat for photos anyway.
geoTrad - Google My Maps
Well, this is a rather wonderful mashup made with data from thesession.org:
The distribution of Irish traditional tunes which reference place names in Ireland
Fairweather Fiddlers @ Brighton Acoustic Club Aug 2019 - YouTube
Myself and Jessica joining in some reels and jigs.
Sessions Map
This is nifty—a map of all the Irish music sessions and events happening around the world, using the data from TheSession.org.
If you’re interested in using data from The Session, there’s a read-only API and regularly-updated data dumps.
Bad Character - The New Yorker
A fascinating thought experiment from Ted Chiang:
So let’s imagine a world in which Chinese characters were never invented in the first place. Given such a void, the alphabet might have spread east from India in a way that it couldn’t in our history, but, to keep this from being an Indo-Eurocentric thought experiment, let’s suppose that the ancient Chinese invented their own phonetic system of writing, something like the modern Bopomofo, some thirty-two hundred years ago. What might the consequences be?
Banjos and Discrete Technologies | stevebenford
An examination of how sites like The Session are meshing with older ideas of traditional Irish music:
There is a very interesting tension at play here – one that speaks directly to the design of new technologies. On the one hand, Irish musicians appear to be enthusiastically adopting digital media to establish a common repertoire of tunes, while on the other the actual performance of these tunes in a live session is governed by a strong etiquette that emphasizes the importance of playing by ear.
There’s an accompanying paper called Supporting Traditional Music-Making: Designing for Situated Discretion (PDF).
In The Name of Willie Clancy « Arbutus Yarns
A really nice short film about the Willie Clancy Summer School. It makes me want to get back to Miltown Malbay this July.
The Keymaster: Patrick Olwell’s story - YouTube
The trailer for a documentary on flutemaker Patrick Olwell. The film should be done later this year.
reboot10 - Jeremy Keith talks about the Transmission of Tradition
Here's the video of my talk from this year's Reboot conference in Copenhagen. I had a lot of fun talking about (and playing) Irish music here.
BBC interview with Gary McKinnon
The BBC talk to the hacker/conspiracy theorist awaiting extradition to the US. He's a bit of a loony but he's harmless.