The Gathering

The Gathering
62361 Real World

This album was recorded live in Cork at Eigse Na Laoi 1995:The Gathering. This was the fifth in a series of traditional music festivals presented by the Music Department of University of Cork under the general title of Eigse na Laoi. The four previous festivals, Fiddlesticks (1991), Dear Old Erins Isle (1992), Cape Breton Island (1993) and Across The Waters (1994) featured traditional musicians from Donegal and Shetland, the United States, Cape Breton Island and England respectively. Several of these musicians returned to Cork for The Gathering and were joined by musicians from Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, Galicia, Ontario, Quebec, Northumbria and New Zealand including Kathyrn Tickell, Brendan McGlinchey, Hamish Moore and Pierre Schreyer. Produced by internationally renowned Celtic Music scholar Michael O'Suilleabhain, this recording includes some of the musical highlights of that extraordinary event.

First there was The Scattering - a spinning out of generations of Irish people across the world from North America to Australia. With them went cultures encoded in sounds and gestures. Ways of thinking. Ways of feeling. Ways of being.

Then there was The Sowing. Blown by the winds of history, the encoded seeds fell deep within new cultural soils. Breathing a different air, unfolding into other rhythms, reaching towards another light.

Then there was The Gathering - an embracing of the signs and sounds of that scattered sowing, an enfolding of traditions related through blood, through friendship, and through the spirit.

The time of this recording is the time of The Gathering. It documents a homecoming made in triumph and strength. Most importantly, when that circle closed briefly in Cork University in April 1995, a new potential was manifest. Like good music which does not want to stop, its end was its beginning. Another round was called, and everyone knew the tune - a tune that spins now like the globe itself, creating a celestial music for all who will listen.