http://celtic.stanford.edu/ceolas.html (World Wide Web Directory, 06/1995)
Ceolas - celtic music on the internet
Welcome to
Ceolas, the home of celtic music on the internet! This site contains the largest collection
of information on celtic music available online, and has links
to just about every other site dealing with celtic music.
Ceolas is also available by anonymous FTP to
and our concert calendars are available by email.
News of recent updates is available in the
What's New section, or by fingering
ceolas@celtic.stanford.edu.
We would like this site to be the best possible resource for celtic music, and for this, we need
your feedback. Please send me your suggestions, problems, or comments using
the mailto feature, or with this
form.
Gerard Manning
ceolas@celtic.stanford.edu
Resources
- Radio
- The Thistle & Shamrock is a popular syndicated celtic music radio show in the U.S. Patrick
Murphy has compiled a list of all the
stations carrying it, and has other bits of information on the show, as does
NPR. Ceolas has another
list of 70 or so independent celtic
music radio shows in the U.S. with a some entries for Ireland, Britain, Canada and Britanny.
- Publications
- We have a guide to magazines which deal
with celtic music, including links to online editions of
The Living Tradition,
Dirty Linen,
Folk Roots and
Hot Press.
- The Internet
- There are dozens of archive sites and mailing lists which deal with celtic music in one form
or another. They are all gathered together in the Ceolas
Internet Sources list, now in hypertext format (also now a few months out
of date with respect to the text version, but we're working on the update).
- Places to spend your money
- For this you should have a look at Lloyd McIsaac's worldwide guide to celtic music
mail-order sources, which deals
mainly in record sales. For instruments and suchlike, see the various instrument guides below.
- Places to play
- All over the world people play celtic music for the fun of it, often together at seisiúin or sessions;
here's George Keith's list of sessions, most
of which are open to listeners as well.
- Albums to buy
- There are many many recordings of celtic music, and it can be difficult to tell what's good and what's not. A
poll of the
favourite albums of the members of the Irtrad-L
mailing list may help. It is by no means a definitive
list of the best albums ever (that would be quite impossible) but it's not a bad starting point.
For up to date news, we carry the monthly
newsletter of Claddagh Records which has brief notes
on releases and reissues, mainly of Irish music.
Artists
Here are profiles and discographies of several dozen groups and solo musicians.
Live Music
Records are fine, but there's nothing like hearing traditional music live.
Ceolas carries listings of hundreds of celtic music concerts in North America. You can
look at the entire listing,
or look at the current calendar for each state. For the most convenience, you
can have the current listings for your state delivered by
email every month.
We also have lists of festivals
in Ireland and Scotland as well as a large list of
Scottish
festivals and highland games in North America.
Information on specific festivals is also available, but changes rapidly;
check it out by FTP.
Instruments
One of the best aspects of traditional celtic music is that it is easy to get involved.
Rather than just sitting back, buying records, you can get involved
in making music. You can't yet learn to play from the Internet, but it
has several resources to help you. The tin whistle
is one of the easiest and cheapest instruments to start on, and Ceolas has a
Tin Whistle guide to
help you out. To get an idea of how it sounds, have a listen to
Ain't Whistlin' Dixie, what may be the first ever music album released over the
internet, containing sound files of many tunes played on tin whistle by David Walker.
For other instruments there are internet mailing lists (see the
Internet Sources
guide) and Ceolas has files on
Accordion,
Harp,
Flute (By Brad Hurley) and
Bagpipes,
a guide to making your own
Bodhran or Tin Whistle, and bibliographies
for
fiddle and bagpipes.
We also have the first draft of a guide to
accompanying celtic music,
thanks to David James and Dan Beimborn has a
field guide which helps tell the
difference between mandolins, bouzoukis, citterns and the like.
There are also other sites which cover
Accordions,
Pipes,
Hammered Dulcimers,
Harps and
Bodhráns.
Irish Traditional Music Archive
We now have online copies of a number of introductory leaflets that the
ITMA publishes. These are:
Tunes
This directory contains a number of tunes in tif, postscript,
Midi and TeX format as well as software to print Midi files and
to add music-formatting options to the TeX wordprocessor. In particular, it
carries a large number of tunes in
abc format and the software to print them out. See
the tunes catalog
for more information or click
here to access this FTP directory. Alan
Ng has recently pulled together the software to allow Windows users to get at abc
format tunes without using TeX. See here for details.
Two valiant volunteers have created collections of tunes that you can read directly from a
Web viewer. Ceolas carries a copy of
Richard Robinson's Tunebook ,
and you can also try
Richard Darsie's tunebook.
You can also try the
Digital Tradition, a huge online listing of
folk tunes from around the world which you can see and play online.
The Irish American Post Online
Ceolas is now carrying the first online edition of a major Irish American newspaper,
the Irish American Post, with stories
of Irish events in the American midwest, news from Ireland, and including reviews of
celtic music events and releases. Check it out, and let us know what you think of it!
(This is at least temporarily discontinued, but back issues are still online.)
misc
A variety of other files include a guide to Irish Music in Finland, by Seppo Nieme,
Robert Borcherding's index to the the Northern Fiddler,
the lyrics
of the Irish national anthem, the official rules of Fleadh Ceol
competitions and Seamus Keleher's personalCD list.
We also have a directory with other files, not
directly related to celtic music.
Gerard Manning
ceolas@celtic.stanford.edu
http://celtic.stanford.edu/ceolas.html (World Wide Web Directory, 06/1995)