Earlier this week McHaglund O’Heel wandered over to Carnegie Hall to hang with the famous Irish fiddler Martin Hayes and The Common Ground Ensemble to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Hayes and the Ensemble have a home-away-from-home at the Irish Arts Center in Hell’s Kitchen; so, it was with great pride that the H.K. Irish folks jigged & back-clicked our way en masse over to the great hall for their debut.
Hayes is a specialist in Traditional Irish music. He formed the Common Ground Ensemble “as a collaborative project to facilitate a musical dialogue between Irish traditional music and other traditions, genres, and artistic disciplines.” Their performances include percussive dancing, poetry, and music that utilizes a variety of instruments including the bouzouki, cello, piano, concertina, guitar, harmonium and harp. It’s a very lively group.
Hayes says that Traditional Irish music “is a living, breathing tradition that does not belong to any one era; it lives through renewal.”
It lives through renewal.
No nonsense talk about moving the art form forward to some unknown destination or over a cliff or forcing it to be relevant to whatever a particular generation deems relevant. It lives through renewal.
So does ballet. Tradition is the future.
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