Back to school for a mighty session

The discovery of the Ardagh Chalice of trad music, and some barnstorming performances, made Scoil Cheoil an Earraigh a joy to behold, writes Siobhán Long

Dorian Grays were 10 a penny in Ballyferriter last weekend; it's said that the older the fiddle the sweeter the tune, but, as Breanndán Begley rightly observed, in west Kerry it seemed the truth was that the older the fiddle player, the sweeter the tune.

What started as a glint in the eye of Begley and his festival co-director, Niamh Ní Bhaoill, just three years ago has mushroomed into the musical equivalent of a cottage garden. Scoil Cheoil an Earraigh, Ballyferriter's home-grown spring music school, is a haven; a place where budding musicians are encouraged and cajoled by those more seasoned in the tradition's and the region's polkas and slides. It's the nature/nurture debate in microcosm - those with a genetic lineage inextricably intertwined with the geography of Corca Dhuibhne sharing their inheritance with local and visitor alike, nurturing whatever innate instinct for the music that's there, and peppering it with fistfuls of the essential charisma that is at the heart of west Kerry's music.

Past and present didn't so much collide as coalesce on February 23 in Tigh An tSaorsaigh, when Sliabh Luachra's greatest living fiddler, Paddy Cronin, swapped tunes with Breanndán Begley and young Dublin fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh.

Cronin embarked on this much-anticipated recital with some trepidation, fingering his vast catalogue of tunes with the apprehension of a master musician for whom access to a decent session is an all-too-rare experience these days.

He indulged Begley's entreaty to air a favourite hornpipe, Eibhlín Ó Neill, and then slowly but surely dredged countless tunes from his memory, accompanied by tales of house dances where he and Pádraig O'Keeffe (the peerless Sliabh Luachra fiddle master) could find themselves elevated on chairs atop a kitchen table, all the better to make way for the dancers who encroached on every precious square inch of ground.

It was a place in which Cronin and O'Keeffe found due comfort, as it afforded them at the very least enough elbow room to bow their way through dance sets till dawn.

It wasn't long before Ó Raghallaigh (himself a traditional music scholar of Confucian proportions) and Cronin were swapping musical molecules midstream, trading licks on everything from Colonel Frazer's to An Buachaill Caol Dubh, the very embodiment of Flann O'Brien's infamous guardian of the peace who became one with his beloved bicycle in The Third Policeman.

Nicholas Carolan of the Irish Traditional Music Archive was Ballyferriter's own Woodward and Bernstein rolled into one. His lecture on the Corca Dhuibhne music collection of Canon James Goodman left the audience dumbstruck, with the breaking news that long lost words to a host of tunes that were collected by Goodman in the mid- to late-19th century have recently been unearthed in England. Ventry born and bred, a piper and flute player, a graduate of Trinity College, and ultimately a professor of Irish in his alma mater, Goodman counted Douglas Hyde and John Millington Synge among his students. A canon of the Church of Ireland, Goodman personified that most modern of ideas, of work-life balance, marrying his ecclesiastical duties with a love of Irish traditional music, and collecting more than 2,000 tunes before his death in 1896. Niamh Ní Bhaoill smiles conspiratorially as she recounts the sheer impact of Carolan's news among the largely local listeners.

"There was a gasp in the audience," she discloses, "when Nicholas revealed that two full manuscripts have been uncovered in an attic in England, with words to 80 of the tunes in Canon Goodman's collection. That means, of course, that the next challenge will be the task of matching the words with the airs. But it's like finding the Ardagh Chalice for singers and musicians. It's really that important."

With 120 students enrolled in classes during Scoil Cheoil an Earraigh, aged from 10 years of age to 50 plus, the event's high point was a grand concert in Ballyferriter's primary school, where every bodhrán and banjo player, every errant piper and concertina player merged with fiddlers, singers and box players to showcase their collective repertoires, honed and polished over the previous week. Donegal fiddlers Vincent, Jimmy and Peter Campbell (re-christened the father, son and holy ghost of traditional music by one local wag) leant an unmistakably cosmopolitan air to the proceedings with their exotic, throaty highlands, while the roof was raised during the grand finale, featuring The Peeler and the Goat (aka I'll Puck You With My Horn) and Daly's, with ringleader and box player Breanndán Begley revving it up with his customary vim and vigour.

Later, Frankie Gavin and Carl Hession transformed Halla na Feothanaí into a virtual Grand Ole Opry with their electrifying mix of jazz-tinged, Klezmer-influenced bouillabaisse, swing shifting from the florid grandiosity of The Arrival of the Queen Of Sheba in An Daingean to the clean lines of The Shaskeen reel and The Glendalough Hornpipe.

West Kerry is a place where students of life can secure maths grinds and piping classes in one fell swoop, courtesy of the lateral-thinking antics of Renaissance man Eoin Duignan. It's a place where, despite the plethora of world-class musicians, Scoil Cheoil entered a voluntary state of suspended animation so that every dog, devil and fiddle player could savour the delight of Ireland's victory over England in the Six Nations. It's a melting pot of polkas, slides and reels - and any place where the music of Handel can cosy up alongside that of Peadar O'Loughlin, Seán Garvey and Bobby Gardiner must surely hold something special for anyone with even half an ear cocked for a tune.

As fiddle student and Curraheen native James Allman declared: "I love it, I really do. This is what the tunes are all about. Getting a chance to learn them from musicians who grew up with them; what more could we ask for?"