Around-The-World Traditional Irish Music Relay

Around-The-World Traditional Irish Music Relay

We are in the planning stage of the World’s Biggest and Longest Traditional Irish Music Session.

It has been proposed that a Marathon Session will begin and end in Ireland having spanned the globe in a series of video link-ups with sessions in as many different countries and time zones as possible for an entire weekend of continuous Trad Irish Music.

Each session around the world will have a ‘live’ audio/video link-up with the session from which it is taking the musical baton !!! Musicans will then play continuously for an hour before passing over (again via Audio/Visual link-up) to the next session all of the way round the world.

The event will involve thousands of Trad Musicians in scores of sessions around the world.

The details and logistics are yet to be finalised for the event but it is hoped that we will have sponsorship from the likes of RTE, Arts Councils in Ireland (and abroad!), TradConnect, LiveTrad etc. etc.

Please share your thoughts and feelings on what should be an epic musical journey!!!

Best Regards

Frank Doherty

All the tunes should be polkas.

By "continuously" you mean?

Polkas are cool, cooler if the team passing the baton were shot! DeathSession 2000

By "we" you mean…?

I hope you follow usual session etiquette. For example, no repeated tunes. But not sure about the "play continuously for an hour" thing. If you tried that where I like to play you’d be certainly playing on your own after 20 mins or less.

And can you imagine the shambles when the link goes live to wherever and they are all out on their smoking break?

No "touching" when passing the baton……, please.

"The event will involve thousands of Trad Musicians in scores of sessions around the world."

… to be pedantic … lets say, for the benefit of doubt, you get one thousand musicians and one score of sessions, that’s fifty musicians per session.

Or … are you gone be the one, like that crap Genesis drummer (gladly, his name escapes me) who’s gonna hop on a plane and turn up at two gigs?

Don’t worry about the smoking break scenario. Just leave a bodhran player playing on his own, while the rest of the band remain ‘offstage’. That way you can keep the continuity.

"… to be pedantic … lets say, for the benefit of doubt, you get one thousand musicians and one score of sessions, that’s fifty musicians per session."

Not necessarily, my own regular session group is six strong and we can do a two hour set easily so an hour will be wee buns; I know of quite a few others to whose sessions we go, and vice versa. There’s three sessions I can think of all within a ten mile radius of ours. The problem won’t be the sessions or the time, the problem will be getting camera crews into them all…

Ambitious as Mr Dohety’s plans are, I doubt whether he’s actually envisaging camera crews and satellite link ups. More likely smart phones and web cams I’d say.

And while I wouldn’t foresee any problems with one’s abilities to play for an hour, it’s the desirability that concerns me.

"By "continuously" you mean?"

Yes - I was wondering that. I was just looking through the Guinness Book of Records yesterday with my 8-year-old nephew and learned of an Indian musician who holds the world endurance record for playing guitar, playing continuously for 24 hrs 30 mins. (It doesn’t mention whether any one individual managed to listen for that long.) A 1hr set of tunes should by child’s play by comparison. (In fact, it doesn’t even require any one musician to play continuously for the full hour, so long as *someone* is playing at any given point.)

Great idea. An hour between several tune players is feck all if u co-ordinate it. Well done!