Belfast Regains Its Voice
By JOSHUA HAMMER
THE Friday night session was just getting started on the second floor of Maddens, a dimly lighted pub in the Cathedral Quarter of Belfast. Six musicians — a young woman fiddle player; a pony-tailed, grizzled uilleann piper; a pair of guitarists; a tin-whistler; and a bodhran, or Irish tambourine, player — sat in a circle jamming, gazing at one another, seemingly oblivious to the crowd. The music had an improvisational feel to it — sprightly and hypnotic, the vigorous melody of the fiddles skittering above the sweet, mellow tones of the bagpipes.
Midway through the set, I heard an unfamiliar language being spoken and turned to face a bearded, stringy-haired young man clad in baggy sweatshirt and jeans sitting beside me at the bar. He introduced himself as Caomhin (pronounced KEE-vin) Mac Giolla Caehain, a fiddler and devotee of Gaelic, which, like Irish folk music, has been enjoying a revival in Belfast the last few years.
Many of the people in the room, Caomhin (the name means gentle offspring) told me, were regulars — traditionalists who showed up at Maddens on Friday nights to pay homage to both the ancient language and Ireland’s rich musical heritage. “This is the real thing,” Mr. Mac Giolla Caehain said of the music.
Some 10 years after the Northern Ireland peace agreement, Belfast is in the midst of a transformation. A wave of investment — mostly from other parts of Britain — has turned this once war-torn, economically depressed city into one of Europe’s liveliest towns.
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NYTimes: Belfast Regains Its Voice
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mcurtiss
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NYTimes: Belfast Regains Its Voice
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/tr ... lfast.html
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Innocent Bystander
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dubhlinn
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Innocent Bystander wrote:I love the map with the river "Logan".
You might have some interesting discussions with the locals if you called it that. It should be the LAGAN.
Indeed...
Slan,
D.
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
W.B.Yeats
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
W.B.Yeats
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gerrymceltic
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s1m0n
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I'm seeing "Lagan". It's a lower case italic 'a', not the roman lettering that the word "Belfast" is in. Both vowells in Lagan are the same letter, so it's got to be logon or lagan.Innocent Bystander wrote:I love the map with the river "Logan".
You might have some interesting discussions with the locals if you called it that. It should be the LAGAN.
And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')
C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis