October for us is a time to catch up. August & September were very busy with many festivals and events. October is the time to wrap up things from 2010 and start gearing up for new projects too. Jeff will be bringing in 3 great musicians on October 29 with Smith, Gannon & Blake. If you like Trad music this should be great. The reason I won’t be here is that many of us from Irish Fest will be traveling to Ireland for 2 conferences there. One is a U.S. Irish Festival promoters conference and the Second conference is our counterparts from Ireland with the AOIFE Conference. We’re all looking forward to a lot of networking going on. So many connections are made at conferences like this that I expect them to last a lifetime. Plus we’ll see around 30 new bands. I’m very excited about that!

Then when we get back it’ll be the Celtic Boutique on Saturday November 20th. Come shop for Christmas and buy some music from the Archives or some of our beautiful sheet music.

See you soon,

Barry Stapleton

We’d like to thank all of you who participated in our “10 for 2″ program in which folks give 10 Irish music Related items to the Archives in exchange for 2 free tickets to Irish Fest. We got over 300 items this year. Nearly 100 were new to the Archives so that’s a great addition to our collections. The duplicates are either sold to raise funds for the Archives or given to other institutions like ourselves.
So a big thank you to all who participated. Pass the word on to your friends!

Well the summer is officially over and so are all the festivals we visited with our exhibits. We started in May at Gaelic Park in Chicago and ended in Muskegon. We had a great time at all of them. Our exhibit “A Song For Ireland” was great and many folks enjoyed seeing all the beautiful sheet music covers from Tin Pan Alley when Ireland and the Irish were a core theme to so many composers.

We hope to visit as many festivals next year when our exhibit will be about the Irish & Irish Americans in the American Civil War. While the exhibit will look at the involvement of the Irish on both the Union & Confederate sides, the exhibit will explore the many musical connections and innovations that the Irish contributed to our history during this era.

The big news for the Archives this fall was the release of the Dunn Family Collection microsite and CD containing the Francis O’Neill cylinders. We’ve gotten a great response so far and we are expecting critical review and correspondence soon as the CD is now in the hands of many folks in the Irish traditional music genre.

We’ll be having a CD release in Ireland at The Pipers Club on Friday October 29th, 2010. Besides a program by Archives director Barry Stapleton, we’ll also have an Uilleann Piping performance with Seán McKiernan, who is the current owner of Patrick Touhey’s set of pipes. It should be a very grand & historic evening. Please follow us on our facebook site to get more up to date information on the activities of the Archives.