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.