Beautiful plaster design on ceiling at Na Píobairí Uilleann

Na Píobairí Uilleann,The Pipers Club in Dublin. Its a beautifully restored Georgian house on Henrietta St. So besides all the good work their doing in regards to keeping the piping tradition alive…they’ve also contributed greatly to the restoration of Dublin in preserving this beautiful building.

Many thanks to Gay McKeon, Gerry Lyons & Terry Moylan for their hospitality. The Presentation went great and I think the crowd enjoyed it. After my presentation Sean McKiernan played for us on the set of pipes that Patrick Touhey played. These are the same set of pipes that were played by Touhey on the Francis O’Neill cylinders CD that was released that night in Ireland. So these recordings are 106 years old. Then to hear Sean play the same pipes so eloquently was really quite a treat.

Afterwards we retired to Hughes pub were we had a great chat about all things Irish music related. My thanks to Nicholas Carolan & Rab Cherry who also came to the event. Nicholas is of course the director of the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin and Rab is involved with Cairdeas na bhFidiléirí.

Sean McKiernan

Touhey's Pipes

The one thing that stands out for me on this particular trip is the passion that these people bring to their institutions. All the folks at Na Píobairí Uilleann are extremely dedicated to the preservation and continuance of the piping traditions. In fact one of the areas of concern within the pipers community is the availability of quality pipes. So Na Píobairí Uilleann is in the middle of a major project called the PipeCraft initiative. They hope to be able to offer hands-on training in pipemaking this fall.

Nicholas Carolan, Gay McKeon, Sean McKiernan, Barry Stapleton

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 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.

Dunn Family Collection

On August 16, 2010, WIMA officially launched the Francis O’Neill Cylinders CD and the Dunn Family Collection website during the opening of the Milwaukee Irish Fest Summer School. We were delighted to have so many friends and supporters turn out for the event to help us celebrate the release of these projects, which of course are closely related.

You can purchase the O’Neill Cylinders CD (which is a double CD set, by the way) from the Irish Fest online store:  Francis O’Neill Cylinders CD.

And we invite you to explore the Dunn Family Collection site, which features audio from the cylinder recordings, as well as music manuscripts, artifacts, and photos about Michael J. Dunn, Francis O’Neill, and other famed Irish musicians of the time. Keep posted for further updates to exhibit, including several manuscripts found within James Early’s copy of The Dance Music of Ireland which were just added today!

Also released at the event was a compilation of music from the Celtic Rock Stage at Milwaukee Irish Fest. The Celtic Rock Stage dates back to the 1990 festival. Since then, dozens of bands from across America, Ireland, Northern Ireland , Scotland and Canada have entertained Irish Fest audiences. The new CD contains songs of some of the most popular bands from the last two decades. You can purchase the CD from the Irish Fest store: Celtic Rock CD.

Jeff Ksiazek, Archivist

WIMA is pleased to announced that on August 16, 2010, we’re officially releasing a double audio CD of the Dunn Family Collection recordings called The Francis O’Neill Cylinders: Thirty-two Recordings of Irish Traditional Music in America circa 1904. We’ll simultaneously release a dedicated website, The Dunn Family Collection: Francis O’Neill Cylinders, featuring online versions of images, manuscripts, and historical information from the Dunn Family Collection, as well as streaming versions of all the Francis O’Neill cylinders. Keep your eyes on our website, http://www.irishfest.com/archives, and Facebook page for links to purchase the CD and study the collection sometime in early August.

We’ve taken word about this fine collection on the road the past few months. Director Barry Stapleton presented a program about the Dunn Family Collection at the 44th annual conference of the Association for Record Sound Collections in New Orleans in May. I recently returned from a trip to the Catskills Irish Arts Week where I presented information about the collection, as well as unveiling several of the remastered recordings.

Barry and I will launch the CD and website at the 2010 Milwaukee Irish Fest Summer School on Monday night, August 16 from 7 to 9pm. Feel free to contact us about the launch or visit the Summer School site for more details: http://www.irishfest.com/schools/summerschool.php

Expect more updates in the next week or two!

-Jeff Ksiazek, archivist

We here at the Ward Irish Music Archives wish you a great and happy day, and we ask that you get out and enjoy some live Irish music during the 2010 Green Season!

In other news:

The Archives and the Dunn Family Collection were featured in a recent issue of Milwaukee’s Shepherd Express. Click here to read the online version.

Work is moving ahead on getting the Dunn materials online. More updates will come soon!

Slainte!

Jeff Ksiazek, Archivist

WIMA

March is upon us, and if you’re involved with an Irish music archives, you know that means the Green Season is in full swing. The St. Patrick’s season is always a busy one for WIMA, so here’s an update of what we’ll be up to this month.

This Saturday, March 6, we have the eleventh annual Green Tie Event, which is a major fundraiser for the archives. We’ll be featuring entertainment from local traditional band áthas, the McMenamin Irish Dancers, and you can watch (and participate in!) the Great Celtic Whiskey Debate! It’s all taking place at the Wisconsin Club—contact the Milwaukee Irish Fest Center for further details.

The week of March 22, WIMA will participate in our third Alternative Spring Break with the UWM Archives department. We’re happy and grateful to have the help of another MLIS student volunteer during this week, and we’ll be putting a lot of energy into processing the festival photo collection of Milwaukee Irish Fest.

We’re still moving forward with the Dunn Collection project as well. A CD copy of the recently re-mastered cylinder recordings are currently hurtling through the mail system, and we here at WIMA are looking forward to having a listen! This batch has some speed and pitch correction applied, thanks in part to a special set of uilleann pipes that may very well have been played on the recordings themselves! More information on that will be coming soon.

And speaking of the Dunn Collection and fundraisers, WIMA just launched it’s Adopt a Cylinder program online! If you’d like to help support getting the Dunn Collection online for the world to see and hear, please consider sponsoring a cylinder recording! Check out the website here: http://www.irishfest.com/archives/adopt-a-cylinder.php

Enjoy March in all its Irish celebratory glory, and be sure to get out and partake of some live Irish music wherever you may be!

The Dunn Family Collection was donated to the Ward Irish Music Archives (WIMA) in January 2007. The collection contains many artifacts from the life and times of Michael J. Dunn who immigrated to Milwaukee from Ireland in the 1880s. The items include musical manuscripts, instruments, photos, books, a Victrola and his Ancient Order of Hibernians uniform.

Micheal "Joe" Dunn and Michael J. Dunn, August 1911

The cornerstone of this collection is the Francis O’Neill cylinders. Dunn was friends with O’Neill, and towards the end of O’Neill’s life he gave his friends many items from his vast musical collection. Whether the cylinders came to Dunn directly or through a mutual friend, Sgt. James Early, is unknown, but the cylinders were likely in the Dunn home on south 26^th street in Milwaukee for over 80 years.

O’Neill was known for collecting Irish tunes from the musicians in Chicago. He published over 3,500 tunes through several publications, including the mammoth O’Neill’s Music of Ireland (1903). It was known that O’Neill had recorded some of these musicians sometime circa 1904, and that they had been given to Dunn. But many thought these cylinders were destroyed after Dunn’s death in 1935.

In 2003 Dr. David Dunn, Michael Dunn’s grandson, took one last look in the attic of his grandfather’s home before selling it and found the suitcase of these 32 cylinder recordings along with most of the artifacts in the Dunn Family Collection at WIMA.

So what’s in store for the Dunn Family Collection? We’re currently developing a website to give the public online access to the majority of the collection, including the ability to listen to the cylinder recordings. The recordings themselves are being mastered, and  the pitch and speed of the transfers are being compared to one of the original sets of uilleann pipes used by Patrick Touhey on the recordings. We’ll also be releasing a CD of the cylinders, along with more information about the collection and musicians involved.

Stay tuned to the blog for more updates as WIMA works on these projects!

-Jeff Ksiazek, archivist

As we head in to Christmas its amazing how many Irish-Americans have contributed to our culture of Christmas related songs and carols. Tin Pan Alley was practicly done when Bing Crosby had his huge hit of “White Christmas” in 1942. That one song kept songwriters in business for the next decade as they all tried to write the next Christmas hit song. Many of the current songs we sing today came from that time period. Burl Ives was half Irish and of course he left us a wealth of Christmas songs…and who could forget Suzie snowflake made famous by Rosemary Clooney.