Comhaltas session

I went to my very first Comhaltas session.

I had found it because I had been on an Irish community mailing list, I mostly read through these emails and didn't go out to events. I'm not sure how the Comhaltas sessions caught my eye. I had found out about Comhaltas when I was looking through the traditional Irish music videos on Youtube. Comhaltas seems to be an organization to promote Irish culture, and so they organize lessons and competitions for learners of Irish music.

So I found out about Comhaltas sessions geared towards intermediate players. I read through the tune list... though I had tried to find tunes that were not obscure, it seemed that the majority of the tunes this group played, were unfamiliar to me.

The session I went to was at someone's house. When I got there, the dining room table had various instruments laid across it, and there were about 10 kitchen chairs waiting for people to sit on them. It was fun when people started playing music. We went around in a circle, with people suggesting tunes from the list, and people played along, if they could. If the person didn't know anything on the list, they played something else, and if other people knew the tune, they joined in. It was mostly people over 40, and about half and half Irish-born and Canadian. My teacher had been going over with me ways to chord along with a melody, but I realized that here, the only thing that would work was playing unison melody. We stopped partway through and tea and coffee and snacks were served - it was a nice homey atmosphere! It was a lot of fun, but I have to learn about 10-15 more tunes before I can really participate. It was fun to chat to other musicians, they varied in their music repertoire, turns out I have learned a lot of old-time and Canadian tunes.