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Pádraig O'Keeffe joined the elite and secretive French Foreign Legion at the age of twenty, seeking a challenge that would absorb his interests and intensity. He served with the Legion in Cambodia and Bosnia, then returned to civilian life, but military habits would not allow him to settle. His need for intense excitement and extreme danger drove him back to the lifestyle he knew and loved, and using his Legion training, he became a 'hidden soldier' by opting for security missions in Iraq and Haiti. In Iraq he was the sole survivor of an ambush in no man's land between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, the most dangerous place on earth. An intense, exciting and vivid account of extraordinary and sometimes horrific events, Hidden Soldier lifts the veil on the dark and shadowy world of security contractors and what the situation is really like in Iraq as well as other trouble spots. This bestseller also includes photographs taken by Padraig O'Keeffe while he was a Legionnaire and when he was in Iraq.
The two southern most counties in Ireland, Cork and Kerry, have legendary music and dance traditions. on the border of these two counties, a rural area called Sliabh Luachra is especially well-known for its fiddle tunes and itinerant fiddle teachers. When speaking of this area's fiddle music, some describe a special lilt or backbeat, or they talk about the special role of set dances, but the most often expressed quality relates to the frequent use of slides and polkas. This book features transcriptions of 107 tunes as played by three of the region's most distinguished fiddlers: Pádraig O'Keeffe, Denis Murphy, and Connie O'Connell. Each fiddler is profiled, followed by a collection of meticulously transcribed tunes and annotations. an accompanying CD includes 30 of these tunes played solo by Connie O'Connell.
Johnny O'Leary, master-instrumentalist, composer and performer, custodian of a huge repertoire of tunes adapted by The Chieftains, De Dannan and Planxty among others, blends Sliabh Luachra airs with older Kerry music, and is hailed as one of its finest exponents. Polkas, slides, reels, jigs and hornpipes make up the tune-sources for this collection; their names alone celebrate places and events, as well as friends, neighbours and associates; they replenish a living tradition, orally transmitted and regionally rooted in popular culture, in which dance and music form twin strands in the fabric of rural community life.
It is really great fun to play these beautiful traditional melodies in easy piano arrangements. The volume contains information on the styles and cultural background of Irish music. All pieces can also be played together with the violin; a violin book in matching keys is available as well (The Irish Violin Book, ED 21378). Beautiful pieces for piano lessons or ensemble playing.
This collection includes many favourite Irish fiddle tunes. Some are easy to play, others more challenging. the bowing techniques, ornamentation and other aspects of playing style summarized in the introduction will be familiar to readers of Pete's earlier book, the Complete Irish Fiddle Player, as will source musicians like Julia Clifford, Tommy Peoples, Lucy Farr, John Doherty and Padraig O'Keeffe. Here though, instead of proceeding in 'fiddle method' style from simpler to more complex tunes, regional repertoire and styles are explored. Grouped in sets for performance, the tunes from any one tradition can be of varying levels of difficulty. Less experienced players may find sets 5, 6 and 29, for example, quite approachable, as well as the first reel in set 14 and the second single jig in set 15. All tunes included on companion CD.
In this volume, the folk musician Patrick Steinbach has compiled the most beautiful Irish tunes and, in addition, provides much information on the performance as well as on the style and the cultural background of Irish music.
A room in a pub. Some musicians facing each other. They play well-known traditional Irish tunes on flutes, tin whistles, and fiddles. Every musician plays the melodic line adding her own variations and grace notes. Some musicians are just listening; others are cracking jokes. The crowd nearby is composed of friends, occasional patrons, a regular audience, and curious tourists. Some seem not to care; some come closer to listen or perhaps even participate. This is called a “session”. From an anthropological point of view, sessions are not just a musical environment. They are a combination of social interactions, suggesting specific dynamics between community, subjects and cultural items. A scene like that can be found the world over, from Dublin to Boston and Rome. During the last forty years the practices and the appreciation of this particular music, and of this particular setting, have moved decisively from local arenas into the global marketplace. A transnational perspective is, therefore, necessary. As such, this book will appeal to a very wide range of readers, from musicians and aficionados to scholars and students.
Contains the names of medical practitioners registered with the General Medical Council of Great Britain. Data includes name and date of registration, address, registered qualifications, and registration number. Also includes information on the Council, registration statistics, and registrable qualifications granted in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, in member states of the European Economic Community, and recognized overseas (selected British Commonwealth) qualifications.
"This book addresses the relationship between music and cultural history in Ireland. It variously identifies and examines the development of music as an outgrowth of extra-musical concepts and socio-cultural entities, including celticism (in pre-christian and early christian Ireland), the ideology of ethnic culture, education, nationalism, religion, the composer in modern Ireland and the impact of music on the Irish literary imagination. Throughout the book, an abiding concern with music as the expression of political, social and religious norms of cultural development in Ireland affords thematic coherence to the essays as a whole." "As with the preceding volumes in the series, Music and Irish Cultural History breaks new ground in the cultivation of musicology in Ireland. In particular, it serves as a stimulus to the better understanding of music as a vital preoccupation of the Irish Mind."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
After civil war, can the winners commemorate their victory, hailing their conquering heroes with the blood of their former comrades still fresh on their boots? Or should they cover themselves in shame and hope that the nation soon forgets? In this book, Anne Dolan explores the tensions between memory and forgetting in twentieth-century Ireland. By examining the memory of winning the Irish Civil War, she discusses the extent to which it has been used to serve party political ends, where private grief finds consolation when the dead have fallen from political favour, and how the dead are remembered when no one wanted to fight the war. The book addresses the Irish Civil War at its most public point: at the statues and crosses, and in the ritual and rhetoric of commemoration. It will be of central interest to all students and scholars of European history and politics.