Social, cultural traditions of Irish music celebrated at Kirkland Art Center

Ellen E. Mintzer, Utica Observer Dispatch
·8 min read

Irish traditional music, from “Danny Boy” to rowdy pub songs to dynamic dance numbers, is a social practice. Nora Revenaugh of Clinton, who plays the fiddle and sings in both Irish and English, explained the power of that tradition.

“I think with social music, it's about what music can do,” Revenaugh said. “Especially for adults, where nobody's making you practice, nobody's making you do this, to have it as a way to connect with other people is really inspiring.”

Revenaugh grew up around traditional Irish music – her paternal grandfather, who was born in Ireland and immigrated to the U.S. - was a professional banjo player, and her father played the bodhrán, an Irish frame drum.

Her father played tunes with Craobh Dugan O'Looney, a local Irish cultural organization founded in Clinton in 1978, and Revenaugh would tag along with him when she was a child. One of the musicians she encountered during those days was Patrick Reynolds, another Clinton-based Irish fiddle player.

Craobh Dugan O'Looney, the Utica-based branch of the international Irish cultural organization Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, performs at the 2023 "Irish Evening at the Kirkland Art Center."
Craobh Dugan O'Looney, the Utica-based branch of the international Irish cultural organization Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, performs at the 2023 "Irish Evening at the Kirkland Art Center."

“He was the first fiddler I really saw when I was little, and I just thought it was so cool, and it made me say, ‘I want to do that someday,’” Revenaugh said.

Irish evening

Revenaugh, Reynolds, Craobh Dugan O’Looney, and other traditional Irish musicians will bring their repertoire, everything from vivacious jigs to stirring ballads, to the Kirkland Art Center on Saturday, March 16. The annual “Irish Evening at the KAC,” part of the center’s monthly “KAC Live series,” starts at 5 p.m. Tickets are $20 for the general public and $18 for KAC members.

KAC board member Damhnait McHugh, who also happens to be married to Reynolds, said that this St. Patrick’s Day event has become a staple of the center’s calendar every March.

“It’s a pretty free-flowing, casual, lively community event,” McHugh said. “People always seem to enjoy the Irish evening.”

A social practice with centuries of tradition

Free-flowing and casual are apt descriptors for the social practice of Irish traditional music. Musicians often gather in pubs or restaurants for informal jam sessions, playing tunes from the repertoire they all know by heart — no sheet music required, although these sessions often involve the exchange of new music.

Reynolds, like Revenaugh, grew up surrounded by traditional music, with his parents and grandparents playing and promoting the practice in their village in western Ireland. He mostly plays dance music – jigs, reels and hornpipes – and loves to learn new tunes.

(From left) Fiddle player Pat Reynolds and uilleann pipes player Nick Whitmer will perform together at the "Irish Evening at the KAC."
(From left) Fiddle player Pat Reynolds and uilleann pipes player Nick Whitmer will perform together at the "Irish Evening at the KAC."

“It's music associated, at least historically, with the rural countryside,” Reynolds said. “And I suppose I'm also inspired by older musicians, some of whom, of course, are long gone and some are still living that I play with. And by getting together with other people to play in informal settings, and kind of exploring the music, exploring the repertoire, so I'm constantly learning new tunes.”

Reynolds will be duetting with Nick Whitmer, who plays uilleann pipes, sometimes known as the Irish bagpipes, at the KAC event. Reynolds and Whitmer have known each other and been playing together for years. Reynolds also hops online with an Albany-based Irish traditional flutist every Monday night, playing tunes together via a program called JamKazam that lets musicians jam live and in-sync over the web.

“Every time I get on with him – I’ve been playing for 40 years, but I learn from him every night,” Reynolds said.

Revenaugh has a hard time picking favorite trad tunes, given that there are thousands of them in diverse styles. She enjoys playing Celtic-influenced music from different parts of the world, and is working to unearth traditional tunes that exemplify female agency.

“I'm a little rougher around the edges,” Revenaugh said. “I really like the dance music of Scotland and Cape Breton [Nova Scotia] in the northeast, the sort of really groovy, driving fiddle rhythms, which I think probably comes from being a fiddler who was raised by a drummer. So it's also really cool just how different the same instrument can sound.”

“With singing, I do sing some songs in Irish and some songs in English, and I sort of like finding traditional songs that are a little cheeky,” she continued. “Especially, a lot of the Irish songs are either these really sad love songs or these sort of loud, rousing rebel songs or pub songs, and I like finding songs for female voices that are a little funny, or cheeky, or sort of show that women were people in the past, also. I have a handful of those – whether they’re booleying songs, or lullabies, or sort of drinking and going home songs, it’s one of my projects to collect cool songs with nice melodies for female voices that have lyrics that are a little unexpected.”

(From left) Fiddle player and singer Nora Revenaugh, fiddle player Pat Reynolds and uilleann pipes player Nick Whitmer will perform at the "Irish Evening at the KAC."
(From left) Fiddle player and singer Nora Revenaugh, fiddle player Pat Reynolds and uilleann pipes player Nick Whitmer will perform at the "Irish Evening at the KAC."

Irish in their bones

At the KAC event, Reynolds and Whitmer will play dance music, vocalist Stephanie Steele will croon some classic ballads, and Revenaugh and Craobh Dugan O’Looney will close out the evening.

Guests can snack on Irish soda bread and Guinness-infused chocolate cookies, sip Barry’s Tea, an Ireland-based brand, and enjoy Irish ales like Guinness and Harp Lager.

Anita Welych, executive director of KAC, said that while this is her first St. Patrick’s Day in her role with KAC, she has heard rave reviews of the event from the community.

“People look forward to it, whether they're Irish in their bones, or just feel Irish that day,” Welych said. “They show up, listen to music, and do all the Irish-y things they can think of.”

McHugh and Reynolds are both Irish in their bones, growing up in the same village in County Mayo in western Ireland and attending college in Galway before moving to Canada for graduate school. McHugh said she drinks Barry’s Tea every day in Clinton and every day when she visits Ireland, too.

The couple are both biology professors, McHugh at Colgate University and Reynolds at Hamilton College, and they return to their ancestral homeland every summer. Reynolds said that while he does not get as many opportunities to jam during the school year, when he’s back in the village he grew up in, he joins sessions three or four nights a week. For the couple, as well as for Revenaugh, music and cultural heritage are intertwined.

“It's so integrated into all my life,” McHugh said. “[Reynolds] plays fiddle every single day, so I hear Irish tunes every single day, for example. The music is part of me. We spend as much time as we can in Ireland – it's home. It's kind of interesting – when I say I'm going to Ireland, I say I'm going home, and when I’m in Ireland and I'm coming back to Clinton, I say I'm going home.”

Reynolds said that his mother’s family goes back hundreds of years in the village they call home.

“We’re very connected there, and really, most of our families are located there,” Reynolds said. “We still have a lot of tight connections in this village that I grew up in.”

Craobh Dugan O'Looney is the Utica-based branch of the international Irish cultural organization Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, which promotes Irish traditional music, among other cultural elements.
Craobh Dugan O'Looney is the Utica-based branch of the international Irish cultural organization Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, which promotes Irish traditional music, among other cultural elements.

Let it linger

Revenaugh said that organizations like Craobh Dugan O’Looney help Irish folks around the world stay connected. It is the local branch of the international organization Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, established Clinton by Irish trad musicians Jim O’Looney and Pat and Frank Dugan.

“They were sort of gathering people around them who played this music,” Revenaugh said. “Ireland has this organization that has little enclaves around the world, and it’s a way to preserve the culture and sort of stay connected to the diaspora. So they started this branch of Comhaltas, which just provides an open place for anybody who is interested to learn more about Irish music, learn more about the Irish language.”

Craobh Dugan O’Looney hosts two open sessions a month: one at the Irish Cultural Center of the Mohawk Valley the first Wednesday of every month, and one at Copper City Brewing Company in Rome the third Tuesday of every month. Everyone is welcome, whether they’re an expert in the repertoire or just a curious community member.

“For people who like this sort of thing, everyone's reminded around St. Patrick's Day that Irish and Celtic music exists, but we're doing this all year round,” Revenaugh said. “So if people like it, come out and say hi, come to one of our open sessions, and don’t be a stranger.”

McHugh said she finds it fascinating how folks from all walks of Irish life, from recent immigrants like herself and Reynolds to people whose families have been in the United States for generations, feel Irish in their bones.

“It is remarkable how many people identify as Irish,” McHugh said. “Even if their family left Ireland 100 years ago, they still have that sense of being Irish. It's strong. It lingers.”

This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Kirkland Art Center in Clinton, NY, presents evening of Irish music