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TTU Celtic Ensemble: Dancing at the Turning of the Year, concert at Canterbury Student Ctr., Tuesday May 1 5:30pm at Historic Seaman Hall near the TTU campus (16th and X) the TTU Celtic Ensemble presents a concert of dance music and song from England and Ireland.
The event is co-sponsored by the School of Music, the Vernacular Music Center, and the Caprock Celtic Association. Singers, players, and dancers present dances, songs, and listening pieces in English and Irish Gaelic, as well as the venerable dance tradition of the English “Morris.” Admission is free, and students, families, and seniors are especially welcome.
Special event: This is a gala concert recognizing the completed renovations and much-awaited reopening of historic Seaman Hall, home of the Canterbury Student Center, a Lubbock landmark, and a treasured friend to Celtic arts, music, and culture communities across the South Plains. Come and join us to celebrate the return of this much-loved venue!
About “Morris” dance
References to the “Morris” dance reach back in English literature and visual arts at least to the 16th century. Shakespeare’s compatriot and favorite clown Will Kempe once danced the morris from London to Norwich, and morris dances (6 pairs of men, dancing in a circle, surrounding a piper or fiddler, waving sticks or handkerchiefs) appear in woodcuts and other illustrations from the Tudor era. Morris continued as a rural and village amusement—with each locality developing its own favorite tunes, steps, and figures—until the 20th century. Though in danger of dying out before WWI, it was revived, first by antiquarians and folklorists like Cecil Sharpe (who famously stumbled across a performance by the Headington Quarry morris side on a Christmas visit to Oxford), and then by young English rock and folk musicians like Ashley Hutchings (of Fairport Convention) and accordion-player John Kirkpatrick.
Traditionally, morris is danced at village fetes, fairs, markets, and on holidays—especially those heralding Spring. Join us on May Day to dance at the turning of the year.
About the ensemble:
TTU's Celtic Ensemble is a small ensemble of singers, instrumentalists, and dancers specializing in group performance of the traditional dance music and song of the seven Celtic nations: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, Galicia, and the Isle of Man. The ensemble learns and plays their repertoire by ear, combining timber flute, tin whistle, fiddles, mandola, guitar, harp, percussion, accordion, double-bass, and brass and wind instruments with dancing and solo and choral song, in Irish and Scots Gaelic, Gwerz, French, and English. [For this concert: we view England as a province of Ireland, rather than the more common reverse!]
Local contact
Ensemble website at: http://webpages.acs.ttu.edu/chrissmi/3106
Contact ensemble director Dr Christopher Smith at TTU School of Music: 806.742-2270 x249 christopher.smith@ttu.edu
