Music to our ears

Twilight gathers outside the church window, turning the sky sapphire and transforming green hills into black silhouettes. Inside on stage, Steve Coulter plays a simple Irish flute tune, the pure tones echoing from the two-foot-thick walls. Shadows dance on the wall behind him.

Down the street, group music sessions start at the pubs, but in Dingle's St. James Churchin western County Kerry, the musicians follow older traditions handed down across generations.

The music drew us to Ireland - a favorite Chieftains album and Riverdance's fiery beats - music that kindled worldwide interest in Ireland's music. We spent days lost in Ireland's history and nights absorbed in its laments, jigs, and reels, tunes recalling sea and wind, love lost and won, victory and defeat.

Irish speaking voices are so musical that it often seems as if the whole country were singing, and adding words to sentences: "It's you we'd be talking about, so," as if to finish the cadence. It's no wonder that music performances are as plentiful as shamrocks in the gift shops.

To find older music forms, we looked beyond the ubiquitous pub session, an ensemble music form that arose in the 1950s. The session did descend from Irish musical tradition, but for centuries before it started, musicians played unaccompanied, and we were searching for the modern-day equivalent of siamsa (shee-am-sah), an evening's entertainment at a neighbor's home.

A flier promised a folk concert at St. James Church, and so we found ourselves listening to Mr. Coulter's flute and tapping our toes to a fiddler's jig. At intermission, our fellow Irish music lovers' accents revealed their origins: American, English, German, Irish.

So many musical styles bill themselves as "traditional Irish" that finding authentic music, even in its mother country, requires Sherlock Holmes's sleuthing skills. We scanned leaflets for clues: traditional instruments such as the Irish harp and uillean (ILL-in) pipes, solo performers, or well-known musicians.

The reward was worth the effort. Ornamentation, the artist's decorative touch that typifies a regional or personal style, shone in the solos. In the quiet places, the instruments spoke: the harp's strum, the concertina's soft wheeze, and the flute's whistle. No buzzing conversation obscured the music. No smoke filled the air.

Ivory-cheeked children, black-haired, eyes shining, fill Ireland's strollers. Eilís Kennedy, who sang at St. James when we were there, must have been one of them. Wearing a red sweater and black slacks, she sang a song by Colum Sands: "Ah but never count your chickens... when you're dealing with the women... For many's a wise man fell asleep and wakened up a fool." Her clear voice filled the darkening church.

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