Ceol

Tradition Meets Technology at Dublin's Folk Music Museum

By Dave Fox

A new interactive museum in Dublin is grafting centuries-old instruments and traditions with computers and high-tech toys, giving visitors a hands-on introduction to Ireland's musical heritage.

Ceol - the Traditional Irish Music Centre - leads visitors through a labyrinth of sound as they explore the history of Irish music. The exhibit shows how tightly Ireland's musical heritage is interwoven with other aspects of its history and politics.

(Ceol, pronounced "KAY-oll," is the Gaellic word for "music.")

You enter into a roomful of computer stations, each covering a different time period. The entire museum is bilingual, offering a choice of English or Gaellic.

Computers let you select the topics you want to learn about, explaining, for example, how an 18th century population boom created not only unemployment and hunger, but also a lot of free time to learn musical instruments. The exhibit explores radio's contribution to a 1940s folk music revival, and how emigration carried Irish music overseas.

Another room offers a clever demonstration of different instruments. A tune plays throughout the room. Instruments are displayed in glass cases. Speakers above the particular instrument you are standing near play that instrument more loudly than the others. Move around the room and you discover how the different instruments weave together to build a tune.

The tradition of "songs" - lilting tunes sung a cappella by a single person is also featured. Eight statues with TV-screen heads sit in a circle. You are welcome to sit beside them. Press a button to choose a song, and a face on one of the screens sings it for you while you and the other seven video statues smile and listen.

As you enter the dance room, look up at more video screens, this time facing down through a clear ceiling. Cameras shot the footage for these videos from the same angle at which you are craning your neck. You see the soles of dancers' shoes tapping out fancy rhythms above your head. Deeper into the room, a Ceili (pronounced "KAY-lee") - a traditional Irish dance - is taking place on life-sized screens at floor level. If you care to join in, there's a wooden dance floor next to the screen, and mirrors to observe your own fancy footwork.

A 20-minute film entitled "Ceol: The Music of the People" shows lively pub sessions and dizzying aerial shots of the countryside on a wide semi-circular screen, offering good close-up glimpses of people playing different instruments.

Ceol is located in Smithfield Village, a trendy new complex in Dublin that was once home of the Jamison Whiskey Distillery. A hotel bar connected to the museum sometimes offers live traditional music. The setting in Chief O'Neill's Bar is too modern for the music to feel authentic, but the museum itself offers a fun and thorough introduction to Irish music, and a launching pad for some time in countryside pubs.