The
Ceol Sean Story
Ceol Sean was founded on the
belief that there is a vast body of "lost or forgotten' pipe music from the
first half of the twentieth century and before that would benefit the piping
community if only it could be made easily available. We know that there are
literally hundreds of delightful and worthwhile marches, reels, jigs,
strathspeys, and even some piobaireachds that somehow have not made their way
into the major pipe music collections that are currently available. We feel
that both individual players and the piping community in general would benefit
from having an expanded "menu" of tune choices open to them.
Until now, generating paper
copies was the only way to access these older sources. All of us have had to
deal with the difficulties of copied sheet music. We know that producing
anything more than just a "handful" is both expensive and time-consuming. In
addition, retrieving and storing unbound copies is laborious, and requires each
piper to rely on memory, or to devise his or her own "tracking" system. There's
also the all-to-familiar problem of a poor quality copy that is several
generations removed from its original.
Modern technology offers a
solution to these problems, and we found that converting music sources to CD's
offers a way to avoid all the hassle and fuss of paper copy. A CD can hold a
large amount of sheet music in a permanently organized format, allows
generation of good quality printed copy when needed, permits immediate access
to any given recorded item, and presents less of a fire hazard than a stack of
several hundred pages from a Xerox machine. To us, the choice between "paper or
plastic" is pretty clear.
Ceol Sean works in
collaboration with the Bagpipe Music Museum. Located in Ellicott City,
Maryland, the Bagpipe Music Museum holds the world's largest privately-held
collection of bagpipes and bagpipe music. We bring you tunes from the great
collections of David Glen, Peter Henderson, William Ross and others. The
Bagpipe Music Museum has graciously agreed to make its music resources
available to Ceol Sean to support our music-sharing mission, and has entered
into a permanent working agreement with us. A portion of the proceeds from the
sale of each CD goes to support the on-going work of the Museum .
Our CD's are our only business.
We don't sell pipes, reeds, bags, cords, drumsticks, beeswax, black wax, or
hemp. We leave that to other suppliers. Although our current offerings comprise
only a modest menu of choices, expanding our list of collections is part of our
on-going activities.
|
