Irish music speaks universal language

There’s always something about the Irish. They have not only a gift for blarney and sociability that becomes intensified around St. Patrick’s Day all over the world, but they have the artist’s gift of the universal

The world discovers itself in the pages of “Ulysses,” in Samuel Beckett’s tramps, still waiting for Godot, in the poetry of W.B. Yeats and in stage-Irish characters that are staples of American film. People who have never heard of the 18th century Irish patriot Wolfe Tone or know a “Brits-out” Fenian from a farmer thrill to Irish rebel songs in pubs all over the country.

But if you want to find the heart of the universal appeal of Irish culture, you don’t have to go very far: Listen to its music.

Go, for instance, to the newly minted Ri-Ra Restaurant on Elm Street in Bethesda on some Wednesday night or a Sunday afternoon, and pull up a chair at a nearby table or a barstool in the pub and give a real listen.

You’ll be at an Irish session, or seisun, and you’ll hear a reel or an air running down a road with a fiddle or two, a guitar, a pipe, a flute or a bodhran drum. It’s all melody and music.

There you’ll find a Frenchman playing the fiddle, leading the way. You may see a woman from Germany playing a flute, a young black man on the bodhran — a goatskin drum resembling a tambourine but without the jingles — or middle-aged men in casual clothing, or a young American University graduate student waiting to chime in on a small flute.

You realize then that for a long time now, Irish music has pulled on the whole world, and been embraced by musicians everywhere.

Sessions constitute Irish traditional (or “trad”) music on display at its most basic and authentic. At a session, men and women who play Irish music engage in a kind of musical conversation, a discussion among themselves. But they also illustrate just how intense the appeal of real Irish music is, how it jumps like electricity across cultures, settings, languages, genders, ethnic groups and history.

Philippe Varlet, a 48-year-old native of France, has made a life in America out of Irish music, a kind of passion that dates back to the 1970s when he first heard Celtic music in Brittany. A sessions leader at the Ri-Ra along with Rob Greenway, he’s intensely serious about the music.

“Musicians basically play for each other,” he says. “The audience, when we see people moving to the music, keeping time, all of that is, of course, very nice, but it really is about the players.”

Tina Eck, a regular at the Ri-Ra session, has been making music this way for about 10 years.

“One day, I think it was in 1994, I walked into Nanny O’Briens on Connecticut Avenue, and I sat down and listened the music being played,” says Ms. Eck, 41, a radio correspondent for the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

“I was absolutely enthralled. It was a session and I came back, and some time later I brought a tin whistle and I started playing. It became a big part of my life, and still is.”

Staff Sgt. Josh Dukes, 24, is a member of the elite Old Guard Drum and Bugle Corps (the U.S. 3rd Infantry) at Fort Myer. Tonight at Ri-Ra he’s playing the bodhran.

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