20 Essential Uilleann Piping Tunes: Volume 1

Uilleann piping tunes are at the heart of Ireland's dance music tradition. This curated collection of Irish traditional tunes offers a variety of ornamentation and melodic variations for beginner, intermediate, and advanced players. Musicians looking to expand their repertoire will find a rich selection of reels, jigs, and hornpipes to play in the session or on the stage.20 Essential Uilleann Piping Tunes draws on core repertoire of the uilleann pipes to teach students of Irish music how to think about playing dance music in a traditional style. Each of these 20 classic tunes has been carefully selected, transcribed, and arranged to offer musicians a guide for ornamentation, harmonization, and variation. Distilled from two decades of teaching experience, this book also explains how to understand the rhythm of Irish traditional dance music so that the musician can play with greater confidence.====About the AuthorEliot Grasso is one of the world's foremost performers and teachers of the uilleann pipes.He has performed and taught extensively across North America and Europe, and has played for the National Endowment for the Arts Awards, the National Heritage Awards, Glasgow’s International Piping Festival, Piping Live!, Armagh’s William Kennedy Piping Festival, and at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Library of Congress, and Constitution Hall.Among Grasso's numerous acclaimed recordings are Up Against the Flatirons (commissioned by Na Píobairí Uilleann, Ireland's national piping society), Standing Room Only, North-by-Northwest, The Clearing (with Dréos), Cascade Mountain Aire (with Dréos), and Breathe Blue. He holds a M.A. in ethnomusicology from the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, and a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance.More info is available at eliotgrasso.com Read more