Music & Dance Scene Not Like It Was, But It’s Still There if You Want It
By Sean Smith
Special to the BIR
It’s a cool, early spring Saturday night at Watertown’s Canadian-American Club, and the sounds of a fiddle and piano casually tearing through a set of Cape Breton reels reverberates through the sparsely populated ballroom. Small clusters of people sit on the edges of the dance floor, chatting as the music continues — a cavalcade of marches, jigs, strathspeys, and the occasional air.

A column of news and updates on the Boston Celtic Music Fest (BCMFest), which celebrates the Boston area’s rich heritage of Irish, Scottish, Cape Breton music and dance with a grassroots, musician-run winter music festival and other events during the year.

By Thomas O’Grady
Special to the BIR
Recently, I happened upon an interview with Seamus Heaney published more than thirty years ago in the literary journal Ploughshares. Having read countless other interviews with Heaney over the decades, most of them involving variations on the thematic territory of his poetry’s relationship to the political and sectarian divide in his native Northern Ireland, I wondered if I would find much new in this one.