Release date: Dec. 5, 2003
Contact: Deb Hammacher, Associate Director, University Media Relations,
at 404-727-0644 or dhammac@emory.edu

Annual Celtic Christmas Concert Presents Irish and Southern Holiday Themes

WHO: Irish harper and "sean nos" singer Cormac De Barra, Nonesuch, The Gateway Performance Players, Celtic harper Kelly Stewart, the Buddy O'Reilly Band, the Emory Early Music Ensemble, Irish tenor James Flannery and fiddler Sinead Madden.

WHAT: 11th Annual Atlanta Celtic Christmas Concert

WHEN: 8 p.m. Dec. 12 and 13

WHERE: Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, 1700 N. Decatur Rd., Emory.

COST: $20 general admission; $16 discount groups, faculty and staff; $8 children and Emory students with I.D. For tickets, call 404-727-5050. For information, call 404-727-6180 or e-mail jflanne@emory.edu.

During the past several years an underground movement in roots music has occurred which, until very recently, escaped the radar screen of mainstream culture. With virtually no commercial airplay, the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers film "O Brother, Where Art Thou" has sold more than five million copies nationwide, won the 2002 Grammy Award for the best album of the year and shot to the top of the Billboard charts.

This comes as no surprise to those who have flocked for the past 10 years to attend the annual Atlanta Celtic Christmas Concert at Emory University, held this year on Dec. 12 and 13 at 8 p.m. at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. Produced by Emory's W. B. Yeats Foundation under the direction of James W. Flannery, Winship Professor of the Arts and Humanities, the concert has a double focus. The program portrays the Christmas traditions of the Celtic lands, many of them dating back to medieval times, through music, dance, poetry, song and story. The concert also shows how those traditions have had a direct influence on the ways in which many Southerners, particularly those in the Appalachian region, continue to celebrate Christmas.

This year's featured performers include Cormac De Barra, premier Irish harper and "sean nos" singer, and fiddler Sinead Madden, who has recorded with Clannad, the Grammy Award-winning Irish band. Additional artists include the four-part close harmony of Nonesuch, The Gateway Performance Players, Celtic harper Kelly Stewart, the Buddy O'Reilly Band, the Emory Early Music Ensemble and Irish tenor James Flannery.

Many audience members return year after year because, as they often say, the concert is one of those rare experiences that bridges the gap between so-called high culture and popular entertainment. And, without at all being "churchy," the concert encompasses a wide variety of religious traditions and evokes the wondrously mystical nature of Celtic spirituality--a tradition that, in its poetic expressiveness and childlike acceptance of the blessedness of ordinary life, is as timeless as the holiday season itself.

For the first time this year, the Atlanta Celtic Christmas Concert will take place in Emory's new Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. The wonderful acoustics of its concert hall will provide a showcase for the magnificent prayer-poems and stories of the early Celtic Christian tradition. Noted for their layering of imagery drawn from druidic nature worship, Celtic mythology and the Gospels, these early Christian liturgical and secular works are among the most beautiful in the Western tradition. Scottish pipes, old time fiddlers, the shimmering strings of a Welsh harp, solo performers and ensembles of all sorts add to the holiday mix.

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