Labor Day Fun

I have been studying poolside for the past few days...so despite a little water on my blue book and a little sunburn, everything is going well. I have been really frustrated with my lack of progress in getting anywhere with Book 2 and 3, as I have been trying to memorize whole ceilis and at the end of a good study session, can barely remember a thing! So, yesterday, I decided to just start by memorizing the names of the sections in each dance, and that is going really well. I am going to keep up this method for the rest of the week, and it is my goal to have all of the sections of all of the ceilis memorized by Sunday, the 9th of September. Fingers Crossed! In the meantime, I thought that I'd mention a great find that I came across in my Grandmother's house- a feis syllabus from 1936!!!! Aside from entering Gaelic speech and singing competitions, you could enter dance competitions- choosing to do reel, jig or hornpipe, and the set dance competition- where you could choose from The Blackbird and Job of Journeywork! It is really neat to think that we are still working on dances done so long ago...

ALSO- Thank you to the great peeps on the TCRG Forum who let me know that the new set dances WILL be included in the music exam- Apparantly, they a used a bunch on the last exam, so we should definitely be studying them too!!! I'll post the list of all of these sets ( and their bar counts) this week.