NPR Music & Concerts

Learn how to inject a Celtic core into your music library that reflects past and present, honors tradition and celebrates the spirit of innovation. It can be done! Host Fiona Ritchie has suggestions that will enhance any personal music collection.

This is the second time Hamilton Leithauser has graced the Tiny Desk. Two summers ago, he and his band The Walkmen played a powerful set of songs from their final album for now, Heaven.

Marisa Anderson knows where American guitar music has been and where it is now, and probably possesses an inkling of where it can go. She's studied the history and musical nuance of blues, country and folk music through and through, and ingests it all in a style that's as raw as it true. But mostly, Anderson just wants to kick up some dirt — which isn't easy here, given that the NPR Music offices are relatively clean. (Mind the towering stacks of CDs, though. They could topple over at any time.)

From its legendary beachfront locale to its celebrations of folk music's past, the Newport Folk Festival draws on more than half a century of celebrated traditions. But it's also an event in which folk's boundaries are tested: This is, after all, where Bob Dylan famously plugged in an electric guitar 49 years ago, in the process enraging the purists in the crowd.

The Newport Folk Festival has been around for more than half a century now — this is its 55th year, to be exact — and the event now routinely sells out months before its lineup is even announced. And why shouldn't it?

Rivers run through many of our well-loved and best-known landscapes. Their quiet banks and neglected docksides are now often the focus of rural rediscovery and urban regeneration. Music, old and new, celebrates our rivers as sources of life and of timeless inspirations to song-makers.

This program previously ran May 2014.

Marked in early May, Beltane is one of four quarter-day festivals in the old year. Join our celebration of the natural elements — Air, Earth, Water and Fire — in a Beltane-themed hour of music.

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Sample a variety of fiddle flavors from the wide world of Celtic music.

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Explore the branches of contemporary song sprouting from the roots of ancient vocal traditions.

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In the right hands, the driving rhythms of fiddle music and the ornamentations of Celtic pipes and harp all dance freely on piano keys. Join us for a trip to the heart of Celtic piano music, featuring artists like Antoni O'Breskey and Micháel Ó Súilleabháin.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.