National Folk / Traditional music

I'm a big fan of Irish and Scottish fiddle music myself. One source that I've drawn from before as a composition resource:

http://thesession.org/index.php

And since my own ethnic background is Chinese, here's a web resource:

http://www.ibiblio.org/chinese-music/

The site carries a lot of recent music (especially pop music and Communist-era songs) but there's plenty of folk music there as well.

Wow! me likey chinese music!!! thanks for the link mr.violist. :glare:

I also love irish music. It may sound odd coming from a guy from serbia, but a lot of people here adore irish music, and there are loads of bands here who perform it.

Here is a link i found for very old serbian music:

http://www.kosovo.com/news/archive/2005/August_11/4.htmll

I was coming home from a rehearsal in Orange County tonight and I switched over from news to the local classical public radio station. I heard what at first sounded like a baroque violin - peculiar tone, no vibrato at all - but then realised that I was hearing sympathetic strings and uncommon overtones. I knew it must be a hardanger fiddle. As I listened further, an orchestra joined it - I'd apparently been listening to a cadenza - and I could scarcely believe my ears. A concerto for hardanger fiddle? It couldn't be...

But it was!

I was listening to the Concerto #2 for Hardanger Fiddle and Orchestra by the prolific (and apparently rather gifted) Norweigian composer Geirr Tveitt (1908-1981).

Has anyone heard it? If you haven't, I recommend it. There is a new recording commercially available, which was what I was listening to.

national music... well, if you have listened to chopin's polonaises and mazurkas (which im certain you have) you have heard national music (or something like that, please correct me)

for folk tunes: why not liszt's gypsy tunes or hungarian rhapsodies?

strange... i seem to be harping quite a lot about liszt and chopin lately... :P

well they both had patriotic feelings of course...

OH! and J.lee - i heard geirr Tveitts hardanger fiddle concerto! WOW! fillde rocks, makes suha a mogical sound it should be used in an ocrhestra! too bad no one around here has one...