FEATURING The McGee Band and David Wilson
in an evening of traditional style music and readings from the speeches,
letters and poetry of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.
A musically exciting and historically interesting show
that will lift your spirits.
THE MCGEE BAND
The McGee Band play a blend of Irish, Scottish, and Québécois music. The band’s latest CD In Honour of the Life and Times of Thomas D’Arcy McGee was recorded in a style reminiscent of music which evolved in 1860’s Ottawa. This CD of original music “in traditional style” was written, recorded and produced by James Stephens and Frank Cassidy in Ottawa with financial support from Canada Arts Council and The Embassy of Ireland.
“This is an exciting and brilliantly arranged CD, and I hope it gets the wide hearing and distribution it deserves; it’s a rare enough event to hear so excellently performed a recording of music in the traditional vein, but when it succeeds in weaving a creative melodious tapestry of the ‘folk’ and the ingeniously newly composed, it is an altogether unexpected delight.”
— Aidan O’Hara, RTE (Irish Radio and TV)
DAVID WILSON
David A. Wilson is a professor in the Celtic Studies Program and the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His latest book, Thomas D'Arcy McGee Volume 1: Passion, Reason, and Politics, 1825-1857.
is the first volume in a two-part biography, exploring the development of a brilliant writer, outstanding orator, and charismatic politician.
Thomas D'Arcy McGee is best known for his prominent role in Irish-Canadian politics, his inspirational speeches in support of Canadian Confederation, and his assassination by an Irish revolutionary who accused him of betraying his earlier Irish nationalist principles. From his early temperance speeches in Wexford, Ireland, David Wilson follows McGee across the Atlantic, where at nineteen he became the editor of America's leading Irish newspaper, and traces his subsequent involvement with the Young Ireland movement, his reactions to the Famine, and his role in the Rising of 1848.
Co-winner of the James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize for Books in History and the Social Sciences presented by the American Conference for Irish Studies, 2009.
"An outstanding work of scholarship and literature ... I doubt if a better study of McGee is possible."
– Liam Kennedy, Queen's University Belfast
“..a brilliant piece of scholarship: exhaustively researched, scrupulously fair, thoroughly documented.”
– Roger Hall, Globe & Mail
|
 |
