Irish Tunes (in Staff and ABC Notation)
and Sessions in Eastern Massachusetts

This website was developed primarily for the transfer of tunes played at the BOSS (Boston's Original Slow Session) http://www.slowplayers.org/BOSS/index.html in simultaneous ABC and sheet music form.

There are several sessions in the Eastern Massachusetts area.
To name only a few:
Mondays:
The BOSS (Boston's Original Slow Session) http://www.slowplayers.org/BOSS/index.html which meets every Monday (Intermediate session 7-9, Regular session 9-11).

Tuesdays:
The Stone's Public House session begins around 7:30PM. Its address is: 179 Main Street, Ashland MA, 01721, (508) 881-1778, http://stonespublichouse.com/music.htm

Wednesdays:
The Groton Session http://www.thegrotonsession.com/index.html has a great intermediate speed session on Wednesdays (7-8:30) followed by their fireplace regular session. Their website is superb, current, and contains a full listings of all their workshop tunes.

Thursdays:
The Mulligen's Tavern in Westborough http://www.westboroughsession.com/ hosts Thursday sessions since 2005.
The session was expanded to include a "learners" session at 7 p.m. followed by the regular session at 8. Linda Wade has done a great job getting their website in similar spirits to that of The Groton Session.

Fridays:
The Irish Cultural Center Inc at 200 New Boston Dr, Canton, MA has a slow session lead by John Kearney on Friday evenings 7-9 PM. Bill Black follows John's lead with an advanced session from 9-11.
A regular session, started in the fall of 2009, at Finbarr's (521 Washington St, Canton, MA) is lead by Tim O'Connell from 7:30-10:00 on Fridays too.

Addtional Information:
Deb Carleton manages a Boston traditional Irish music forum that posts a multitude of information for the eastern Massachusetts area. http://www.tradirishforums.com/ This is a site to bookmark for updates to various sessions and happenings in the area.

Much of the music played at the BOSS is contained in the Foinn Seisiun Books 1, 2, (and now 3) which can be found at the following site: http://comhaltas.ie/shop/archive/C57/

The listings provided have not been copied from the Foinn Seisiun books. Rather, the list of tunes have been looked up on various websites http://www.thesession.org, http://ecf-guest.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/abc/tunefind, and others. I modified the downloaded ABC text files to include the note identifications below each note. In this mode, one can read the ABC form simulatneous with the sheet music form. This stragegy might encourage (and/or help) those ABC readers to learn the sheet music. Some of the ABC tunes were modified based upon the BOSS preferences of that specific tune.

Text files containing the ABC notations for the site are located at the end of the Contents list (for books) or at the end each set listing. These files can be used to create the sheet music from a variety of applications that read and convert ABC notation. However, many ABC converters don't support text below the notes. The ABC Plus project located at abcplus.sourceforge does support this and many more conversion options. It was the code (specifically the abcm2ps binaries) I used to create the PDF files.

Contact me via email (only me please, i.e. don't flood the BOSS or other group emails) for any errors, corrections, etc.

Copyright J.M. Sullivan, Jr., (2007-2009)
All Rights Reserved.
sullivan@wpi.edu