ABSTRACT
Traditional Irish music sessions are a very distinctive form of social music making that have spread worldwide. Most major cities in Europe, North America and Australasia have at least one traditional session where Irish musicians gather to play together, almost always in pubs and bars, and, as such, they have become an important part of pub culture. Although Irish sessions can involve both music and musicians that are not Irish, the majority of the music played at such sessions is of Irish origin and competent musicians in the genre have a fairly clear idea of what ‘counts’ as being part of the ‘Irish session’ corpus, though this is of varying degrees of flexibility according to the venue.
