Celtic Quilt

2 minutes 52 seconds

This delightful original arrangement is a warm and relaxing song of Celtic heritage is reminiscent of green valleys and times gone by, from the album Celtic Quilt.


In early Irish mythology, music was divided into an emotional triad of geantrai - The Music of Happiness, goltrai - The Music of Sadness and suantrai - The Music of Sleep and Meditation. Drawing on an archaic oral tradition, the Celtic music maker, like the seer and the poet, had an abundant repository with which to woo his admirers, eulogize his patrons and satirize his detractors. His music had the unique power to transcend earthly reality, to cross over the threshold of the Otherworld and to explore the domain of the subconscious. Master seers combined the art of the music maker with the ethereal gifts of the divine intervention and their instruments donned the mantle of sacred interlocutors.

Two millennia after the Celts first settled on the western fringe of Europe their music makers continue to inspire us. Weaving through an ornate fabric of meditative and joyous sounds, Daniel Kobialka's Celtic Quilt rekindles the emotional magic of the Celtic triad. Beautifully performed on traditional, classical and contemporary instruments, his poignant arrangements entice us to enter the sanctuary of Celtic conciousness, to experience it's emotional conciousness, to experience textures and to walk along the untrodden pathways of it's imagination.

Filled with a depth of human passion and spiritual repose, Kobialka's Quilt invokes the settings of Turtle Dove, Three Blackbirds, and The Lark in the Clear Air, the latter of which is based on an ancient Gaelic melody. The Celtic predilection for exile and discovery is portrayed vividly in Oh, Why Left I My Hame? and The Road to Durham, while Greensleeves brings us to the musical boundary between Celtic and Tudor society, the latter of which was spawned originally by Welsh antecedents. The resilience of Gaelic Scotland is summoned to the fore in the powerful cadence of Braveheart which is followed by the love ballad Annachi Gordon popularized by itinerant street singers throughout Britain and Ireland. In it's reprise and finale, Celtic Quilt ushers us back into the realm of romance and the fairylore of the Gaelic word. The Lass of Glenshee conjures up the continued presence of the Otherworld in Glenshee - the valley of magic - whence we came.

Daniel Kobialka's Celtic Quilt is indeed a rare journey through musical time and space; through the realms of an archaic Celtic world which refuses to let us forget its presence in the Emerald Pools of our imagination .

~Dr. Gearoid O Hallmhurain, Ph.D.
Irish Historian and Enthomusicologist San Fransisco, July 1996

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