Flutility is a traditional Irish flute music project recorded and released in 1994. Intended to help expand repertoire, it has proved to be popular has been circulated freely amongst traditional musicians in Scotland, UK, Ireland and USA.

Please note: this project was originally made available on The Flow website and has been repackaged for this release.

All of the tunes were learned from a mixture of sessions, books and recordings unless otherwise stated. These are as I played them at the time and I may play them differently now. Some have been adapted to fit on the flute. See Andrew Kuntz’s Fiddler’s Companion and The Session for discussion and written music for these and other tunes.

The project consists of tunes mostly played at least twice: once slowly and once at regular session speed. The versions that were recorded represent how I played the tunes at the time. Your local session may play them differently and indeed so might I today. Lots of different versions of tunes exist happily together in traditional music. Tune titles are as I learned them. It may be that they are also known by other titles.

Flutility has very humble origins. I was approached by uilleann piper Duncan MacInnes to put some tunes I play onto a cassette for him to learn. He gave me a C90 and over a number of weeks I recorded tunes and sets that I like to play or ones he heard me play in sessions that he specifically requested.

Tunes which might have copyright issues have been omitted for obvious reasons. I have chosen to include some tunes that have been credited to composers on the general understanding that the composers are happy for these to be circulated. If you think that there may be a copyright problem about any of these tunes, please let me know and I will fix it.

For the technically-minded, this is a fairly rough and ready recording made in my kitchen. I used a Panasonic double cassette machine, a tie clip microphone and did just a rough tuning check before playing. I have to thank Lesl Harker for converting the tapes to digital format and putting them on CD for me. There has been no other editing or production work.