We have a fresh year ahead of us! The days are getting longer, vaccines are out, and I am filled with hope for 2021.

While we wait patiently for in-person meetings to be safe for all of us, the Center for Irish Music remains firmly rooted in the Celtic Junction, with our branches reaching across the country through online course offerings, events, private lessons and the common tunes sessions.

I am excited to share with you that we are forging ahead with a long-term donor-funded project to support CIM's youngest musicians—our Celtic Cuties, aged 6 months to 4 years old—by developing Irish trad-specific resources for young families. Over the holidays, Brian Miller and I were hard at work recording songs (with frequent calls to instructor Alisa Mee). We look forward to sharing more with you about this ambitious project as it develops in the coming year.

Many of our current youth (and dancers in the community) were brought up taking CIM's song-based classes, back when the school had only 60-75 students. This initiative is a way of making our Irish song resources available to more people over time. CIM is very fortunate to have such a strong roster of singing instructors, and I believe it is one of the reasons why our students are so musical.

We have 3 weeks left in the Fall Term, and Dáithí Sproule (one of our amazing song instructors who happens to know a lot about many things) is offering a fascinating, and brief class that you might be interested in called Irish Poetry in Translation. Register for Dáithí's class here.

Finally, Spring Term registration is now open. Take a look at our course offerings below!

Happy New Year! Thank your health care workers, and take care of one another.

*CIM students: The "students" webpage is updated on a weekly basis. We request that current students bookmark this page and check in regularly to find out about upcoming dates, deadlines, events and student-related announcements. Thank you!