In the course of an extremely engrossing concert at An Creagan centre, a capacity crowd which had braved the foggy winter night, heard Arty and violinist Nollaig Casey play a program which went far beyond the limits of most traditional fare.

Nollaig is not in any sense the junior partner in this duo. I resisted saying second fiddle. She is steeped in Irish music and also has the advantage of being classically trained, which is clearly audible in the impressive technique and tone she brings to her music. Several pieces such as the piper's slow air 'Moran's Return' were unearthed by her from manuscripts dating from 1844 and in the absence of her research, might otherwise have remained unheard. In an even older piece The Clergy's Lamentation she demonstrated how to accentuate the beauty of the melody by using only the very lightest vibrato, where less sensitive performers would show considerably less restraint or taste. One of her own compositions 'Lios na Banriona', with its carefully controlled pace and ornamentation, seems to hark back to an era when Irish music was not so far removed from its Italian and French counterparts.

Never one to move willingly into the spotlight, Arty shadowed the violin throughout the performance, playing melodies in unison, adding elegant harpsichord-like harmony or driving the music forward with a dropped D tuning rhythm. When he imposes complex cross-rhythms over a fast moving reel, the music is transformed and one begins to see how he can understand and emulate the complicated metre and rhythmic patterns of the Bulgarian and Galician music which were high points of the set.

It is this sense on rhythm and harmony that has been his essential contribution to the development of traditional music since the late 1970's. Apart from some well intentioned attempts at adapting American and English modal tunings to the solo performance of a few jigs and reels, up to then no other guitarist could be said to have made any real musical impression on the monolithic and extremely conservative traditional music world. Arty's good humoured account of how he was eventually invited into the inner sanctum need not obscure the fact the he basically invented a role for the guitar and continues to dominate his field. He also proved a useful translator, explaining to a mystified Nollaig that the title of the Cork slow air 'Cape Clear meant No Parking in rural Tyrone.