DINGLE TOWN, Ireland -- It's nearly 10 in the evening and darkness is finally drifting down onto Ireland's Dingle Peninsula, with its breathtaking vistas and bone-aching dampness.
John Benny Moriarty's Pub is filling up with customers seeking warmth, but my friend Patti and I already possess a grand spot, on cushioned stools between the fireplace and the window overlooking the harbor. Our supper dishes, with the leavings of succulent plaice, bright and creamy slaw, and thick, golden chips, have just been whisked away.
Then, in a corner across the room, three men, including the young one who served our drinks, scrape their wooden chairs into a circle and take up their instruments. A glowing note of fiddle leaps up like a flame, swells, and whirls us into the heart of our Irish vacation.
That night at John Benny's -- and five other evenings of warbling, thrumming, keening, slurring, throbbing, emotion-drenched music -- constituted our primary reason for this trip to Ireland, though a mob of other pleasures crowded into the one short week as well.
We wandered Dublin's broad sidewalks to scour its shops, study its characters, and taste the nation's bitter history. We walked and drove winding paths in the Wicklow Mountains, watched wind flutter the crystal lakes of Glendalough, and lighted a candle in the Church of Saints Mary and Patrick in Avoca. Then we drove across the island to the west coast, where seascapes of rearing cliffs edged with emerald pastureland unfolded, each more fantastic than the last.
The idea had been to chase Ireland's folk music to its best-known nesting places: Dublin, yes, but mostly locales in the west such as Donegal, Mayo, Doolin, Galway, and Sligo. Yet we found the island's nonmusical charms too irresistible, and our itinerary collapsed. We ran out of nights, and headed home without having reached any of those west coast sanctuaries.
Instead of a music survey, we managed a good Irish tour. Staying in Dublin, Dingle, and Ennis, we found music at a different venue every night, and at week's end, our heads also rang with the sounds collected in daytime explorations: dank echoes of the ghosts of Dublin's Kilmainham Gaol, two rushing rivers at the Meeting of the Waters, a rain-drenched wind moaning at Inch Strand in Dingle, and the lilting speech of the Irish we met in shops and tearooms and narrow lanes.
Interspersed, like a repeating chorus, was traditional Irish music, live.
''Trad," some signs in Dublin pubs call it, bespeaking a complicated regard ranging from reverence for the music's formidable heritage to contempt for its stereotype. Some trendy pubs in Dublin tout their live blues, rock, samba, or even American country music to the exclusion of all trad, and count themselves the hipper for it. Other venues milk the tourist interest in trad without much real support for the music's integrity, and naive visitors may wind up hoisting an overpriced Guinness to a recording -- the Dublin equivalent of elevator tunes.
Still, anyone who thinks live traditional music is something put on just for tourists should consider who's making it (the Irish), how well they play it (brilliantly), and whether they seem to like the job (a fine time they're having, indeed).
Fiddle, flute, guitar, voice, and whistle, the mainstays of traditional Irish music as it is performed across the island today, appear in a rainbow of combinations and styles. A range of other instruments, such as mandolin, bodhran, concertina, accordion, harp, and uilleann pipes (a quieter bagpipe inflated with the elbow), also can turn up. Dance tunes and marches alternate with slow airs; instruments may be amplified, or not; and the audience may or may not be invited to join in a song or two.
From Dublin to Dingle, every village seems to boast a pub, and many of those pubs feature traditional Irish music, either a regular gig for a band with a following, or a ''seisun," an open-door jam in which traditional musicians just show up and play together.
Knowledgeable fans and visiting musicians, too, know that a tune played Sligo style sounds vastly different from the same tune played Kinvara style. That practiced ear takes years to acquire, though, and with great variations, too, between ensemble and types of tune (the beat of a reel, for example, distinct from that of a hornpipe), we couldn't have begun to make regional distinctions. Dublin, as the capital, is the musical melting pot, drawing musicians from across the island.
Dublin also offers visitors a perfect setup for researching trad: the Musical Pub Crawl, a 2 1/2-hour, four-pub walking exploration of tunes, comedy, imbibing, and Irish history. Inside just a few square blocks in the downtown Temple Bar area, two professional musicians guide groups of two dozen or so through a couple of centuries of musical progression, telling stories, performing and explaining lyrics, and playing jigs to ballads. We loved every minute of our crawl. It is entertainment and frame-of-reference combined, and if at evening's end you are not primed to hunt down a lifetime's worth of music on the island, you probably did more drinking than listening.
It's hard to overstate the musical joys of Dublin. Among our wanderings we sampled an explosive gig that seemed to be blowing the roof off a pub named after its location, the Temple Bar. Four amped-up musicians played fiddle, flute, guitar, and button accordion fast and loud, seamlessly shifting from one traditional tune to the next. The guitar drove the beat, the flute traced the peaks, and the fiddle and accordion wove the winding highway of sound from Ireland's past deep into its present day.
We shared the thrill with more than a hundred other pub patrons, packed in on every chair and stool, with many standees. Even though it seemed that every inch of the place was occupied, when the tempo melted down to a slow air, one brash young pair found enough floor space to sway and turn together for the song. (That was, incidentally, the only dancing we witnessed all week, but plenty of set dancing and step dancing are there for the finding, at house dances and ceilidh festivals around the island.)
Beyond Temple Bar, there was an intimate night at The Brazen Head, Dublin's oldest pub (established 1198), with two sweet fiddles, a guitar, a pennywhistle, and a blend of three voices that went down as smoothly as a shot of Jameson's. With no need for amplifiers in the cozy, low-ceilinged, cottage-style pub, we sat in straight-backed chairs at square wooden tables just a few feet from the band, gleaning the nuances of irony and regret that shape a traditional ballad, and bouncing back to the joyous jigs that send age-old sorrows away.
In the west, the variations in setting and tone continued, almost always felicitously. Disappointments were few: At one pub in Ennis, a fiddler and concertina player struggled, unamplified and in vain, to distract a rowdy roomful of drinkers. At another in Dingle, a blustery band led a New Zealand tour group in an eternal rendition of the chestnut ''No, Nay, Never." In those cases, we quietly exited and found a better choice within a block or two.
Finding Ireland's own music was never a problem. Coast to coast, our inquiries brought forth tips, from bed-and-breakfast owners, tourist info clerks, and even restaurant customers sitting at the next table. The musicians themselves, when approached on a break, sometimes steered us to their own favorites.
In the end, the quest for traditional music was a road, not a rule, for our time in Ireland. It kept us free by day to soak in the history, beauty, and essence of the place, and it wrapped our nights in the songs and stories built by that culture.
With dozens of towns and festivals on our list unheard from, I'm committed to returning -- especially if I'm ever to learn how to tell a Sligo reel from a Galway strathspey.
Contact Adele Foy at foy@globe.com. 
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