The  2012 Music Nova Scotia Music & Industry Award Winners were announced Sunday night in Liverpool and Celtic Colours alumni were among the 50 winners. Keith Mullins took home two awards - Educator of the Year and Children’s Recording of the Year for The Wood Buffalo Youth Song Project, a collaboration with songwriter Thom Swift. Dylan Guthro won New Artist Recording of the Year for All That’s True, Rose Cousins won Folk Recording of the Year for her album We Have Made A Spark, Carleton Stone won Rock Recording of the Year for his self-titled album and The Barra MacNeils won Classical Recording of the Year for The Barra MacNeils with Symphony Nova Scotia Live in Concert.

The 16th annual Nova Scotia Music Week comes to Cape Breton next November when Sydney plays host.

For the third year in a row Celtic Colours International Festival was named a finalist for the National Cultural Tourism Award. This will be only the third year that Cultural Tourism has been added to the TIAC awards and Celtic Colours was a finalist in 2010 and winner in 2011.

The Barra MacNeils’ new studio recording The Celtic Colours Sessions is the result of 10 days of musical collaboration between the band and an outstanding collection of guest artists. These tracks were recorded in consecutive days during the 2011 Celtic Colours Festival. The material ranges from new original songs to traditional tunes, re-workings of existing standards, including traditional Gaelic material, all buoyed by the collaborative process.

A roundup of media coverage of the 2012 festival

Back at Celtic Colours for their 50th anniversary tour, the Chieftains have never failed to wow and charm us all at the same time. Almost as well-known for their collaborations as for their own groundbreaking work, the Chieftains will once again welcome some very special guests to the stage for this closing concert. In fact, these guests are so special that any one of them would usually be headlining their own show. To have them all together will make for a truly stunning evening.

In 2010, songwriter Carmel Mikol brought forward the idea of pairing up young songwriters with young tune makers to see how our traditional music influences their contemporary work. The resulting concert was so much more than the sum of its parts that we couldn’t wait to do it again.

Otis is a luthier, composer and musician. Over several years he crafted many beautiful instruments from one maple tree…fiddles, mandolins, guitars, cellos, violas and harps. We brought the instruments back together for a fabulous concert. Otis has continued the project, published a book and written more tunes.

Celtic Colours is thrilled to announce we will once again stream one show in its entirety, live online, each day of the festival. From October 5th to 13th our streams will begin at 7:30pm ADT and will feature broadcast quality video produced by liveonlinecanada.ca’s experienced five person camera crew and production team.