Ross Daly
Ross Daly (born 29 September 1952 in King's Lynn, Norfolk) is a world musician who specializes in music of the Cretan lyra. Although of Irish descent, he has been living on the island of Crete for over 35 years. Biography. Ross Daly has traveled the world, mainly in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, studying various forms of local music traditions. In 1982 he established an educational institution called Labyrinth Musical Workshop, in the village in Crete, twenty kilometers south of the capital city of Herakleion. More than 250 instruments that Daly collected during  his travels are on show. Since 2002 seminars and "master-classes" are conducted every year with teachers of traditional music from around the world. Students from all over the world come to study with teachers of modal music each year. Labyrinth Musical Workshop was founded in order to initiate, mainly young people, in a creative approach to traditional musical idioms from various parts of the world. In 1990 Daly designed a new type of Cretan lyra which incorporates elements of , the byzantine lyra and the Indian sarangi. The result was a lyra with three playing strings of 29 cm in  length (the same as the standard Cretan lyra), and 18 sympathetic strings which resonate on Indian-styled jawari bridges (the number of sympathetic strings was later increased to 22). Daly has released more than 35 albums of his own compositions and of his own arrangements of traditional melodies collected during his travels. In Summer 2004 he was the artistic director of the cultural program of the Olympic Games for the Olympic city of Heraklion on the island of Crete, titled "Crete, Music Crossroads". He organized and artistically supervised 15 concerts with the participation of 300 musicians from all over the  world, including: Jordi Savall, Eduardo Niebla, Huun Huur Tu, Habil Aliyev, Dhoad Gypsies of Rajasthan, Mohammad Rahim Khushnawaz, Chemirani Trio, Adel Selameh. Ross Daly is the originator of the term Contemporary Modal Music, which refers to contemporary compositional works which draw their influences and inspiration from the broader world of Modal musical traditions which are found primarily (although not exclusively) in the vast geographical region between Western Africa and Western China. Composers of Contemporary Modal Music initially study intensively various of these traditions and subsequently compose new works in which they freely integrate influences and elements from these idioms into  their work. The Musical Workshop Labyrinth, of which Ross Daly is the founder and artistic director, has been very active in promoting and supporting this type of composition as it crosses ethnic and other lines as well as stressing contemporary creative work in musical idioms which are usually considered to be “traditional” and therefore with their “creative center” in the past. Ross Daly himself disputes this notion, believing instead that the epithet “traditional” implies above all an element of timelessness in which the contributions of the past, present and future are equally important and relevant to the creative process. In  the European Elections of 2009 he was candidate with the Ecologists Greens. Concerts at festivals. Daly has performed in many venues and festivals: