In the course of the 20th century, the art of composing music based upon folk materials went through the extreme judgements. One might notice that the major front line between the West and East dissected the musical composition into the art of an isolated individual, on the one side, and the art of collective origin, on the other. The struggle of formalists and social determinists is one of the most radical examples of the same opposition. Today, in the West, the legacy of the mid-century avant-garde slowly fading away; it is being replaced with the multiplicity of trends united under the umbrella of “experimental music.” This new music is different from the Darmstradt elitism in many ways; it is open to the means of expression. There are simply no taboo (with the exception, perhaps, of the ban on classical logocentric model). Music of Donnacha Dennehy is hard to classify within the older matrix of styles and periods. The composition Cead Slan is an homage to good old American minimalism, with one important addition: there is a sound track that is taken from the 1920’s recording of Irish folk music. The recording is not digitalized; neither it is processed; it retains the rough quality of recording techniques of that time. The voice sounds as if it comes directly from the past. The string quartet reacts as a collective collocutor, over the time and space that separate the 1920s rural Irish music from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins and its modern musicians. Instrumental participant interacts with the vocal. This is, perhaps, a new concept of interaction of folk music with the academic musicians. It is something that makes us, musicians, trained in Eastern-European tradition, to rethink (perhaps, again) our attitude to our own tradition of composition in the context of folk music.