Heritage Week 2021 – Gráinne Yeats Collection

gallery of images presented below for Heritage Week 2021 comes from the collection of Gráinne Yeats which was donated to ITMA by the Yeats Family in April 2018. Gráinne Yeats (1925-2013) was a professional harper, singer, teacher, arranger, historian and recorded artist. She left an extremely rich collection of printed books, music manuscripts, photographs, slides, lecture scripts, diaries, music arrangements (mostly for the Irish harp), research notes, ephemera, artefacts, and commercial & non-commercial sound recordings.Yeats’ image collection consists of photographs, both in colour and back & white, negatives and a large number of slides, amounting to just over 1,200 items in total. Gráinne’s life-long passion for the Irish harp is very much reflected in this collection. The collection covers a wide range of topics relating to the Irish harp and will be an invaluable resource to all students and enthusiasts of this wonderful instrument.

During a concert tour of Japan in the autumn of 1972 Gráinne and her husband Michael Yeats travelled by train to Fukui city which is located on the Japan Sea coast in the Chubu (central) region of Japan. There they visited the Aoyama harp factory and collected a nylon strung lever harp which had been made especially for Yeats. The gallery includes is a record of their trip to Aoyama on the 9 October 1972. This harp was one of a number of harps that Yeats performed on. It can be heard on the iconic recording published by Gael Linn in 1980 and re-issued in 1992 Féile na gCruitirí Bhéal Feirste 1792: the music collected by Bunting at the historic Belfast Harpers Festival 1792.
The gallery also looks back at the many harp festivals, concerts and events which Gráinne Yeats attended over the years. Below are just a small sample of the many images in the Yeats collection which focus on this aspect of her life. In the course of her career Yeats performed, tutored and lectured extensively in Ireland, Europe and abroad, including a number of tours of North America, Japan, Russia, India and Australia. She was a frequent attendee at international harping events, most notably the World Harp Congress which takes place every three years at different locations around the world. Yeats and Máire Ní Chathasaigh were the first Irish harpers to perform on the Irish harp at the 1993 World Harp Congress in Copenhagen. Some of the other events featured in the images below include: An Churit Chruiterachta, July 1992; ‘Festival for Irish Harp’, Downpatrick, Co. Down, 1988; The World Harp Festival, Belfast, May 1992; O’Carolan Harp Festival, Nobber, Co. Meath, 1992; and the World Harp Congress, Copenhagen, 1993.

Heritage Council Funding 2021

ITMA’s unique image collection now stands at over 21,700 items. Many of these exist in obsolete physical formats only which limits access to this material to those who can visit the ITMA premises in Merrion Square, Dublin. This year (2021) the Heritage Council has awarded ITMA a grant to digitise, preserve and make accessible, to archival best practice, some 4,500+ slides, negatives and photographs from the collections of two highly significant figures in Irish traditional music: Breandán Breathnach (1912-1985) & Gráinne Yeats (1925-2013).