Ancient Irish Music: Comprising One Hundred Airs Hitherto Unpublished, Many of the Old Popular Songs, and Several New Songs, ed. Patrick Weston Joyce (1st ed., Dublin, 1873)

Ancient Irish Music includes 100 song airs, song texts in Irish and English and dance tunes that Joyce absorbed during his childhood in Glenosheen in rural Co Limerick during the years before the Great Famine, and more that he later collected there and elsewhere. The tunes were harmonised for piano by the Dublin professional musician Professor J. W. Glover. Many of the items are accompanied by Joyce’s extensive annotations, as are most of the 20 pieces in Irish Music and Song, which is the first collection of Irish-language song texts in which words are underlaid to the music notation. Each item is accompanied by an English translation.

With thanks to Terry Moylan for the donation of Sibelius music files created by him from this collection, which have been converted to these interactive Scorch files by ITMA staff.

Nicholas Carolan, Treasa Harkin & Jackie Small, 26 September 2012

The Illustrated London News (ILN) was the world’s first illustrated weekly newspaper and was first published on Saturday, 14 May 1842. Published by Herbert Ingram, this Victorian publication reached a weekly circulation of over 300,000 copies, bringing news to life with detailed woodcut engravings depicting personalities and events of the day. Success brought other competitors to the market and in 1869, former ILN engraver William Luson Thomas launched The Graphic. These newspapers now provide the modern reader with a visual record of history including events relating to Ireland, and an insight into Victorian perceptions of the Irish.

We have digitised a selection of these illustrations taken from ITMA’s own newspaper collections.  These were published between 1844 and 1893 and depict or include Irish music, song, dance or musical instruments. Political parades featuring marching bands; banners & flags bearing a symbolic harp; St. Patrick’s Day celebrations; dancers and ballad singers as well as well-known musical figures such as Thomas Moore & George Petrie are among the selected images. Some are of a journalistic nature while others betray a more caricaturist approach to the depiction of the Irish during the 19th century.

The Illustrated London News ceased publication in 2003 and The Graphic in 1932.

Essentially, everyone who learns an Irish traditional tune is a collector of the music, and most interested people will have a memorised collection, even if they don’t sing or play an instrument. But what is normally meant by the term are those dedicated individuals who amass over time large numbers of songs and melodies and preserve them on a variety of paper media or on sound or video recordings. They may partly be motivated by personal or commercial considerations, but most collectors are altruistic, driven by a wish to preserve and share something that they themselves enjoy and value. Some may in time publish items from their collections.

The collectors featured in this gallery from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive range from those of the 18th and 19th centuries who of necessity collected with pen and paper and had the rare skill of being able to jot down melodies at first hearings, to those modern collectors with the no less valuable skill of operating audio and video technology to faithfully convey the reality of live performance. A debt is owed to all of them for enabling people now and in the future to experience the past of the music, and for providing materials for its ongoing re-creation.

Also here while it is still active is a link to a recent RTÉ ‘Nationwide’ programme (this programme is no longer available on the RTÉ Player) which featured the work of the collectors Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie on the occasion of their recordings being made available through the Clare County Library here. An ITMA feature on their Irish collections can be found below.

With thanks to Colette Moloney, Ríonach uí Ógáin, Peter Browne, & Lisa Shields.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 June 2015