In collaboration with the current custodian of the manuscripts, Hugh Maguire, ITMA have digitised all ten books and they are now available on the ITMA website.

Stephen Grier Manuscripts

These manuscripts have been digitised to a high resolution and presented in a IIIF viewer, allowing you to view each page in incredible detail.

The tunes have been indexed to allow you to navigate to the tune of your choice

Each of the 1,153 tunes has been transcribed using music notation software and made available on the ITMA website as an interactive score.  These scores are a learning resource that allow you to hear the music, loop through a section and slow down or speed up the music without changing the key.

With each score there is also an option to download the music as a PDF.  It is also possible to download each book in PDF format.

For many years this collection has served as a valuable source of tunes for musicians in the area.  It features many tunes that are local to the area and also an eclectic mix of Irish traditional music and music that was heard in Ireland at the time from other parts.  The recently launched Furls of Music: The Michael McNamara Sound Collection features tunes from the Grier collection.

For more information you can read Jackie Small’s description of the manuscript.  This was delivered at the initial launch of nine of the Stephen Grier Manuscripts at the Willie Clancy Summer School 2019.   

Written & presented by:

Treasa Harkin & Maeve Gebruers

With thanks to:

Hugh Maguire, Séamus McGuire, Fr. John Quinn, Conor Ward, and Jackie Small for their support in bringing this project to fruition. 

Tunes from PW Joyce In Music of Ireland / collected, edited, and harmonized for the pianoforte by the late George Petrie

Tune from Eugene Curry in Music of Ireland / collected, edited, and harmonized for the pianoforte by the late George Petrie>

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.

John Nicholson of Belfast, last of the substantial ballad-sheet printers of the city, flourished from the late 1880s to the late 1910s. During these decades, he occupied the Cheapside Song House, premises at 24 or 26 Church Lane in the city, from which he also sold songbooks, some of them of his own printing.

Nicholson’s product was sold across Ulster, and especially in counties Down and Antrim. His core market was loyalist and orange but, as will be seen from the sheets reproduced below, he also to a degree catered for nationalist and green sentiment and published songs of general interest.

The Irish Traditional Music Archive has recently been able to purchase an unusual sheet of four uncut nationalist-sentiment Nicholson ballads, and this is presented here as the second of two uncut Nicholson ballad sheets in the ITMA collections. The first, also a purchase, is a sixteen-ballad sheet of loyalist sentiment. The songs on both uncut and undated sheets are also copied as individual items. The final four Nicholson ballad sheets here were donated to ITMA by the late Leslie Shepard. All items are also presented in PDF format for ease of enlargement and printing.

With thanks to Leslie Shepard, Jill Shepard Glenstrup, & Dr John Moulden, who has donated to ITMA a copy of his 2006 Ph.D. thesis The Printed Ballad in Ireland: A Guide to the Popular Printing of Songs in Ireland, 1760–1920.

Nicholas Carolan & Maeve Gebruers, 1 August 2013

George Petrie (c. 1790–1866), a Dublin professional artist, was a leading figure in the cultural and intellectual life of 19th-century Ireland. The benefits of his work in the areas of Irish art, archaeology, history, topography, architecture, the establishment of cultural institutions – and traditional music – are felt to this day.

From his youth Petrie had the habit of noting down traditional melodies in manuscript on his sketching tours around Ireland and in Dublin, and he contributed to the publications of the older collector Edward Bunting. After the devastation caused to traditional culture by the Great Famine, Petrie was prominent in the 1851 establishment in Dublin of the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland (see below). His own collection was the first mooted publication, and with the assistance of colleagues he undertook to edit selected melodies with a commentary. The first volume was published in 1855, and is reproduced here in facsimile from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

Although this first volume was published in 1855, it has recently been brought to our notice by Dr Jimmy O’Brien Moran that the first sections of it were being published in forty-page numbers from 1853, presumably to satisfy the demands of subscribers. A page of one of these numbers is reproduced here.

After 1855 Petrie continued work on a second volume drawn from his collection, but this was only partially completed at the time of his death and it ends abruptly in the middle of a note on a song. This incomplete volume was published almost twenty years later, in 1882, without a title page, and this item also is reproduced in facsimile below from the ITMA collections.

Both volumes have been republished in one-volume print editions: in 1967 and 1969 in facsimile by Gregg International, Farnborough, Hants, UK; and in 2002 in a re-set edition (David Cooper ed., with Lillis Ó Laoire) by Cork University Press. These editions are also in the ITMA collections.

The Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland 1851

Many of those prominently involved in the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland, the first formal Irish traditional music society, lived on Merrion Square or in its vicinity. The Society was established under the presidency of George Petrie in December 1851, in the aftermath of the Great Famine, to preserve, study and publish ‘the immense quantity of National Music still existing in Ireland’. It was directed by a twenty-three-man Council. As well as David Richard Pigot and John Edward Pigot, Thomas Beatty MD and William Stokes MD lived on the square, at nos 18 and 5 respectively. In the vicinity of the Square lived the Treasurer of the Society Robert Callwell (Herbert Place), its other Joint Hon. Secretary Robert D. Lyons MD (Merrion Square), Rev. Charles Graves DD (Fitzwilliam Square), Benjamin Lee Guinness (Dawson Street), Thomas Rice Henn (Upper Mount Street), Henry Hudson and Samuel Maclean (St Stephen’s Green), Joseph Huban Smith (Holles Street), Rev. Jas H. Todd (Trinity College), and William Wilde (later Sir William, father of Oscar; Westland Row). Most of those associated with the Society were members of the Royal Irish Academy, which was then situated in Grafton Street.

One of the aims of the Society, never realised, was ‘the formation of a central depot in Dublin, to which persons… may be invited to send copies of any airs which they can obtain, either in Ireland or among our countrymen on other lands’. ITMA might be said to be a realisation of that aim. Its collections contain the published works of the Society and later editions of them.

―From No 73 Merrion Square, Dublin 2: The Premises of the Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin: Irish Traditional Music Archive, 2008

With thanks to the Breathnach Family who donated the volumes reproduced to ITMA in 1987 as part of Cnuasach an Bhreathnaigh, the Breandán Breathnach Collection, and to Dr Jimmy O’Brien Moran. ITMA would welcome the donation of other materials of this kind which are not yet in its collections (check our catalogues here), or of their loan for copying.

Nicholas Carolan & Maeve Gebruers, 1 February 2011

Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, published in Boston in 1883, was – and is – an important collection of traditional music, though comparatively little known among Irish traditional players today.

Most of its content was long available in the United States as 1000 Fiddle Tunes, commonly known as simply ‘Cole’s’, named after its publisher. Recently, an annotated edition of Ryan’s original edition, edited by Patrick Sky, was published by Mel Bay publications.

Ryan’s collection contains more than a thousand tunes. It was a forerunner and model for the now much better known collections of Francis O’Neill. Ryan’s book features music in a wider variety of keys and degrees of difficulty than are prevalent in the Irish tradition today. The book is known to have been a source of repertory for many prominent Irish players, including such notable players of complicated hornpipes as the fiddle players James Morrison and Seán Maguire. However, there are many extremely simple tunes in the collection as well, and this makes it a fruitful source of tunes for players of every level of competence.

In the Irish Traditional Music Archive versions presented here, obvious mistakes and doubtful readings in the original are corrected in order to give an optimal interactive experience to you, the user.  It is broken into five sections, each containing c. 200 tunes.

Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, published in Boston in 1883, was – and is – an important collection of traditional music, though comparatively little known among Irish traditional players today.

Most of its content was long available in the United States as 1000 Fiddle Tunes, commonly known as simply ‘Cole’s’, named after its publisher. Recently, an annotated edition of Ryan’s original edition, edited by Patrick Sky, was published by Mel Bay publications.

Ryan’s collection contains more than a thousand tunes. It was a forerunner and model for the now much better known collections of Francis O’Neill. Ryan’s book features music in a wider variety of keys and degrees of difficulty than are prevalent in the Irish tradition today. The book is known to have been a source of repertory for many prominent Irish players, including such notable players of complicated hornpipes as the fiddle players James Morrison and Seán Maguire. However, there are many extremely simple tunes in the collection as well, and this makes it a fruitful source of tunes for players of every level of competence.

In the Irish Traditional Music Archive versions presented here, obvious mistakes and doubtful readings in the original are corrected in order to give an optimal interactive experience to you, the user.  It is broken into five sections, each featuring c. 200 tunes.

Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, published in Boston in 1883, was – and is – an important collection of traditional music, though comparatively little known among Irish traditional players today.

Most of its content was long available in the United States as 1000 Fiddle Tunes, commonly known as simply ‘Cole’s’, named after its publisher. Recently, an annotated edition of Ryan’s original edition, edited by Patrick Sky, was published by Mel Bay publications.

Ryan’s collection contains more than a thousand tunes. It was a forerunner and model for the now much better known collections of Francis O’Neill. Ryan’s book features music in a wider variety of keys and degrees of difficulty than are prevalent in the Irish tradition today. The book is known to have been a source of repertory for many prominent Irish players, including such notable players of complicated hornpipes as the fiddle players James Morrison and Seán Maguire. However, there are many extremely simple tunes in the collection as well, and this makes it a fruitful source of tunes for players of every level of competence.

In the Irish Traditional Music Archive versions presented here, obvious mistakes and doubtful readings in the original are corrected in order to give an optimal interactive experience to you, the user.  It is broken into five sections, each featuring c. 200 tunes.

Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, published in Boston in 1883, was – and is – an important collection of traditional music, though comparatively little known among Irish traditional players today.

Most of its content was long available in the United States as 1000 Fiddle Tunes, commonly known as simply ‘Cole’s’, named after its publisher. Recently, an annotated edition of Ryan’s original edition, edited by Patrick Sky, was published by Mel Bay publications.

Ryan’s collection contains more than a thousand tunes. It was a forerunner and model for the now much better known collections of Francis O’Neill. Ryan’s book features music in a wider variety of keys and degrees of difficulty than are prevalent in the Irish tradition today. The book is known to have been a source of repertory for many prominent Irish players, including such notable players of complicated hornpipes as the fiddle players James Morrison and Seán Maguire. However, there are many extremely simple tunes in the collection as well, and this makes it a fruitful source of tunes for players of every level of competence.

In the Irish Traditional Music Archive versions presented here, obvious mistakes and doubtful readings in the original are corrected in order to give an optimal interactive experience to you, the user.  It is broken into five sections, each featuring c. 200 tunes.

Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, published in Boston in 1883, was – and is – an important collection of traditional music, though comparatively little known among Irish traditional players today.

Most of its content was long available in the United States as 1000 Fiddle Tunes, commonly known as simply ‘Cole’s’, named after its publisher. Recently, an annotated edition of Ryan’s original edition, edited by Patrick Sky, was published by Mel Bay publications.

Ryan’s collection contains more than a thousand tunes. It was a forerunner and model for the now much better known collections of Francis O’Neill. Ryan’s book features music in a wider variety of keys and degrees of difficulty than are prevalent in the Irish tradition today. The book is known to have been a source of repertory for many prominent Irish players, including such notable players of complicated hornpipes as the fiddle players James Morrison and Seán Maguire. However, there are many extremely simple tunes in the collection as well, and this makes it a fruitful source of tunes for players of every level of competence.

In the Irish Traditional Music Archive versions presented here, obvious mistakes and doubtful readings in the original are corrected in order to give an optimal interactive experience to you, the user.  It is broken into five sections, each featuring c. 200 tunes.

An extract of The flannel jacket from Petrie’s Ancient Music of Ireland (1882)

More of these tunes appear in an incomplete Petrie volume of 1882; in Francis Hoffmann’s Ancient Music of Ireland from the Petrie Collection Arranged for the Pianoforte; and in Charles V. Stanford’s The Complete Petrie Collection of Ancient Irish Music. PW Joyce also contributed the words and melodies of two songs to the 1897 Boosey volume Irish Folk-Songs, a collection of mostly original song-lyrics written by A.P. Graves and set to traditional melodies by Charles Wood.