Tunes from PW Joyce in The complete collection of Irish music / as noted by George Petrie (1789-1866); edited from the original manuscripts by Charles Villiers Stanford.

Irish Music and Song: A Collection of Songs in the Irish Language, ed. Patrick Weston Joyce (Dublin: 1st ed. 1888; new edition 1901)

Joyce’s Irish Music and Song: A Collection of Songs in the Irish Language (Dublin: Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language; M.H. Gill and Son, vi+[ii]+44 pp.), published in 1888, was drawn largely from printed sources. It is the first collection in which Irish-language songs are set to music, the syllables under the notes, and it was well received by a growing national movement for the revival of the Irish language and its culture.

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

Captain Francis O’Neill (1848–1936), a traditional musician from Tralibane in west Co Cork, was also chief of police in Chicago from 1901 to 1905. He made and published there, in collaboration with various associates, large and highly influential collections of Irish traditional music, from 1903 to 1924. O’Neill was also a pioneer in the sound-recording of Irish traditional music and a number of his cylinders have recently come to light (see here).

In addition Francis O’Neill wrote and published in Chicago two ground-breaking studies of Irish traditional music: Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby in 1910 and Irish Minstrels and Musicians in 1913. In the course of his researches for these and other volumes, he painstakingly undertook the collection of existing visual images of Irish traditional musicians and music performance, and the creation of others.

O’Neill’s various books contain therefore the largest pictorial collection illustrating Irish music made until his day; many of the images would not exist if he had not commissioned them. The introductory illustrations from his O’Neill’s Music of Ireland (1903), different editions of his The Dance Music of Ireland (from 1907), O’Neill’s Irish Music. 250 Choice Selections (1908), and the larger collection of illustrations from his first volume Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby (excluding music notations) are reproduced here from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 December 2010

The Limerick-born music collector, historian, and educationalist PW Joyce (1827–1914), in spite of his very many publications, generally has only been represented by one undated photograph. Showing him in his prime, it is presumably one that he commissioned and approved for use. It was widely reproduced during his own life time.

Patrick Weston Joyce (CID158)

In 2013, a second undated Joyce photograph was donated to ITMA by his great-nephew Robert Dwyer Joyce of Dublin; it shows PW Joyce with his wife Caroline at a family meal.

Patrick Weston & Caroline Joyce at lunch (CID18219; Image courtesy of Robert Dwyer Joyce)

Another six photographs of PW Joyce, mostly taken at festive family gatherings in his home at Lyre-na-Grena, Leinster Road, Rathmines, have now been donated to ITMA by actor and singer Éamonn Hunt. They are all dated and are reproduced here in chronological order, ranging from 1896 to 1911. They show a solid prosperous Dublin middle-class family at the end of the Victorian era. At least one was taken by Joyce’s son, Weston St John Joyce, an author and keen photographer. Another proves to be the source for the photograph of Joyce and his wife received earlier from Robert Dwyer Joyce. The final photograph shows an elderly Joyce by himself in 1911, seemingly at 18 Leinster Road West. Joyce moved to the new address, where he was cared for by servants, after the death of his wife and the dispersal of his family.

Éamonn Hunt stumbled upon the photographs about 17 years ago. Although he did not recognise the subjects, he knew that the photographs were of historical interest and preserved them. After ITMA mounted its PW Joyce Microsite, Éamonn identified Joyce from his official photograph, contacted ITMA, and kindly donated his photographs for public use. The many other photographs discovered in the cache have been returned to the Joyce family.

With thanks to Éamonn Hunt

Nicholas Carolan, Treasa Harkin, Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw, 31 May 2018

Since the 19th century, Irish postcards have carried representations of Irish social life and symbols of national identity, and this process increased with the rise of national feeling in the early 20th century. Symbols of identity have frequently been musical. The national instrument of the harp, in various forms, has been particularly prominent. Also to the fore have been the uilleann pipes (the Irish form of bellows-blown bagpipes) and traditional dance.

The Irish Traditional Music Archive accordingly collects Irish musical postcards (which are normally undated) of all periods as representing aspects of Irish traditional music. It presents here a selection of these cards.

With thanks to postcard donors the Breathnach Family and Matt Murtagh. ITMA always welcomes such donations or the opportunity to copy such materials.

Nicholas Carolan, 1 October 2008

Although the Irish harp has been depicted in various forms and media since the Middle Ages, the greatest advance in the iconography of the instrument was made in 1904 with the publication in Edinburgh of Robert Bruce Armstrong’s Musical Instruments. Part 1: The Irish and the Highland Harps. This was the first of two volumes he wrote on historic harps and other instruments – Irish, Scottish and English – the second being English and Irish Instruments (Edinburgh 1908).

The 1904 volume is notable for Armstrong’s own meticulous drawings (marked RBA) and for contemporary photographs (some by Armstrong) of the most important Irish and Scottish harps then known to him, as well as for his measured scholarly consideration of the history and nature of the two related harp traditions. A selection of his Irish images is reproduced here.

Robert Bruce Armstrong (died c. 1914) was a historian and archaeologist, artist and musician, who was born in Dublin of Ulster and Scottish parentage. Living in Edinburgh, he was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and a life-member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. He bequeathed unsold copies of his musical works to the Royal Irish Academy for its benefit.

The 1904 volume was published in a limited edition of 180 copies, which are now rare. It was republished in facsimile in 1969, with an introduction by Seóirse Bodley, in Shannon etc. by the Irish University Press and in New York by Praeger Publications. The full text of the volume is available online in the Internet Archive at www.archive.org.

With thanks to Keith Sanger.

Nicholas Carolan, 1 August 2009

Since 2006 the Irish Traditional Music Archive has been in a productive partnership with The Journal of Music in Ireland (JMI) in publishing in each issue of the journal a black-and-white archival image from its collections on some aspect of Irish traditional music (as well as extensive listings of recent publications). Each image has accompanying text by Nicholas Carolan.

In 2007 the JMI became an online journal as well as continuing to publish in hardcopy, and the Archive’s images are now available on the JMI site. In 2008 the JMI became the Journal of Music with which the project continues.

With thanks to editor Toner Quinn and JM staff. With thanks also for the donation of photographs to ITMA and for other facilitation to the Breathnach Family, Luke Cheevers, Ken Garland, the Irish Examiner, Antain Mac Lochlainn, Liam McNulty, Pat McNulty, the National Library of Ireland, O’Donoghue’s public house, Merrion Row, Dublin, the Gerard O’Grady Family, J.B. Vallely, & the directors of the Willie Clancy Summer School. ITMA always welcomes such donations or the opportunity to copy such materials.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 August 2008

It would seem that when bellows bagpipes were first brought to Ireland in the late 1600s they were introduced at a fairly high social level. Certainly they were often played in their early centuries here by prosperous amateurs, ‘gentlemen pipers’. Professional Irish uilleann pipers were employed by the gentry and were well rewarded by other wealthy patrons, in England even by the monarchs George III and George IV.

But as the instrument grew in popularity, cheap sets were played by low-status and often disabled musicians, performing for poor audiences on the street, and in cottages and taverns, and at fairs. In the 19th century, with changes in musical fashion, the uilleann pipes became generally associated with these indigent street pipers, especially after the Great Famine of the mid-century. Poverty became the hallmark of pipers, and the collective term ‘a poverty of pipers’ was used to describe them.

The images reproduced below are of uilleann pipers from this period of decline in the late 19th and early 20th century. With the growth of the Gaelic League and the establishment of pipers’ clubs in Cork and Dublin in the years around 1900, the decline of uilleann piping and pipers was temporarily arrested. The final image below, a photograph of pipers taken at the Dublin Feis Ceoil of 1901, as well as including amateur pipers of farming stock and piping-club enthusiasts, includes the blind professional Galway city piper Martin Reilly who was forced to have recourse to the poorhouse there at periods in his life.

With thanks to donors of photographs: Breathnach family, Nóirín Leech (Pavee Point), Ted Hickey, & Liam McNulty.

Nicholas Carolan & Ian Lynch, 1 October 2012

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

The colour images featured in this gallery are taken from a series of six booklets entitled Songs from the Four Winds of Eirinn, published by M.H. Gill & Son and James Duffy & Co. in Dublin in 1906 and in the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive. The booklets were first published in 1902. Each contained an original song by Ethna Carbery (1866–1902) with music set by Charlotte Milligan Fox (1864–1916) and a colour picture on the theme of the song by Seaghán Mac Cathmhaoil (1883–1962). They were issued with card covers tied with silk ribbons. Ethna Carbery was the pen name of Anna MacManus née Johnston, who was married to folklorist and poet Seamus MacManus. She died aged 35 while living in Revlin House in Donegal town and Songs from the Four Winds of Eirinn was published posthumously.

Seaghán Mac Cathmhaoil (John Patrick Campbell) was born in Belfast in 1883 and attended the School of Art in Belfast until c.1905. As a student he was awarded prizes for his Celtic-style designs, and his piece ‘Calendar of the Dead’, owned at the time by Francis Joseph Bigger, was exhibited at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Seaghán visited Donegal in 1903 in the company of Bigger, composer and collector Herbert Hughes, Frederic Hughes and Seaghán’s brother Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil (Joseph Campbell). The result of this trip was Songs of Uladh published in 1904. Featuring tunes and airs collected and notated by Hughes, and lyrics by Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil, the book was illustrated by Seaghán in black and white.

Seaghán Mac Cathmhaoil illustrated many Gaelic revival publications in the first decade of the 20th century, including feis programmes and two Irish-language books by Patrick Pearse. His other interests lay in costume and set design, and acting. Following a successful London production of The Drone by Rutherford Mayne, the cast and crew of the Ulster Literary Theatre were invited to New York in 1912. Seaghán Mac Cathmhaoil remained in the United States following this trip. He died in 1962.

The complete publications published in 1906 can be accessed below as part of a collection featuring the work of Charlotte Milligan Fox. Charlotte and Ethna were close friends and activists in the Gaelic Revival. ITMA also holds the first edition, published in 1902, in its Printed Collections.

Grace Toland, Treasa Harkin & Piaras Hoban, 1 April 2016

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.

Among the very first field recordings made of Irish traditional song were 13 ‘wax’ cylinder recordings created in 1905 in the Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking areas of An Rinn (Ring promontory) and Cill Ghobnait (KIlgobnet parish), Co Waterford, by Rev. Dr Richard Henebry (Risteárd de Hindeberg, 1863–1916), a Roman Catholic priest and an academic in Celtic studies. The cylinders preserved 14 songs sung in Irish (2 on one cylinder). Although the original recordings were destroyed, several copies of them survive. These are now relatively difficult to listen to because of their age and condition, but they have a great importance in enabling us to actually hear Irish-language traditional singers of more than a century ago. The 14 performances are presented here, along with a copy of a recording made by Henebry about the same time of hornpipes played by an uilleann piper, and with ancillary information and links provided below.

Richard Henebry was a traditional musician, a fiddle player and uilleann piper, born in 1863 to an Irish-speaking and musical farming family near Portlaw, Co Waterford. Ordained as a priest in Dublin in 1892, he served for some years in England before going to Germany to study for a doctorate in Irish dialect. He came into contact with cylinder recording technology while lecturing in the United States from 1898. On his return to Ireland in 1903 he published some of his music theories in a pamphlet Irish Music

In An Rinn and Cill Ghobnait in July 1905 Henebry recorded the 14 songs from six local singers. They were Mrs Margaret Costelloe from Baile na nGall, An Rinn; Walter de Poer or Power (a middle-aged man who had ‘never sung into a phonograph before’) from Cúl na Sméar, Cill Ghobnait or Cill na bhFraochán (Kilnafrehan); Martin Draper (about 11 years old and a ‘practised phonograph singer’) from Baile na nGall, An Rinn; Maighréad Ní Cheallaigh or Margaret Kelly also from Baile na nGall; Pádraig Ó Néill or Patrick O’Neill (about 12 years old and ‘quite accustomed to sing into the phonograph’) from Droichead na gCorrán, Heilbhic (Helvic) An Rinn; and Maighréad Ní Néill or Margaret O’Neill (aged between 9 and 10 and a sister ‘now in Boston, Mass.’ to Pádraig Ó Néill). The uilleann piper recorded was James Byrne, a musician from Trim, Co Meath, who was living in Mooncoin, Co Kilkenny, and it is possible that he was recorded before the singers. Byrne was a favourite piper of Henebry’s. He recorded him on other occasions and would bring him some years later to play for his students in University College Cork while all present shared a dozen bottles of stout.

Probably because of his contacts with Germany, Henebry was aware of the scientific work of recording and analysing ethnic music worldwide that was being carried out from 1900 in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv under the early ethnomusicologists Carl Stumf and Erich von Hornbostel. Wishing to have his 1905 song recordings copied and subjected to musical analysis in Berlin, he sent them to von Hornbostel in 1907 with payment for copies and a request for analysis. He inadvertently included a recording of James Byrne.

The work of copying involved making a copper negative mould or ‘galvano’ of the original ‘wax’ cylinder, which was destroyed in the process. Wax copies were then made from the galvano, which was itself sent in each case to Henebry along with copies of the cylinders and transcriptions of the melodies and a tonometric analysis of their pitches, made by von Hornbostel and a colleague Otto Abraham. One wax copy of each was retained in the Berlin archive (They remain there to the present, having in the interim been moved to Silesia during WW2, then to Lenigrad, then to East Germany, and finally back to their original home in the former West Germany).

Henebry became professor of Irish Language and Literature in University College Cork in 1909 and continued to develop his music theories until his death in Portlaw in 1916. His cylinder recordings and the documentation provided from Germany formed a basis for some of his theorising, although he may have further edited the German transcriptions. He left behind a manuscript on the subject, which drew on the 1905 cylinders, and this was edited and published by some of his Cork colleagues as A Handbook of Irish Music (Cork University Press, 1928). Copies of certain wax cylinders owned by Henebry remained in the College (They have recently been digitised with other UCC cylinders – see below).

Long after Richard Henebry’s death, in the 1960s, 14 copper galvanos, a cylinder phonograph, and Henebry family cylinders from Richard’s time and later, were given by a member of the family to Dr Seóirse Bodley of the Music Department of University College Dublin (UCD), The galvanos have since proved to be those supplied by the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv to Henebry in 1907. They contain reversed recordings in their interiors of his six Waterford singers and the uilleann piper James Byrne. In the 1990s, the galvanos and phonograph with cylinders were donated by Professor Bodley in turn to the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

The cylinders were digitised for ITMA in France in 2006 by Henri Chamoux of the Archeophone Company and the galvanos were preserved in ITMA, but no further use could be made of the latter until it was discovered in 2008 – through the good offices of Dr Fintan Vallely, and of Professor Thérèse Smith of the School of Music, UCD – that the Phonogramm-Archiv still had the capability of making new cylinder copies from galvanos. Contact was made with Berlin and scholarly cooperation was quickly forthcoming from Dr Susanne Ziegler of the Archiv. Information and documentation was exchanged between the two bodies. ITMA sent the galvanos to Berlin, new copies were made from them using a red composition, and these copies were digitised there. The digital files were presented to ITMA by Dr Ziegler on 27 February 2009 at an International Council for Traditional Music Ireland conference on ‘Recording’ held in UCD.

These files were remastered for ITMA by Harry Bradshaw in Dublin, and the resulting copies are those presented above. Henebry’s local titles have been followed, but his often eccentric spelling has been changed to a modern standard.

A second tranche of copies of ITMA Henebry cylinder recordings is available below.

Links to further Henebry information and recordings from ITMA and others:

             From ITMA

• His 1903 booklet Irish Music is available in facsimile online see below.
• His 1928 book A Handbook of Irish Music is  available in facsimile see below. It contains notations of the melodies (only) of the songs on the 1905 cylinders and some discussion of the singers.
• Other relevant ITMA material can be found on the collection page below ‘Explore Early Sound Recordings of Irish Traditional Music at ITMA’.
• A May 1983 lecture on the Handbook was given by Breandán Breathnach to the Folk Music Society of Ireland, and was reported on by Nicholas Carolan in the newsletter Ceol Tíre 24 (Nov. 1983), available online here.
• A number of Henebry-related books, essays and articles, and a recent MA thesis on his music collecting, are held for public consultation in ITMA. Catalogue information on them can be found by searching the keywords ‘Henebry’ and ‘De Hindeberg’ on the ITMA Online Catalogues here.

From others

• For other online Henebry recordings, see the University College Cork O’Neill/Henebry site here.
• For further online biographical information on Richard Henebry, in Irish, see the biographical site Ainm.ie here.
• An article by Suzanne Ziegler ‘From Waterford to Berlin and Back to Ireland: Richard Henebry’s Wax Cylinder Recordings and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv’ has been published in Ancestral Imprints: Histories of Irish Traditional Music and Dance, Thérèse Smith ed., Dublin: Cork University Press, 2012.
• A radio documentary by Seán Corcoran The Musical Priest: The Extraordinary Life of Richard Henebry of Portlaw (1863–1916), first broadcast on Waterford local radio station WLR FM on 29 December 2013 (48 min.), is available online here.

With thanks to Professor Seóirse Bodley, Dr Suzanne Ziegler and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, Dr Fintan Vallely, Professor Thérèse Smith, Henri Chamoux, and Harry Bradshaw.

Nicholas Carolan, Elaina Solon & Danny Diamond, 1 June 2015

This second tranche of copies of cylinder recordings of Irish-language singers made by Rev. Dr Richard Henebry in Co Waterford in the early 20th century, and presented here from its collections by the Irish Traditional Music Archive with some of his instrumental music cylinders, is not for the faint-hearted.

Although they have been expertly remastered for ITMA by Harry Bradshaw, who has recovered sound from them that is inaudible when they are played ‘flat’, they are nevertheless still indistinct and noisy. Not surprising, given that the original cylinders are now more than a century old, are of ‘wax’ composition and were only designed for a limited number of playings. They are now badly worn, and often scratched or cracked. The wonder is that they have survived and can be heard at all.

These recordings differ therefore from the first published tranche of ITMA Henebry cylinder recordings. Those were remade from copper cylinder moulds as the result of a cooperative project between ITMA and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv and are of a better audio quality. These recordings differ also in containing some fiddle renditions of traditional tunes, some of which may be given by Richard Henebry himself using up unused space on cylinders, and in including some recordings from Irish America. The first tranche of Henebry cylinder recordings is available below, along with information on the whole ITMA Henebry project and links to copies of his books and other recordings.

These new recordings are undated but at least two were made in July 1905, when the first tranche was recorded, and the probability is that at least some of the others also were. Introduced by Henebry himself, two of the singers are the same, Pádraig Ó Néill and Maighréad Ní Néill, and second takes are given of some of the same songs. The uilleann piper James Byrne is playing here again. But there are also new singers to be found from An Rinn, some introducing themselves. A Seán de Henebry, probably Richard’s brother, plays fiddle, and a whistle or piccolo player can also be heard. Among the new singers are William Power and Sylvester O’Murray, and two whose names will be familiar: Nioclás Ua Tóibín and Labhrás Ó Cadhla. But these latter are undoubtedly older relatives of the well-known Waterford singers of these names who were recorded by radio and record companies in the mid- and later 20th century. It is possible that some of these recordings were made by members of the Henebry family using his equipment after Richard’s death in 1916 as some written documentation found with these cylinders dates from 1929 and 1930 (however it is also possible that only the documentation and not the cylinders may be of those dates). Also to be heard here is the Chicago-based uilleann piper Bernard Delaney of Offaly, and an anonymous uilleann pipes and fiddle duet, on cylinders which had been sent to Henebry by Captain Francis O’Neill of Chicago (Delaney can be more audibly heard on Milwaukee O’Neill cylinder copies available here).

In spite of their difficult audio quality, these Henebry recordings have a unique cultural value. They preserve traditional melodies, something not often found in early Irish-language song collections which typically print only verbal texts. They also preserve elements of traditional song style and instrumental style which are beyond the reach of music notation. A declamatory singing style is common in these recordings; it may have been influenced somewhat by the recording process. In the hope that singers and musicians of the present day will hear enough on them to be able to re-create the songs and music, and that people with local knowledge and interested scholars will be able to add information and make transcriptions, even the noisiest of the Henebry cylinders are presented here. Some identifications of songs and singers are tentative, as indicated; additional information would be very welcome.

With thanks to Professor Seóirse Bodley, donor of the original recordings to ITMA; to Henri Chamoux of the Archaeophone Company in France who digitised them; and to Harry Bradshaw who remastered the digitisations.

Nicholas Carolan, Elaina Solon & Danny Diamond, 1 August 2015

The uilleann piper Patsy Touhey was the most celebrated Irish traditional musician of his day. Born in 1865 in Co Galway, he flourished in the USA as a professional entertainer and became a prime mover of the Gaelic music revival in the States. Today his music is a byword for unsurpassed virtuosity.

His crucial importance to the history of Irish traditional music is that he is the earliest traditional musician of whom we have a substantial body of sound recordings, giving us a unique insight into the incredibly rich world of traditional music making in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The largest single collection of recordings of Touhey’s music is the Busby-Carney collection, which is now held at the Irish Traditional Music Archive. This collection contains private cylinder recordings made by Touhey himself and often featuring spoken introductions by him. A remastered selection from the collection is given here.

Jackie Small, Harry Bradshaw & Danny Diamond, 1 August 2008

This audio playlist has been curated by Irish Traditional Music Archive staff to provide a soundscape to the Decade of Centenaries. The selection reflects material of contemporary political, cultural and popular interest and is drawn from recordings held in the ITMA collections. The songs, music and speech come from wax cylinder and 78 rpm disc recordings, ranging in date from 1905−c.1940, which have been digitised by ITMA, and in the case of the wax cylinders by Henri Chamoux. They were originally recorded in Ireland, London and New York by early recording pioneers, the majority issued by commercial recording companies.

The recordings provide a backdrop to a changing Ireland: the Gaelic League and the Irish-language revival, the First World War, the 1916 Rising, and Irish and international popular music of the day, including the first wave of popular Irish-American vaudeville instrumentalists.

We drew inspiration from printed resources (see Erin remember 1916 below) as well as the Irish Military Archives’ Bureau of Military History Collection, 1913−1921. The witness statements are a rich source of information on songs, fundraising concerts, marching bands and individual musicians and singers of the period. Recordings made in Germany in 1917 of Irish prisoners of war are also an extremely valuable contemporary resource. They have been digitised by the Sound Archive of Humboldt University Berlin.

You will find more information about each recording in the playlist by selecting the arrow key to the right of each title. This will bring you to the individual page for this audio piece. Here you will find composer names, recording labels, etc. which we have been able to source. Where possible we have linked to printed versions of the sound recordings which you can also view online.

This playlist is a sampler of the many sound recordings held in ITMA which reference events during the Decade of Centenaries. ITMA will continue to catalogue and highlight historical recordings while also documenting responses to the events of 1916 in 1966 and 2016.

Grace Toland, Danny Diamond, Brian Doyle & Alan Woods, 1 March 2016

Seventeen cylinder sound recordings made by the Sterling Company of London at the annual Oireachtas Irish-language cultural festival of the Gaelic League in Dublin in August 1907 are among the some hundred cylinders in the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive. The festival was based that year in the Rotunda hall on O’Connell St (then Sackville St) in the north central city, and the recordings were presumably made somewhere in the vicinity. The recordist, with a ‘special apparatus’, was a Mr Quirke of the Sterling Company. Sterling had been invited to Dublin by its agent John O’Neill, a prominent Dublin record dealer and bicycle manufacturer, and the intention was clearly to make recordings for commercial sale. Accordingly the featured artists, almost all singers performing traditional and national songs in Irish and English, are modern concert performers. They include none of the unaccompanied old-style gaeltacht singers who were also at the festival, although one story-teller in Irish from Limerick was recorded.

More recordings than the number surviving were made by Sterling in Dublin in 1907, but the company went into liquidation early in 1908, and it is certain that none were ever issued. The recordings now in ITMA were donated to it by the late Robert Webster, keeper of the Friends Burial Ground in Blackrock, Co Dublin. He had bought them in the early 1960s from workmen who had found them in a house they were demolishing on George’s Quay in Dublin. Their story was the basis of a special edition of the RTÉ Radio 1 archival series The Irish Phonograph by Harry Bradshaw and Nicholas Carolan in 1984.

These recordings, presented here from more than a century ago, naturally suffer from surface noise and distortion; others are too damaged to present. Since cylinder sound recordings are unknown to most people today, having become an essentially obsolete technology by the period of the First World War, images of ITMA cylinders, including some of these, are presented in an image gallery below.

The ITMA cylinder collection has been digitised in France on the specialist cylinder-copying device the Archeophone, for which see here. The collection will be the basis of a Heritage Week 2013 exhibition in ITMA’s premises at 73 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, which will be complemented by these images and the connected audio playlist.

With thanks to Robert Webster, Henri Chamoux of Archeophone, & Harry Bradshaw.

Nicholas Carolan & Elaina Solon,  1 August 2013

Irish-American Song Book: ‘Come-All-Ye’s’: Six Hundred and Seventeen Irish Songs and Ballads. This compendium of mainly 19th-century Irish song texts in the English language, produced by the Wehman Brothers publishing firm of New York, is undated. The latest date it carries internally is 1890, but the volume itself may have been published about 1900.

The songs it contains were probably those which were first published by the Wehman firm from the late 1880s as part of a series of Irish ten-cent songsters rather than in this single-volume format. The Wehman firm also published Irish songs in at least two other series of smaller-format song books from the early 1890s into the early 1900s, with overlapping but not identical contents. Irish songs were also included in the Wehmans’ general song books. The single-format volume was reprinted at least once in the 1900s.

The work contains a great variety of Irish songs from the first century in which Ireland decisively turned to the English language: love songs and other songs of sentiment, songs in praise of place, patriotic and political songs from Emmet to Parnell, music-hall and vaudeville comic stage songs, and Irish-American songs. They are mostly of unknown authorship, but they include the well known songs of Thomas Moore, Samuel Lover, T.D. Sullivan, and from the end of the century those of Johnny Patterson.

Most of the songs were composed in Ireland, but some in England, Scotland, and the United States. They are national not local songs, and most probably they were copied from printed sources: ballad sheets, sheet music, periodicals, and other song books. Occasionally the tunes to which they were meant to be sung are cited by title, but the intention was obviously to supply words to people who already knew the airs of the songs. In spite of its title, the volume also contains occasional poems, recitations, and prose pieces. Copies of the book were known in Ireland and are known to have influenced oral tradition there.

The firm of Wehman Brothers of Park Row, New York City, was a popular publisher specializing in books of magic tricks, joke and dream books, tutors and self-help books, and song books. It flourished from the 1880s into at least the 1940s.

This copy originally belonged to Joseph L. Maher, leader of the Irish Ramblers Orchestra of Philadelphia, and was donated to the Archive by Bernard and Grace Croke of Philadelphia in 1992, along with much other material. It is probably a late printing of the collection as it does not have the acidic paper and advertisements of earlier printings.

With thanks to donors Bernard and Grace Croke.

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.

NC & MG, 1 December 2009

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

The mouth-blown bagpipes, commonly called the ‘warpipes’ in Ireland, have been played here since medieval times, and were then the instrument which often led Irish forces into battle.

With the introduction of more modern methods of warfare in the 17th century, they lost their military function, and were played only to accompany such recreational activities as dancing, parading, and leading sports teams onto the field of play. By the 18th century, their position had largely been usurped by the quieter bellows-blown uilleann pipes, which were usually played indoors. But there was still a social need for a loud outdoor bagpipe for certain public occasions, and the Irish warpipes never quite disappeared. They enjoyed a revival in Ireland in the later 19th century, under the influence of the bands of Scottish regiments of the British Army stationed in Ireland. The warpipes continue to be played in Ireland as a solo and as a band instrument, and most commonly in the context of competitions.

Nationally minded Irish warpipers incorporated native tunes in their repertories from the time of the revival, often adapting them from other instruments and existing publications. After 1900, as the revival progressed, printed collections of these warpipe melodies began to be published. Among the earliest and most influential was the 1911 collection Irish Tunes for the Scottish and Irish War-Pipes, compiled by William Walsh and arranged and published in Edinburgh by David Glen, the original printing of which is presented below from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

William Walsh, a flute player and dancer as well as a warpiper, and an Irish speaker, was born in 1859 in Oughterard, Co Galway, and was brought to America as a child. Settled in Chicago, he was attracted to the sound of the warpipes, and sought out the company of Scottish players there. He joined the police force in the city in 1891, and was a friend of the music collector Francis O’Neill who was prominent in the force. Walsh was self-taught in music and learned from notation in preference to ear, and his collection of Irish and Scottish tunes for the instrument was in manuscript by 1909. David Glen (b. 1850), one of a prominent family of musical instrument makers and music publishers which had been in business in Edinburgh since the 1820s, added characteristic grace notes to Walsh’s notations. The collection was later reprinted by Glen in a 2/6 edition, and reprinted by Mozart Allan in Glasgow in 1951.

Nicholas Carolan & Maeve Gebruers, 1 February 2014

The Revd Dr Richard Henebry/ Risteard De Hindeberg (1863–1916) was born into an Irish-speaking farming family in Mount Bolton, Portlaw, Co Waterford.

The family was musical. Henebry played the fiddle, as did his mother, and he had a great interest in traditional singing and uilleann piping. An outstanding but eccentric scholar, he became a Catholic priest, and after a doctoral course of philological studies in Germany was briefly professor of Irish in the Catholic University of Washington DC in the 1890s, and later taught in Berkeley University in California.

While in America he became friendly with Captain Francis O’Neill in Chicago and other Irish musicians. Suffering from ill-health, he returned to Ireland about 1903, and made a valuable collection of early cylinder field-recordings in Waterford in 1905. These led to correspondence with leading German ethnomusicologists in Berlin, and formed an influential component of his theories on Irish music scales and intonation. From 1909 until his death Henebry was professor of Irish Language and Literature in University College Cork. Highly idiosyncratic in his behaviour and a stubborn public controversialist, he nonetheless inspired admiration and affection in many of his colleagues, some of whom published the manuscript of his original and substantial Handbook of Irish Music (Cork, 1928) after his death.

Henebry’s originality and dogmaticism is on display in his booklet study Irish Music (Dublin, 1903) which is reproduced below from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive. His only publication on Irish music to appear during his lifetime, apart from occasional pieces in newspapers and magazines, it drew on his musical experiences in Ireland and America, and has a supplement of his mother’s tunes.

Richard Henebry’s brief study of Irish music is best understood in the context of a series of such studies which had appeared before 1903. Many of these – beginning with the earliest substantial study, Joseph Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (Dublin & London, 1786) – are now also available online in full text, and links to them are provided below.

O’Curry, Eugene, On the manners and customs of the ancient Irish: a series of lectures. Vol. I, London: Williams and Norgate, 1873

O’Curry, Eugene, On the manners and customs of the ancient Irish: a series of lectures. Vol. II, London: Williams and Norgate, 1873

O’Curry, Eugene, On the manners and customs of the ancient Irish: a series of lectures. Vol. III, London: Williams and Norgate, 1873

Renehan, Laurence F., History of music, Dublin: C.M. Warren, 1858

Conran, Michael, The national music of Ireland, London: John Johnson, 1850

Walker, Joseph C., Historical memoirs of the Irish bards. Vol. I, Dublin: Printed by J. Christie, 1818

Ledwich, Edward, The antiquities of Ireland, Dublin: Printed by and for John Jones, 1804 (2nd ed.)

Walker, Joseph C., Historical memoirs of the Irish bards, Dublin: Printed for the author, by L. White, 1786

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.

[Other Henebry material is also available on the ITMA website. For his cylinder recordings see here, and for his Handbook of Irish Music see here.]

The Scottish musicologist Alfred Edward Moffat (Edinburgh 1866 – London 1950) was a highly regarded scholar and editor of music, with a specialisation in early British composers for the violin.

Having studied music in Berlin, he had professional connections with German publishing houses, and also edited for the London publishers Augener & Co. and Bayley & Ferguson, between about 1894 and 1907, some thousand national songs in a Minstrelsy of… series . These volumes typically comprised 200 songs, and represented respectively Scotland, Ireland, England, Wales, and the Scottish Highlands. Most appeared in different undated editions in the 1890s and early 1900s, and were reprinted in the 1970s in the United States.

Moffat’s Minstrelsy of Ireland: 206 Irish Songs Adapted to Their Traditional Airs, reproduced below in its fourth and final edition, first appeared in 1898 (undated but with a preface of 1897) with three further editions produced by the early 1900s. The original edition comprised 200 songs, arranged by Moffat for voice and piano, but six more were added in the third edition.

The particular value of Moffat’s Minstrelsy of Ireland now resides in the pioneering historical notes that accompany each song, and which involved him in original library research in Ireland. They show a wide knowledge of early Irish printed collections of music, and also make connections with early British collections. His preface acknowledges the assistance he received from Irish scholars such as P.W. Joyce, and from British scholars such as Frank Kidson of Leeds and John Glen of Edinburgh. Alfred Moffat also edited in the early 1900s various other undated Irish collections, such as his Gems of Irish Melody and Irish National Songs, and items of Irish sheet music.

For permission to reproduce this digitised edition and for other help, the Irish Traditional Music Archive is indebted to Alfred Moffat’s great-granddaughter Tricia Rawlingson Plant.

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 2012

Miss Honoria Tomkins Galwey (31 May 1830 – 7 January 1925), an almost forgotten North of Ireland collector of Irish traditional music, edited the varied collection presented here: Old Irish Croonauns and Other Tunes, published in London and New York by Boosey & Co in 1910 and containing 72 dance tunes and song melodies (with some song texts). Many items are Irish and all were ‘written down exactly as I heard them’. Source-notes are included, and the collection was deservedly well regarded in its own time.

Born to Ven. Charles Galwey, a musical Cork-born Church of Ireland Archdeacon of Derry, and Honoria Knox of Prehen, Co Derry, Miss Galwey lived also from childhood in Inishowen, Co Donegal, where her father was rector of Moville, and much of the music she ‘re-collected and collected’ came from the oral tradition of both counties. Although she collected from a range of lilters, whistlers, singers, fiddle, concertina and jews-harp players, and from manuscript, an important source was uilleann piper Tom Gordon of Moville, Co Donegal. A singer and a seemingly self-taught pianist who had played with traditional musicians, she was still playing within a few weeks of her death in Derry. Through her musical interests, she was linked to a turn-of-the-century network of Irish cultural activity in Britain and Ireland: that of the poets Alfred Perceval Graves and Moira O’Neill, the arrangers Charles Wood, R. Arthur Oulton and Arthur Somervell, the composer Charles Villiers Stanford, the singer Plunkett Greene, and the folklorist and founder of the Gaelic League Douglas Hyde – several of these also the children of Church of Ireland clergymen. She made her collections available to the Irish Folk Song Society, founded in London by Graves and others in 1904.

Honoria Galway first appeared in print late in life, as the contributor of seven melodies (also presented here) and some traditional verses 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. Subsequently three of her collaborations were published as sheet music before Old Irish Croonauns first appeared in 1910, to be followed by a later Boosey Co reprint and an American facsimile reprint in 1975, and a later item of sheet music. She was a source of the song ‘Over Here’ (‘Oh, the praties they are small’), which was rewritten by Graves to relate to the Great Famine, and the song ‘Molly Brannigan’ also owes its popularity to her. Following her father, she always held that the famous ‘Londonderry Air’ belonged as much to Donegal as to Derry.

Also reproduced here from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive are a 19 September 1908 postcard from A.P. Graves (1846–1931) to Miss Galwey and a 22 September 1908 letter from her to Rev. Leslie Creery Stevenson (1878–1961), a hymnwriter and a Church of Ireland curate at the time on Rathlin Island, Co Antrim.

ITMA would welcome donations of or the opportunity to copy four known sheet-music items related to airs collected by Honoria Galway: ‘The Blackbird’ (words by Moira O’Neill, music arranged by Arthur Somervell), ‘Molly Brannigan’ (old words, music arranged by Sir C. Villiers Stanford), ‘Slumber Song’ (words by Moira O’Neill, music arranged by R. Arthur Oulton), Two Irish Airs (music arranged by Mary Tomlinson): 1 ‘The Rock on the Shore’ (words by B.F. Stuart), 2 ‘Little Blue Pigeon’ (words by E. Field). All are believed to have been published by Boosey & Co in London.

Nicholas Carolan & Maeve Gebruers, 1 December 2014

The greatest number of Irish songs ever published, over 1,000 in all, was collected, researched, edited and set to music by An tAthair Pádruig Breathnach / Fr Patrick A. Walsh (1848–1930), a Vincentian Catholic priest and an active cultural nationalist who is almost now a forgotten figure. . Published at politically significant times from 1904 to 1926, Breathnach’s songbooks influenced nationalist cultural thinking during the period, providing material for the de-anglicisation programme of the Gaelic League, disseminating patriotic songs in English during the War of Independence, and making bilingual song provision for schools as part of the nation-building of the new state.

Some 470 of these songs are in Irish and 530 in English. Drawn from oral, manuscript and printed sources, they were published in a sequence of cheap popular songsters and songbooks mainly by the Dublin firm of Browne & Nolan. Every song text was set to a melody in tonic solfa. Sales of these publications ran into the tens of thousands, and they would have a lasting influence on the oral tradition of both languages.

Pádruig Breathnach was born during the Famine in a largely Irish-speaking district near Carrick-on-Suir, Co Waterford. Having been educated locally and in the Catholic seminary of Maynooth, Co. Kildare, he was ordained a priest about 1873; most of his ministry was carried out in the cities of Cork and Dublin. He was interested in music and song from his youth, and, as an early enthusiast for the preservation and revival of the Irish language, he joined several Irish-language organisations before becoming a member of the new Gaelic League in 1893. As a young priest in Cork, he collected songs in Irish from his parishioners and on holidays in west Cork. More than 150 Irish-language songs in his collections, words and music, were collected in Cork and Waterford by himself or by his close associate Áine Ní Raghallaigh (1868–1942) of Macroom, a Gaelic League singing teacher.

In the early 1900s, when he himself was in his fifties, Breathnach was persuaded to begin publishing songs in Irish in penny songsters for schoolchildren. The success of his efforts led him to continue with similar songsters aimed at members of the growing Irish-language revival. The songsters were eventually collected into book form in 1913, and he went on to produce a series of further Irish-language songbooks for over a decade. Many of their songs were new, insofar as Breathnach selected verses by various authors and set them to music collected by himself or chosen by him from the published collections of Irish melody. Breathnach was also aware of the national value of the English-language songs of Ireland and by 1915 he had begun the publication of these songs, again in penny songster form and eventually in a hardback series of songbooks. His publishers advertised these as containing over 1,300 pages of song.

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.

Patrick Weston Joyce was a highly industrious writer throughout his life, and his many seminal books have been frequently mined by writers of newspaper and magazine articles. But Joyce’s own writing efforts went into books rather than articles, and very few articles written by him are known.

Three such are presented here in facsimile, the first a 1904 contribution of airs, rather than an article proper, which he made to the first number of the journal of the Irish Folk Song Society. This society had recently been founded in London by Alfred Perceval Graves, Charlotte Milligan Fox, Herbert Hughes, and others. Joyce was one of its sixteen vice-presidents until his death. He was aged 77 in 1904 and was rightly regarded as the doyen of Irish traditional music collectors by the founders. The second Joyce piece, from the same publication later in 1904, discusses the possible ancient provenance of Irish folk songs by comparing Danish airs to Irish airs of the same name. The third, from the same publication in 1912, is a memoir rather than an article proper.

1. P.W. Joyce, ‘Airs’, Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society, vol. 1, no 1 (April 1904), pp. 5−6

2. P.W. Joyce, ‘Irish and Danish folk music’, Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society, vol. 1, nos 2−3 (Jul.−Oct. 1904), pp. 37−40

3. P.W. Joyce, ‘Some Reminiscences of a Collector of Irish Folk Music (a Communication to Mr. Alfred Perceval Graves by Dr. P.W. Joyce)’, Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society, vol. 11 (Jan.−June 1912), pp. 9−14