Dublin piper, Néillidh Ó Maolagáin, is a member of the renowned Mulligan family and grew up steeped in Irish traditional music.  These five compositions were composed for various family and friends.

Compositions

1. Barr na cúille [comp. Néillidh Ó Maolagáin], reel (for my father)
2. Markree castle [comp. Néillidh Ó Maolagáin], jig (for Siobhán and John)
3. Sketchy days [comp. Néillidh Ó Maolagáin], jig (for Caoimhe)
4. The Leitrim iron [comp. Néillidh Ó Maolagáin], reel (for Vincent Woods)
5. Tom Mulligan’s hornpipe [comp. Néillidh Ó Maolagáin] (for my father)

Uilleann piper Néillidh Ó Maolagáin’s music is embedded in a great tradition. He is a son of acclaimed Leitrim fiddle-player and piper Tom Mulligan and was born in Dublin. He is a piper for whom playing music is a lifelong preoccupation and who plays with warmth and emotion.

He has developed and cultivated his own style of piping, which is grounded in the styles of the old piping masters. He is a great admirer of Irish sean-nós singing and this can be clearly heard in his emotive interpretation of these great songs.

Néillidh has released three solo albums to date. Along with teaching and guesting on other albums, he has performed at many festivals around the world. He has collaborated with conductor Robert Houlihan and played with Orchestras in Serbia, Hungary, and Romania. More recently, Néillidh has performed at home and abroad with renowned Leitrim poet and playright, Vincent Woods.

His two sons, Fiachra and Oisín, are both pipers and fiddle-players and his two daughters, Caoimhe and Éabha, play fiddle, harp, concertina and are both renowned sean-nós dancers.

ITMA presents Drawing from the Well featuring Galway uilleann piper Pádraic Keane. Drawing from the Well connects artists with archival material to inspire new art.

In this 30 minute programme, Pádraic delves into the life and music of piper Michael Carney from Irishtown, one of the eminent musicians New York in the 1920’s. Keane gleans insights into Carney’s much celebrated piping through interviews with Seán McKiernan, Andrea Palandri, Denis Igoe and John Tuohy.

View other Drawing from the Well episodes here.

All donations help to support the preservation of Irish traditional music, song and dance. To find out more about donating to ITMA please follow this link.

This month’s playlist offers an unique opportunity to hear rare recordings made by the late Tom Davis. Tom was a familiar figure at Irish music events for over 50 years since the 1960s, recording music, song and conversation at fleadhs, concerts and private houses. His recording equipment was high quality and over these years he amassed thousands of tapes featuring both well known figures and lesser known musicians and singers. Tom’s widow Eleanor has generously donated Tom’s large collection to ITMA, where work has commenced on exploring and cataloging what is an invaluable resource for the Irish music community. This playlist just offers a glimpse of the breath and quality that Tom’s life’s work has made to Irish music.  – Pádraic

Originally from Pennyburn just outside Derry, Tomás spent time in England where he was a founder member of the Liverpool Céilí Band. In 1961 he moved to Cork where he became Dean of Engineering in University College Cork (UCC). He studied music in UCC under Aloys Fleischmann and Seán Ó Riada and succeeded Ó Riada as lecturer in Irish music after his death in 1971. He also taught uilleann pipes at the Cork School of Music for many years.

In the late 1960s Ó Canainn formed the successful Irish music group Na Filí along with fiddler Matt Cranitch and whistle player Tom Barry. Réamonn Ó Sé, the original whistle player with Na Filí, recorded on their first album An Ghaoth Aniar/The West Wind in 1969. In the 1970s the group toured extensively in Europe and the US and recorded a number of other albums: Farewell to Connacht (1971); Na Filí 3 (1972); A Kindly Welcome (1974) and Chanter’s Tune (1977).

Tomás was also an accomplished solo performer and toured internationally, lecturing and playing the uilleann pipes. He published a number of solo albums: With Pipe and Song (Outlet, 1980), Béal na Trá (with his daughter Nuala Ní Chanainn, Outlet, 1982); New Tunes for Old (Ó Canainn, 1985); and The Pennyburn Piper presents Uilleann Pipes (Outlet, 1998).

Ó Canainn was the author of a number of books on traditional music most notably: Traditional Music in Ireland (Mercier, 1978); biographies in English and Irish on Ó Riada Seán Ó Riada: His Life and Work (Collins Press, 2003), Seán Ó Riada: Saol agus Saothar (with Gearóid Mac an Bhua, Gartan, 1993) and Songs of Cork (Gilbert Dalton, 1978) where he acted as editor for the collection.

He published an autobiographical novel Home to Derry (Appletree Press, 1986), memoirs entitled A Lifetime of Notes (Collins Press, 1996) as well as a book of his own compositions Tomás’ Tunebook (Ossian, 1997) and a book of slow airs Traditional Slow Airs of Ireland (with 2 CDs, Ossian, 1995).

Ó Canainn has a number of choral compositions and arrangements to his name including three masses in Irish; Aifreann Cholmcille (Veritas, 1978), Aifreann Naomh Fionnbarra, and Aifreann Biosántac. He also published two books of poetry Melos (Clog, 1987) and Dornán Dánta (Coiscéim, 2004).

At the 2004 Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, Ó Canainn was awarded Ard-Ollamh, or Supreme Bard by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann.

Maeve examined the print and manuscript items in the collection and gleaned as much information as possible from Helen and Nuala about these materials. This detailed information from the family will greatly assist Maeve in cataloguing the collection in the coming months and years.

In total 15 boxes of manuscripts, printed items, ephemera (posters, flyers, programmes etc.), photographs, film reels, research papers, lecture scripts, scrapbooks, commercial/non-commercial sound and video recordings (LPs, audio cassettes, reel-to-reel tapes etc.) were transferred from the Ó Canainn house in Cork to the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

These materials will be processed in the coming months with priority given to the digitisation of the most at-risk audio/visual carriers. ITMA is working towards organising and making the Tomás Ó Canainn Collection accessible to the public in the coming years.

The series paired poets and musicians from different musical genres in performance at Poetry Ireland headquarters in Parnell Square, Dublin. These events were recorded by ITMA.

The poet/traditional music partners were: 

• Moya Cannon and Kathleen Loughnane 
• John McAuliffe and Kevin Doherty
• Mary O’Malley and Tommy Keane
• Nessa O’ Mahony and Dermot McLaughlin

In advance of each traditional music partnership, former ITMA colleague Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw prepared a blog about the performers and their craft. 

Included below is the piece she wrote in advance of Mary and Tommy’s event on the 20 June 2018.

The blogs for the other performers can be found in the related materials at the bottom of this blog.

‘I work at an oblique angle to music,’ Mary O’Malley tells me when I ask her about how her poems reflect and react to the sounds and people she hears. Sometimes her words are meditations on particular tunes. Sometimes content reflects a visceral reaction to the medium—the instrument—of performance. And sometimes poetry intertwines with the auras of particular musicians. 

Playing the Octopus is the latest book of poems by Mary O’Malley, an award-winning poet, member of Aosdana, and regular contributor to RTÉ Radio. Born in Connemara and educated at University College Galway, she lived and taught in Lisbon for eight years, and subsequently has taught on the MA programme for Writing and Education at NUIGalway and held the Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University. 

She has listened to music and musicians her entire life, so it is fitting that the poetry in Playing the Octopus uses music, particularly the playing of the pipes, as a metaphor for life. 

One poem from the collection, ‘Ixion Stopped,’ is after broadcaster and box player Tony MacMahon’s playing of ‘Raglan Road.’ 

Tony Mc Mahon Plays Raglan Road 

And every girl pregnant with disappointment
and death is in it. The man on the rock 
saying ‘is uaigneach a bheith fireann 
ar an gcarraig crua seo’ is in it. It is played
on the ribcage, teased out of the bone nest 
of the tune with care, with skill. Kept beating—
for the exact caesura a tired heart needs.
Then resumes.

I have heard it fleshed out with lush curves,
too much pigment in the tint. This is the poem
scored on bone, the tune given back to itself.
The stops played this way once, and only once.
The air shivers. Her own dark hair
a glint of copper—the snare. The sign that’s known. 

(from Playing the Octopus, Carcanet Press 2016; used with permission) 

Her words reflect on the music’s despair and its capacity to be felt in the bone, but also react to the musician. Indeed, Mary commented that Tony’s is a presence that could inspire an entire book of poetry. 

Another poem in Playing the Octopus, ‘What Ireland Needs,’ came about when Mary heard percussionist Mel Mercier play the bones, an instrument that she often heard in childhood but that now occupies the sidelines for many traditional musicians. The simplicity of the bones—at their most basic they are scavenged by their user—prompted her to think about getting back to basics in the face of modernity’s chaos and distraction. In ‘What Ireland Needs’ Mary reacts less to melodies and rhythms, and more to the act and medium of performance. 

As Mary says, 

The ‘many tentacled’ uilleann pipes inspired the title poem in Playing the Octopus, so it’s fitting that Mary O’Malley is joined by Waterford-born uilleann piper Tommy Keane for their ‘Soul Clap Its Hands and Sing’ performance. Like Mary, Tommy is no stranger to collaboration: he has spent his career working as a session musician, appearing on the albums of the likes of Elvis Costello and the Pogues, as well as crossing boundaries to perform with the Rambart Ballet Company in London, the Druid Theatre Company and An Taibhdhearc in Galway, Iarla Ó Lionárd, and the Irish Philharmonic. 

Tommy took up the uilleann pipes in his early 20s. He learned his craft from local piper Tommy Kearney, and also was influenced by the tuition he received at the Willie Clancy Summer School—namely from Pat Mitchell and the late Liam O’Flynn. While living in London during the 1980s, Tommy benefited from being part of a vibrant Irish music scene that included the likes of Tommy McCarthy, Bobby Casey, and Roger Sherlock. He was also a member of London’s Thatch Céilí Band, 1986 winners of the Senior Céilí Band Competition at the All Ireland Fleadh Cheoil in Listowel, Co Kerry.  

A recording of Tommy performing at the Wednesday lunchtime piping recital at the 2010 Willie Clancy Summer School demonstrates his lineage as a piper from Waterford. He performs a reel, ‘The hornless cow,’ that he learned from the playing of Tommy Kearney. 

Since returning to Ireland in 1987, Tommy has lived in Galway. A regular teacher of traditional music in Co Galway, he also has taught at festivals and Uilleann Pipe clubs throughout Ireland and the world. Tommy holds an MA(Hons) in Traditional Music Performance from University of Limerick, completed in 2000, and was the Chairman of Na Píobairi Uilleann from 2013 to 2018. 

Get to know the artists

Visit ITMA to hear more from both Mary O’Malley and Tommy Keane. Here’s just a short list of the recordings, tune books, and field recordings in the ITMA Collection that might interest you. 

Our recordings of Mary O’Malley reading point to her important work in environmental education. Both Behind the mist (2000, CONCD001) and An cosán draíochta = The magic path: celebrating 25 years of bog & sea weeks (2009, CMCD004/005) were released by the Connemara Environmental Education Centre.

The ITMA catalogue includes Tommy Keane’s solo album, The piper’s apron (1991, LUNCD052), a duo album with his wife and musical partner, concertina player Jacqueline McCarthy—The wind among the reeds (1995, MMCCD51)—not to mention countless commercial recordings that feature Tommy in a variety of roles ranging from session musician to producer (e.g., The family album by the McCarthys [2002, MMCCD54]). 

Available only at ITMA are a range of non-commercial field recordings, as well as printed tune books:

• The piper’s apron: tune notation from the CD recording by Tommy Keane / notation and layout by Tommy Keane
• The wind among the reeds: tune notation from the CD recording by Tommy Keane and Jacqueline McCarthy / notation and layout by Tommy Keane 

Book now to hear what happens when Mary O’Malley and Tommy Keane take the stage in Poetry Ireland.

WRITTEN & RESEARCHED

Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw
ITMA Archive Assistant (Digital Collections)
25 June 2018

WITH THANKS TO
Mary O’Malley, Tommy Keane & Tony Kearns

UPDATED

Grace Toland
ITMA Project Manager
30 April 2020

In 2020 I was fortunate to receive the Liam O’Flynn Award from the National Concert Hall and the Arts Council of Ireland. The bursary gave me time and space to compose some new music, to dig deep into the well of the tradition and also to consider my role within it.

In what was to become a momentous year for everyone, initial plans for the project changed and I adapted as best I could to the circumstances. My original intentions as part of the award were to have some leading traditional musicians perform my compositions as a live concert at the National Concert Hall. Covid restrictions prevailing, I had to pivot to a scaled back online performance of the work. However, as fortune would have it, I was able also to record some of the music in a window between lockdowns and publish it as an online release titled Cairn.

The Ghosts of Gullion; Carnac; The Travelling Piper / composed by Barry Kerr. Source: Cairn / Barry Kerr (Boy in a Boat Records, 2020)

I spent valuable time investigating the Liam O’Flynn Collection at ITMA and found much inspiration therein. I also spent some time in Conamara where a connection with the land and sea always helps with my creative work. In this blog I will address my processes and some standout thoughts on the Liam O’Flynn Collection. I have also included images of some of my paintings which I was reminded of whilst putting this body of work together, along with transcriptions of some of my new compositions.

In craggy Conamara fields you will find little piles of stones balanced on top of huge rocks. These abstract sculptures may have been built by a farmer in famine times, making room for soil in a field, or by children building some imaginary castle for a fairy queen. The stones have an unworldly quality and there is mystery in their making, a tale untold. In Ireland we have an inherited reverence for standing stones and our instinct tells us that these sacred places must be left alone. Perhaps the little piles of stones in Conamara fields invoke those same emotions, their endurance a nod to ghosts of the past, a talisman in the landscape and a reminder of what went before.

Out of these reflections I chose the word ‘Cairn’ as a title for the recording, its definition being a pile of stones as a marker or memorial. I thought of it as a metaphor for the tradition, where each generation adds their own part to an overall structure paying homage to what went before – ‘a stone upon a stone’ as the song goes.

Along my journey with this project I encountered some strange synchrony between what was inspiring me in the landscape to write, and the material that I was studying in the collection. One such example was a little note that Liam had written down about Dinnseanchas and writing poems and songs in praise of place. The little note almost jumped off the page as it was so pertinent to my thoughts at the time, about our music and its place in relation to the landscape. In this note Liam wrote:

Time and time again these little coincidences occurred. Indeed the first material I was directed to on visiting the archive were two tunes that Liam had composed ‘The Piper’s Stone’ and ‘The Return of the Pedalboard’. The first tune relates to the concept of Dinnseanchas in that it is a tune Liam named in honour of a standing stone in county Kildare that he knew well.

I imagine that Liam had a reverence for the rocks in our landscape too. He was acutely aware of the motivations and instincts that stirred the musicians and composers who went before him, and he carried that weight of tradition in every detail of his own work. I believe that Liam O’Flynn was also very aware of the threads that connect the arts, be it music, literature, or visual art. He was very aware of our oral history and its relationship with the music. Not only did he understand the music, he understood the importance of the narrative that accompanies our rich heritage. Liam could talk in depth about almost every tune he played and being fond of a story myself this aspect of his art always intrigued me.

Yes, the collection illuminates the expected highlights of O’Flynn’s musical life, seminal moments with Planxty and The Brendan Voyage for example, but among the comprehensive records that Liam kept, as an artist I took most inspiration from his scribblings and musings on the seemingly mundane. It is all gold dust.

The body of work was never intended to be a tribute as such to Liam O’Flynn, more so a collection of music inspired in part by his genius and his life in traditional music. I was conscious of Liam’s aesthetic when composing and recording the work, the types of tunes he played, his tone and musicality and I endeavoured to bring a little of his sound into my own work in some way.

I distilled what I was writing, I cut out anything that did not feel right or honest and I let the freedom of the time I had been gifted guide me to a happy conclusion. I did compose one of the tunes however in his honour, a waltz I named ‘The Gentleman Piper’.

The Gentleman Piper / composed by Barry Kerr

Interactive Score: The Gentleman Piper / Barry Kerr, composer

The Holy Trinity Reels

As a piper, for me the names of Willie Clancy, Seamus Ennis and Leo Rowsome always evoke strong emotions and really have a special place in my heart. I composed these three reels in honour of this Holy trinity of pipers. Their legacy is legend in the world of piping and cannot be overstated. While pouring through Liam’s collection it was lovely to find his thoughts on these great men. One note in particular stands out where he speaks of hearing Willie Clancy’s music for the first time:

Clancy from Clare / composed by Barry Kerr

Interactive Score: Clancy from Clare / Barry Kerr, composer

The Rambles of Ennis / composed by Barry Kerr

Interactive Score: The Rambles of Ennis / Barry Kerr, composer

Master Rowsome’s / composed by Barry Kerr

Interactive Score: Master Rowsome’s / Barry Kerr, composer

Songs in both English and Gaeilge were of profound importance to Liam’s musical life. He spoke of the sophistication of sean-nós singing and his renditions of songs on the pipes such as ‘Táimse im’ Chodladh’ are the stuff of legend.

I included one of my own songs named ‘Of Sportsmen Bold’ on the recording, a nod to Liam’s interest in country life. It tells a tale about some friends of mine who would hunt the fields around home when I was a youth. The song is written in the vein of the great Ulster hunting songs, and you will be glad to hear the hare in question gets to run another day!

I found a note among the collection where Liam relates that:

His words certainly ring true for me in my writing of this song.

Of Sportsmen Bold / written & composed by Barry Kerr

I’ll sing a song of days long gone, when I roamed so wild and free,

No river wide, nor mountain side did e’er put a hold on me,

I’d swim and climb in lake and brine, over heather, bog and briar,

From early light, ’til the dark of night, no hound could quell my fire.

’Til one morning came, whilst on the plain, near Lough Neagh’s verdant shores,

A band of men from Castle Lane, Kilwilkie, and the shore,

Their lurchers wild and hounds did cry and raised the sound of hell,

I was frightened then and I sighted Ben, Gentle from the lane.

Of sportsmen bold, I have been told, of Doran and McStay,

With dog and gun for sport and fun, they’d leave a hare to play,

But like thunder clouds his dogs aloud came Gentle from the lane,

His pride and joy a dog named Fly was the one to give me chase.

I turned his dog through field and bog, for mile on aching mile,

No place to hide, though how I tried, to lose him in my style,

But as darkness fell I heard the bells from St. Peter’s on the hill,

I went to ground and homeward bound went Gentle from the lane.

I remember days when as I’d stray and meet these Lurgan men,

But those times are gone, I’m free to roam the countryside all around,

But if on the air a sound I fear, haunting in the wind,

I mind the time I outran fly and Gentle from the lane.

Interactive Score: Of Sportsmen Bold / Barry Kerr, composer

I found it fascinating to see that Liam had kept all of his correspondence with festivals and promoters for gigs down through the years. It is a unique insight into the life of a travelling musician before the advent of the internet. These days we take for granted the simplicity of organising a concert by text or email and it is difficult to imagine the amount of work that was involved in organising a tour abroad in those times. I wrote this tune in honour of all the pipers who have travelled the roads to earn a living.

The Travelling Piper / composed by Barry Kerr

Interactive Score: The Travelling Piper/ Barry Kerr, composer

For good measure I wanted to include a tune I composed for flute on the recording. This is a tune I wrote on the occasion of the birth of my youngest nephew Dara which is named ‘The Dawn of Dara’. I included it on the Cairn recording along with my composition ‘Beatha óna Bhás’.

The Dawn of Dara / composed by Barry Kerr

Interactive Score: The Dawn of Dara / Barry Kerr, composer

All of the above compositions can be heard on my recent release Cairn.  For more details and to purchase Cairn https://barrykerr1.bandcamp.com/album/cairn

ITMA would like to thank Barry Kerr for permission to present his composed work as interactive scores.

I knew of Liam O’Flynn before I ever met him, of course. As a young boy in the early 1970s starting to play a few tunes on tin whistle, Mo Cheol Thú and The Long Note on RTÉ Radio 1 were very important in the weekly schedule. Mo Cheol Thú was often listened to in my parents’ bedroom, us children huddling in and Ciarán Mac Mathúna’s soft tones easing us all into a Sunday morning. I have a memory of hearing the clean, clear lines of O’Flynn’s piping on the programme – naturally, I could not have described back then the majesty of his uncluttered flow and the purity of his tone – but his piping did make some sort of impression on that young boy.

I started playing cello when I was seven or eight, and at eleven I got a practice set of pipes and duly phoned the uncle Tomás in Cork to ask where I might go for lessons. He gave me an address for Francie McPeake, “Middle Francie”, as he was known, and there I went for lessons every week for a few years. I was mad keen on pipes by now, absorbing as much as I could, listening and learning at every opportunity.

In August 1976, having competed successfully in the Ulster Fleadh the previous month, I got the chance to attend the Scoil Éigse in Buncrana, Co. Donegal and the uilleann pipe teacher was none other than my hero, Liam O’Flynn. It was a life-changing week…we all – and I remember others in the class included Máire Ní Ghráda, Marion McCarthy and Patrick Mollard – learned tunes and technique, but also in my own regard, Liam convinced me to change how I was holding the chanter with my upper hand – he indicated that as things were, there would be problems further down the road, that I was limiting myself technically. I was using the tips of the fingers on my left hand rather than the “flats” of the fingers. This trait I inherited from Francie McPeake, he in turn having picked this up from his own father who, before taking up pipes had played flute and fife, where tips of the fingers would have worked fine. I spent the best part of the next year re-educating my left hand and incorporating into my playing what I had gleaned from Liam that transformative week.

Apart from attending his concerts whenever I could, including various performances of The Brendan Voyage – and indeed one in Derry in which I was a cellist in the orchestra – the next time I saw Liam was in Dublin in 1988, in Slattery’s of Capel Street. Alongside Seán Corcoran and Dessie Wilkinson I was performing there in Cran and playing a good deal of cello as well as pipes. I remember being on stage and seeing Liam at the back of the room, that mixture of surprise, pleasure and trepidation coursing through my veins.

One afternoon a few months later, the phone rang and it was Liam on the other end, asking if we might meet up as he was thinking of starting a group and wondered if I’d be interested in joining him – he wanted to bring cello into his musical world and was keen to see where that might lead. You can imagine my sheer glee and excitement. We met up in Dundalk and agreed that we would give it a go and there began thirty years of friendship and collaboration.

Soon thereafter, Arty McGlynn and Nollaig Casey came onboard and the four of us toured occasionally together over the next few years. One of the first gigs was at a festival in France, performing to two thousand people in the grounds of a chateau. We played ‘Táimse im’ Chodladh’ that night – to be there in that setting, playing that piece, in that company – the memory still gives me goosebumps.

Liam and I continued to perform on and off during the 90s in various set-ups, occasional gigs, the odd skite into Europe, trips into studios (notably making the album The Fire Aflame in Ballyvourney in 1991) and of course some social gatherings too, with a goodly dollop of rascality and diversion thrown into the mix.

The Wheels of the World, reel; The Pinch of Snuff, reel; Micho Russell’s Reel. From: The Fire Aflame / Seán Keane; Matt Molloy; Liam O’Flynn (Claddagh Records, 1992)

The Planxty reunion in the early years of the new millennium was very important to Liam – after all, it was with that magical combination of himself, Christy, Donal and Andy that his life as a professional musician began in the early 1970s. Liam, like his father, had been a schoolteacher and it was no small gamble for him to leave that secure world behind and to head out into the great unknown. So when Planxty reformed for those few years, the sense of coming full circle was of considerable comfort and joy. Their concerts sold out everywhere, generations of adoring fans flocking in their droves to catch them. I was too young to have managed to see Planxty perform in their initial years, so getting the chance to see them live in 2002 carried with it something of history being recreated. They did a long run of gigs in Vicar Street and I remember phoning Liam as I drove into Dublin, asking him if ‘Little Musgrave’ was on the setlist – it was, and at one level, my life was now complete.

We got to co-operate at a different level in 2004 when I was commissioned to write a large-scale orchestral piece for Liam, ‘No Tongue Can Tell’, a work that opened the Belfast Festival at Queens. That marked a deepening of our relationship on both a professional and a personal level – collaborating at every stage during the composition of a substantial work specifically for him, writing to his strengths to acknowledge his music that I knew so well, but also writing in other ways to push the parameters and challenge us both. We became interdependent over the work’s creation and the trust and bond between us strengthened. A fascinating time that really was and I’m sorry we didn’t get to perform the work more often.

No Tongue Can Tell. Fourth movement. Sheltering Sound / Neil Martin, composer; Liam O’Flynn, uilleann pipes; Ulster Orchestra, instrumental music

Music finds outlets in various ways, and across 2008–9, a number of us found ourselves playing within a short enough timeframe at the funerals of some close friends and family – David Hammond, Liam’s father and Ciarán MacMathúna. We enjoyed, if one can say that, celebrating the lives of those wonderful people through music and decided that there should also be a few outings outside of funerals. We nonetheless and rather wonderfully called ourselves The Funeral Band and had a few most enjoyable gigs. In that posse were Seán Keane, Shaun Davey, Rita Connolly, Arty McGlynn, Noel Eccles, Rod McVey, Seamus Begley, Liam and myself – and Steve Cooney and Dónal Lunny sat in a few times too.

And then there was the quare trip Liam and I, inter alia, made to Romania in the summer of 2009. It was the premiere of a new work by Shaun Davey, Voices from the Merry Cemetery. The overnight train journey from Bucharest up through and over the Carpathian Mountains and almost as far as the Ukrainian border was quite something, the performances themselves unforgettable. We also laughed a great deal on that trip, the exhilaration and enjoyment of it all. But I knew that Liam was hating travel by then – it had become a necessary evil. He’d seen enough of airports and hotels.

We had a close mutual friend in Seamus Heaney, Liam and himself of course performing together over more than two decades as The Poet and The Piper. They were two men very much at ease with each other, both on and off the stage, two masters respecting and delighting in each other’s craft, two outstanding artists, volleying on a stage. Seamus’s sudden death in 2013 set the world reeling and Liam and I were to play at his funeral. I travelled the day before to Liam’s home near Athy to rehearse, and as we sat in his music room, we played music for almost an hour without speaking a single word. No words. Just music. That was enough. Liam had lost a very dear friend and a lot of the music we were rehearsing he’d played a mere ten days earlier when Seamus and himself had shared a stage in Derry. The power and emotion of music were never stronger for me than in that rehearsal and at the funeral the next day.

Not long after Seamus’s funeral, Liam was asked to bring together a group to perform a concert in the Abbey Theatre for ITMA, the essential and glorious archive of traditional music in Dublin. The other three he asked were Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Paddy Glackin and myself, and after the pleasure of the Abbey gig, we gave some more concerts and the more we played, the more we enjoyed the whole experience. We had all inter-collaborated in different ways over many years, knew each other well and it was nothing other than a great pleasure to be sitting making fine music together. The last concert this all too short-lived quartet played was in November 2016 in Armagh, in the cathedral there. Liam was not himself backstage … he was very subdued and his weight loss was most noticeable. Paddy and I shared our anxieties and sadly within a few months, his terminal illness had been diagnosed. And shockingly, around the same time, Mícheál became gravely ill too.

Liam bravely faced into his illness in the full knowledge that there was no road back, and when I visited him at home, he talked a number of times about his childhood days and how happy they were. Liam’s father, also Liam, was from Kerry and the O’Flynn family would often head there for a summer break. Liam’s father drove a motor-bike and this was their mode of transport on those trips back west – Liam senior up front, his wife Masie riding pillion, and in the side car Liam and his siblings, Maureen and Mícheál. An essential stop on the way there was at Gleann na nGealt (The Glen of the Mad People), a magnificent and expansive glen out towards Dingle. There, Liam senior would recount the local lore and myth of the place, of the healing powers of the water and the watercress in the glen, and young Liam found this mesmerising. As Liam then in his illness recounted this to me, his eyes were dancing with happiness and delight at the memory. The very finest and happiest of days, he would say.

I wanted to write a piece of music for Liam at that time, not to write something afterwards to mark his death as such, but rather to celebrate him in life, and I felt it essential that he got to hear it. So, armed with the image of a young Liam stepping out of the side car, standing there in his short grey-flannels, agape at the beauty and power of Gleann na nGealt, I wrote ‘The Boy in the Glen’. I composed it with Paddy Glackin in mind to play it and one Sunday a few months before he died, we visited Liam and his wife Jane and Paddy played the air over a few times for Liam. Sadly, his health deteriorated sharply not long after that and I only got to see Liam again a few times before he died.

Liam died on 14th March 2018 – and Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin on 7th November. As Paddy Glackin said to me – “half our quartet died this year”

The Boy in the Glen, air / composed by Neil Martin ; West Ocean String Quartet, instrumental music

There was an aura, a forcefield to his music, the piping of Leo Rowsome, Wille Clancy and Seamus Ennis funnelled down through him and out to us. He was influenced by fiddle players and singers and flute players too, and indeed by any musician who moved him. And his passions didn’t lie solely within traditional music either – he enjoyed Bach and Haydn and Vivaldi and Elgar and a whole broad cross-section of genres.

He loved horses all his life and was a most able rider – Jane and himself kept a beautiful yard with some very fine mounts indeed. In his day, Liam was a great steady golfer to boot, a low single-handicapper at one stage. (Himself, Paddy Glackin, David Brophy and I had a most wonderful four-ball at Rosses Point in 2015 – it took us days to recover).

Liam was of a curious nature and read widely, often winnowing what he read into short quotes that he would write on cards and place in his music room, condensed reminders that would offer a way to consider certain things afresh. He took his role in life seriously – he was always prepared and he took pride in his craft.

Like gazing up into a clear starlit winter sky, Liam’s music is boundless and in hundreds of years, people will still marvel at it. There was a consistency to it all, a great hallmark of O’Flynn’s that – consistency. The steady piper, the true friend, the golfer who could shoot three or four pars in a row, the reliable collaborator … always there. After Liam died, his occasional musical partner of more than thirty years, the organist Catherine Ennis, along with Paddy Glackin and myself, played some concerts and Liam’s presence was there still, on stage every time we played, his mark indelible on all three of us. Tragically, Catherine died on Christmas Eve, 2020.

My almost whole-life encounter with Liam, stretching out now over five decades, was deeply enriching at many and various levels and it significantly helped me shape my own way of going. I learned a great deal from the man about music itself, and also about the profession of music – about life, really. We shared many great times and I believe we made some decent music. I consider myself very fortunate to have been in his orbit.

Written by: Neil Martin

Blog Editor: Grace Toland

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Leo Rowsome (1903–1970) was a third generation uilleann piper.  His musical and pipe making skills were inherited from his grandfather Samuel Rowsome from Ballintore. Co. Wexford and his father William who established the family pipe making and repair business in Dublin.  One of six musical children, Leo was to play a pivotal role in the revival of uilleann piping in Ireland as a pipe maker, performer, teacher, organiser, advocate & publisher. He performed extensively in Ireland and abroad, and broadcast on both radio and televsion.  His recording career began in the era of the 78 rpm disc and  Leo recorded with a number of 78 rpm record companies and on vinyl with Claddagh and Topic Records. 

The Rowsome piping tradition continues through fifth and sixth generations of the family in both playing, pipe making and publishing. 

Material and references to Leo Rowsome feature throughout the ITMA Collection and have been the focus of two previously published digital features.

Leo Rowsome King of the Pipers, 78rpm Disc Recordings, 1926-1944 [Sound recording playlist]

Leo Rowsome on the Bill: Concert Posters, 1940s-1950s [Image gallery]

Today 20 September 2020, as well as the digital publishing of the 1936 Tutor, we are also delighted to feature below a written contribution from Leo’s daughter Helena Rowsome Grimes. 

When my father, played happily at my wedding on 10 August 1970, little did I know that he would die suddenly six weeks later.  I spoke with him from Belfast on the night before he travelled to Riverstown, Co. Sligo, where he was to adjudicate The Fiddler of Dooney Competition.  Noticing that he didn’t sound well, I asked him to try and get someone to go in his place, to which he replied “I wouldn’t let them down.”  That, and a “Cheerio” were his last words to me.  

That was the nature of the man, who lived for and by the uilleann pipes.

Through his work as performer, teacher and maker of the uilleann pipes, Leo has been credited with saving the instrument from possible extinction.

In his workshop at the back of his family home, he repaired and refurbished instruments by the old masters, including those of his own father, William, ensuring their preservation for posterity.  

Leo recorded on 78 rpm extensively for HMV, Decca and Columbia records. In forming Claddagh Records, Garech de Brún and Ivor Browne (both pupils of Leo’s) thought it to be essential that a complete long-playing record should be made of Leo’s piping, and so “Rí na bPíobairí” became the title of Claddagh’s first vinyl album. The first album proved to be a great success and that was followed by the piping of another of Leo’s former pupils, Paddy Moloney, playing with The Chieftains on their first Claddagh’s album.

Leo was a global ambassador for Irish traditional music. He was the one who was asked by the Irish Government to entertain diplomats and visitors  to Ireland. Always on time, well dressed and charismatic, with his pipes shining and in perfect tune, he was a true professional. In his performances from Dublin to Fontainebleau, Covent Garden or Carnegie Hall, Leo brought the uilleann pipes to a wide audience, and in doing so earned huge respect for the music he played and for the uilleann pipes.

He appeared in a number of films, including Nora O’Neill (1934); Irish Hearts (1935); Broth of a Boy (1959); Home is the Hero (1959) and The Playboy of the Western World (1961).

There is no doubt that one of Leo’s greatest contributions to traditional Irish music was his appointment as uilleann pipes teacher in Dublin’s Municipal School of Music, at a very young age. It was the renowned Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin RIP, who asked me the cleverest of questions: “How did your father get a job teaching Irish music in a classical music institution” at the age of just seventeen”?

Samuel Rowsome and his wife, Mary were themselves clever in sending their three sons, William, Tom and John to learn the theory of music from a German teacher of music, Frederick Jacobowitch, who lived near their Ballintore home, in the Ferns area of Co. Wexford at that time. Then, in true tradition, William passed that knowledge on to his son, Leo who became an expert in the theory of music, and notated on manuscript all the tunes for his pupils, who themselves benefited greatly from Leo’s instruction. Another factor was that Leo was a kind man who presented himself well, had a great sense of decorum and knew how to communicate with people from all walks of life.   

Leo Rowsome revived the Pipers’ Club (Cumann na bPiobairi Uilleann) in 1936, having called thirty of his senior pupils to attend a Siamsa Mór in the Phoenix Park, Dublin. He became President of the Club and in 1946, the Club moved to Aras Ceannt, 14 Thomas Street, Dublin. Leo and Tom Rowsome, together with their colleagues and friends from Cumann na bPíobairí Uilleann were adamant that a national organisation for the promotion of Irish traditional music should be formed. Leo began writing to musicians country-wide to alert them.  Much work was done, and mileage covered by Leo’s brother Tom in what was known as his “Comhaltas” car!  It was from the “Club” that Cumann Ceoltóirí na hÉireann was formed, which lead to the formation in 1951 of Comhaltas Ceoltoirí Éireann. 

Na Piobairi Uilleann, the organisation for the promotion of the uilleann pipes was formed in 1968 and Leo, with Seamus Ennis were its first patrons.  Its current CEO, Gay McKeon was a pupil of Leo’s. 

Ensuring that the Rowsome tradition of piping and music-making was passed on to his family to be safe for future generations, Leo left an enormous legacy of archival and commercial recordings.  He continued his father’s work by completing his Tutor for the Uilleann pipes and dedicating it to him. [now digitised and available online from ITMA]

I had the privilege of having a book of my father’s reels and jigs The Leo Rowsome Collection of Irish Music – 428 reels and jigs from the pen of master piper, Leo Rowsome published by Waltons to commemorate the Centenary of his birth in 2003. The tunes in the book are Leo’s own versions, handed down to him by his father, grandfather and uncles. The book which is dedicated to my parents also contains some of Leo’s own compositions. 

Leo’s daily schedule was a busy one: He worked making pipes, reeds, carrying our repairs in his workshop every morning, until he took the bus to Dublin’s Municipal School of Music on Chatham Row in the afternoons, where he taught until 9 or 9.30 p.m.  On arrival home, he would be encouraged by my mother to write a few more tunes before supper – It is that collection of reels and jigs, some of Leo’s own compositions, that I had published by Waltons in 2003. In that collection, ironically, the last tune he wrote was a jig – Goodbye and a Blessing.

Leo’s wife, Helena was a fantastic support to him in every aspect of his work. A musician herself with a good singing voice, she worked as a Primary School Teacher in a local school where she also was involved in choral work after school.  She had a deep appreciation of Leo’s talents and always did what she could to ensure that he had peace to complete those wonderful sets of uilleann pipes in his workshop at the back of the family home on Dublin’s north-side.

Leo and Helena had four children. Leon (1936-1994) was a superb uilleann piper and Liam (1939-1997) a genius on the fiddle. Liam and Tommy Potts playing together were, without doubt, the Menuhin and Grappelli of Irish traditional fiddle playing. My twin, Olivia teaches piano and music in our families continues to endure.

Piping in the family reached its 5^th generation, with Leon’s son, Kevin, and is now in its 6^th generation with his daughters and their cousins playing pipes. 

Thankfully, pipes made by Leo and his father, William, are in the hands of some of today’s excellent uilleann pipers world-wide.

Leo’s unique set of uilleann pipes, the set he began making in 1922 and played for his entire professional life, is now part of the Irish national collection and patrimony at The National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, where they are on display for the entire world to see.  Gifting Leo Rowsome’s own handmade set of pipes to the people of Ireland fulfils a guiding principle of Leo’s, i.e. that the cultural heritage of the uilleann pipes belongs to everyone.

On Leo’s 30^th Anniversary, Mr Justice Vivian Lavan (a former pupil of Leo’s) gave a superb address at his graveside. I quote:

My first meeting with Leo was in the Pipers’ Club, Thomas Street, Dublin, where he held his Saturday evening classes. Even to my youthful and untutored eye, I knew that I was in the presence of a true professional. There he was in his bow tie, carrying his avuncular air, exhibiting a charm and courtesy – traits which endured for the years I knew him.

Like many other pipers, I joined the ranks of his pupils in the Municipal School of Music in Chatham Street. As a pupil I witnessed the true professional work. Leo had an unfailing and unflappable ability to each and to encourage from the very youthful to the more mature!  His teaching method was always one to one – never master to neophyte. His encouragement to try again, if the performance was less than ought to have been expected – and after that encouragement, he would take an empty manuscript and transpose on these some apposite and suitable piece of music to whet the pupil’s appetite. My years as such a pupil were a shared delight.  The second part of his teaching took place in the Pipers’ Club in Thomas Street on a Saturday evening. As in law, so also in the Pipers’ Club, there was strict order of precedence, from the youngest to the most senior. There boys of my vintage were to rub shoulders with some who were later to become household names – such as Paddy Moloney, Garech Browne, Liam óg O’Flynn and Des Geraghty. Those Saturday evenings some 45 years later are still firm in my memory for the commitment to the preservation and dissemination of Irish music, and the practice and playing of the uilleann pipes, which Leo gave. In this endeavour, he was ably supported by the Seerys, Tuohys, Crystals, McClouds, Pat Noonan and Tom McCabe, my uncle, and all of the others who in those dim, difficult and distant days had the vision to develop the organisation and structure of Irish music generally and of uilleann piping in particular. I began then to understand the contribution which Leo had been making to the popularisation of the uilleann pipes in the decades from the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

Vivian Lavan (1944-2011) died on 17 August 2011. He was enrolled as a pupil of Leo’s at the School of Music 1957-1960. 

Text written by Helena Rowsome Grimes, Nicholas Carolan [previous features] & Grace Toland.

Presented by Grace Toland.

September, 2020

The Irish Traditional Music Archive has been making audio field recordings since 1995 and video field recordings since 2001 at the annual William Kennedy International Piping Festival in Armagh city and district. The festival was established in 1994 by the Armagh Pipers Club and organised by a committee led by Brian and Eithne Vallely. It was named in honour of the blind maker and developer of uilleann pipes William Kennedy. He was born in Banbridge, Co Down, in 1768 and was sent to Armagh as a child to learn music. Largely self-taught as a craftsman, he supported his family by making pipes, clocks, and furniture. He is believed to have made more that thirty sets of uilleann pipes before his death in Tandragee in 1834. The festival has put an emphasis from the first on the universality of bagpipes; it regularly features pipers of bellows-blown and mouth-blown pipes from Europe, America, and Africa. It also emphases the interaction of bagpipes with other instruments and with various vocal traditions.

The video selections published here were recorded by ITMA staff over two days at the 10th William Kennedy Festival of 2004, on 20–21 November in the restored Primate’s Chapel. They feature the Dublin musicians Michael O’Brien, uilleann pipes, & Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, fiddle; the singers Brian Mullen from Derry and Anne Martin from the Isle of Skye; Belfast poet Gearóid Mac Lochlainn with Jarleth Henderson, Armagh, uilleann pipes; and Co Longford uilleann pipers Peter & Noel Carberry.

With thanks to the featured musicians, singers and poet for their permission to publish their performances here, and to Brian and Eithne Vallely & the Armagh Pipers Club for the facilitation of ITMA’s field recording at the Festival over the years.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 October 2012

Dublin musician Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, of Leitrim ancestry, has become internationally known over the last decade for his innovative playing of Irish traditional music on the fiddle, and for his artistic collaborations with musicians and artists in other musics and genres, as well as in Irish traditional music. In recent years he has taken up the viola and Norwegian hardanger fiddle.

But from his teens Caoimhín has also played traditional music on other instruments, whistle and flute among them, and especially also on uilleann pipes (under the tutelage first of Joe Doyle). Having graduated from Trinity College Dublin in physics, he moved for a time to Miltown Malbay, Co Clare, to study the making of uilleann pipes with pipemaker Geoff Wooff.

The selection of videos reproduced here from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive of Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh’s uilleann piping represents his playing as it was in 2003 and 2004, and some of his observations on pipemaking. They were recorded mainly in Caoimhín’s cottage in Miltown Malbay during the Willie Clancy Summer School of July 2003 and also at the international William Kennedy Piping Festival in Armagh city in November 2004, introduced by Eithne Vallely.

With thanks to Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh for permission to reproduce these recordings, and to Eithne Vallely and the William Kennedy Piping Festival for their cooperation.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 February 2012

Having begun in 1993 a programme of audio studio recording, with ancillary video recording, soon after it had moved to new premises at 63 Merrion Square, Dublin (see here for details), the Irish Traditional Music Archive continued with the programme in 1994 and 1995. Again these recordings were made by Aidan McGovern, Glenn Cumiskey and Sadhbh Nic Ionnraic, and interviews were conducted by Nicholas Carolan, with the aim of documenting material and performance technique rather than producing items for publication.

Three performers among those recorded in those years were: Limerick-born and Galway-resident accordion player and repairer Charlie Harris, who has been much influenced by historic Irish-American recordings and who was in those years a long-time member of the group Shaskeen; Eilís Ní Shúilleabháin, a member of a well regarded west Cork family of traditional singers and an Oireachtas prize-winner, who was then living in Co Limerick; and Dublin uilleann piper (and whistle and flute player) Peter Browne, now also well known as a presenter and producer with the national broadcaster RTÉ Radio. A selection of their video recordings is reproduced below, courtesy of the artists.

The full audio and video recordings from which these selections come are available for reference listening and viewing within ITMA.

ITMA is grateful to Charlie Harris, to Eilís Ní Shúilleabháin, & to Peter Browne for permission to bring these recordings to a wider audience than was originally envisaged.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 February 2013

On 7 January 2015 occurred the 101st anniversary of the death of the notable Limerick traditional music collector Patrick Weston Joyce (1827–1914) whose published and unpublished music collections have been digitised by Irish Traditional Music Archive staff in the course of the past centenary year, and are now freely available on its website (formerly the PW Joyce Irish Music Microsite).

Joyce’s music collections are of great historical, social and regional interest, but their overriding contemporary value is as a source of music. His music notations, published song words and ballad-sheet collection, and the ITMA interactive music scores created from his melodies, all constitute a rich seedbed of traditional music and song for re-creation by musicians and singers of the present day.

To mark the occasion of the anniversary and the end of the centenary year, ITMA has added to its Joyce Microsite a selection of videos recorded recently by its staff on location in Newport, Co Tipperary, and Kinvara, Co Galway, and in its studio in Dublin. The recordings feature a number of contemporary musicians and singers – all of whom have had their own previous and varied connections with the music and song of Joyce – performing their re-creations of sample items from his collections. They have kindly agreed to be recorded for presentation here.

Nicholas Carolan and Danny Diamond, 7 January 2015

From the early years of the Willie Clancy Summer School, which was founded in Miltown Malbay, Co Clare, in 1973, Na Píobairí Uilleann, the Dublin-based organisation for uilleann pipers, has played a central role in organising the teaching, refurbishing and playing of the pipes at the School.

From the 1980s, uilleann pipers played for their fellow pipers on an organised basis after morning classes at their centre on the Ballard Road, and in recent years these lunchtime recitals have moved to take place in Halla an Phobail, the Miltown Malbay community hall, for the wider audience of all those attending the School.

Presented here are Halla an Phobail performances, recorded by Irish Traditional Music Archive staff,  by two of the leading contemporary pipers who featured at the July 2011 recitals: Mickey Dunne of Limerick and Jimmy O’Brien Moran of Waterford.

With thanks to the performers for permission to upload recordings of their playing here, and to Na Píobairí Uilleann and the Willie Clancy Summer School for facilitating ITMA in making the recordings.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 February 2014

The William Kennedy Piping Festival held annually in Armagh is an international celebration of Irish and global piping traditions. It is organised by the Armagh Pipers Club who themselves are celebrating their 50th anniversary in 2016. ITMA has field collected regularly at this event capturing an important range of performers and traditions. As well as featuring individual pipers, duets, trios and groups form an important part in event programming at the festival.

In 2006 uilleann piper Robbie Hannan and fiddle player Dermot McLaughlin performed at a concert in the Market Place Theatre, Armagh. As they said themselves this was ‘the third concert in a world tour that had begun two years previously and had already taken in Donegal and Cork!’

ITMA will be field recording at the 23rd William Kennedy Piping Festival in Armagh, 17-20 November 2016.

With thanks to Robbie Hannan and Dermot McLaughlin for permission to make this recording available online.

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

ITMA was delighted to hear in April 2022 that it had been awarded a Community Heritage Grant from the Heritage Council for its project “Physical to Digital: A Complete Scanning Solution for the Irish Traditional Music Archive.” This funding has enabled ITMA to purchase a state-of-the-art specialised large format archival scanning system. Presented below is a collection of LP covers which have been digitised for Heritage Week 2022 using this new scanner.

The scanner which was manufactured by I2S a French company who specialise in image capture and processing is A2 in size. This machine enables ITMA to scan a range of large-format materials which we have been unable to do in-house in the past. Materials like large-sized sheet music, posters, LP covers, a wide range of manuscripts, printed books, periodicals and images. This specialised equipment will future-proof the safe in-house digitisation of all this material for many years to come.

Watch the behind-the-scenes video which documents the installation of this new state-of-the-art scanning system and read our Heritage Week blog here.
Heritage Week 2022 – ITMA Scanner – YouTube

The ITMA LP Collection

The Irish Traditional Music Archive has over 4,100 LPs in its collection.

The 1950s was the first full decade in which the new long-playing vinyl discs (LPs) were on sale. Being easily scratched or warped, the discs were sold in stiff cardboard sleeves, unlike their predecessors, the 78 rpm discs, which normally came in printed paper bags (and sometimes in cardboard ‘albums’ like photograph albums). The cardboard sleeves gave record companies the opportunity to use graphic design to set up favourable associations for the music on the records and thus attract customers. The typical disc was 12 inches in diameter (some were 10) and the sleeves provided a large image surface for artists and photographers. (Nicholas Carolan, 1 October 2011)

The LPs presented here are from a collection recently donated to ITMA by the Mac Ionnraic Family. They mostly date from the 1970s and 1980s with one published in 1968 by Gael Linn – Trup, trup, a chapaillín. The collection includes recordings of Irish and English language songs as well as instrumental music. Many of the artists and groups popular at the time are represented in this collection including Clannad, De Dannan, The Black Family, Moving Hearts, etc.

The selection presented here is only the tip of the iceberg, with this new large-format scanner ITMA hopes in time to scan every LP cover in its collection!

Another gallery of LP sleeve designs from the 1950s is available below.

With thanks to the Mac Ionnraic Family.

The family photographs of those involved in Irish traditional music are often a valuable informal record of the music as seen from the inside, and preserve images and memories of events, activities and organisations that would otherwise be forgotten. This is the case with a selection of images recently donated to the Irish Traditional Music Archive by Síle Quinn-Davidson of London and Ballinasloe, Co Galway, in memory of her father James Quinn, and reproduced here.

James Quinn (1915–1960), born in Briarfield, Ballinasloe, Co Galway, was an uilleann piper and piccolo player who was prominent in Irish music circles in London in the 1940s and 1950s. Left-handed, he played a set of pipes made for him by Leo Rowsome of Dublin, and made his own reeds. Having gone to work in Kilburn, London, as a young man, he took part in many house sessions there with other traditional musicians from the 1940s, and also played in Irish dance halls such as The Hibernian on Fulham Broadway and The Banba in Kilburn. With his wife Susan (née Doherty) from Dungannon, Co Tyrone, a singer with a large repertory of Irish songs learned from her grandmother, he kept an open house for musicians, playing music particularly with uilleann piper Tommy Coley from Mullingar, Co Westmeath, fiddle player Tom Sullivan from Cork, London-born uilleann piper Pat Goulding, and fiddle player Julia Clifford from Kerry. Following a routine operation James Quinn died in his mid-forties. A huge funeral procession accompanied his coffin to the Mail Train at Euston Station, led by warpiper Larry O’Dowd, and he was buried in Abbeyknockmoy, Co Galway.

His daughter Síle, a stepdancer, was one of the first pupils of the Ted Kavanagh School of Dancing in Cricklewood, and was a prizewinner at Bethnal Green Feis. Music continues in the present generation of the Quinn family: in Briarfield, accordion player Gary, singer Norrie, and banjo and mandolin player Kieran, and in Dublin, singer and guitarist Michael Quinn.

With thanks for images and information to Síle Quinn-Davidson, Galway, and Jimmy Shields, London

Nicholas Carolan, 1 February 2010

Postscript

Since this web page was first put up, we have received a scan of another photograph of James Quinn by donation from Reg Hall, the well known London musician and music historian who has been closely involved with Irish traditional music activity in London since the 1950s. Reg only saw James Quinn once, in the Ceilidh Club in Cecil Sharp House one Sunday afternoon in the mid-1950s. He clearly remembers him singing and playing the pipes at the same time; the song was She Moved through the Fair.

Reg’s photo, now the last one in the sequence, was taken in The Bedford Arms pub, Arlington Road, Camden Town, London, c. 1956. He received it from the late Tony Martin, but it is by an unknown photographer. It shows, left to right, Tommy Maguire almost hidden (accordion), Michael Gorman (fiddle), Paddy Breen (flageolet), Margaret Barry (banjo), James (aka Seamus, Jim) Quinn (uilleann pipes), & Tony Martin (fiddle). The man in front may have been named Liddy.

With thanks for photograph and information to Reg Hall.

NC, March 2010

There have been professional musicians engaged in Irish traditional music for as long as we have music documentation: travelling harpers and pipers, village fiddlers, dancing masters, keening women. But opportunities for professional traditional musicians declined sharply after the Great Famine, and apart from some Irish stage musicians in America and some ceili band and other musicians in Ireland, few traditional performers could make a living from traditional music until the 1960s and 1970s.

In those decades, with increasing national prosperity and growing professionalism in all kinds of Irish music, small numbers of traditional groups began to enter into contractual arrangements with record companies and to engage professional managers to organise international tours and look after their other interests. Among the duties of managers was the provision of copyright-free publicity photographs of their clients to festival organisers and media outlets. By the 1980s these photographs had advanced from being random images of the musicians to including management contact details as standard.

These photographs now form part of the biographies of professional groups and help chart their personnel changes. ITMA accordingly collects such photographs and is always keen to increase its collections of them. It recently received a considerable accession of these photographs which were rescued from a rubbish skip by ITMA staff outside an Irish national newspaper.

ITMA always welcomes the donation of such materials or the opportunity to copy them.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 June 2009

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

The Dublin photographer and film editor Tony Kearns is best known in Irish traditional music circles for his ongoing project of documenting the annual Willie Clancy Summer School in Miltown Malbay, Co Clare. He has been photographing performers and audiences there since 1991, and has built up an enormous archive of images from the School. The Irish Traditional Music Archive is pleased to hold many of these for public reference: at last count we have over 1,700 – our largest collection of pictures from any one source.

Most of these pictures are black-and-white, Tony Kearns’s favourite medium. This preference is seen also in his book A Touchstone for the Tradition: The Willie Clancy Summer School (with Barry Taylor; Dingle, Co Kerry: Brandon, 2003) and in his published art-book of photographs from the WCSS: Music & Light. Ceol & Solas: Irish Traditional Music Photography (Enniskerry, Co Wicklow: Silver Spear Press, 2008).

But Tony also explores the medium of colour photography in his work of documentation, and the selection of colour images presented here were taken by him at recent Willie Clancy Schools, in 2012 and 2013 when the School was in its 41st and 42nd years.

With thanks to Tony Kearns www.tonykearns.net for permission to publish.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 August 2014

Leo Rowsome (1903–1970) was a third generation uilleann piper. His musical and pipe making skills were inherited from his grandfather Samuel Rowsome from Ballintore. Co. Wexford and his father William who established the family pipe making and repair business in Dublin. One of six musical children, Leo was to play a pivotal role in the revival of uilleann piping in Ireland as a pipe maker, performer, teacher, organiser, advocate & publisher. He performed extensively in Ireland and abroad, and broadcast on both radio and televsion. Leo recorded with a number of 78 rpm record companies and on vinyl with Claddagh and Topic Records.

This image gallery contains 8 posters advertising Leo in concert in Ireland and Britain during the 1940s and 1950s, as well as some unique family photographs and an interesting piece of performance contract correspondence. Posters in the archival world are classed as ‘Ephemera’ . Like flyers and concert programmes these paper mementoes are often the only archival record of many concerts and events which tell the earlier story of traditional music and entertainment in both Ireland and abroad.

The Rowsome piping tradition continues through fourth and fifth generations of the family in both playing, pipe making and publishing.

We are indebted to Leo’s daughter Helena who donated these posters and photographs to ITMA and gave permission to share them online. Publishing this gallery inspired us to also feature a selection of Leo’s piping in an audio playlist of his 78 rpm disc recordings from 1926–1944.

We would like to thank Helena Rowsome for the images and also the donors of the 78 rpm discs which make up this tribute to the King of the Pipers Leo Rowsome.