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

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

The William Kennedy International Piping Festival has been held annually in Armagh city and district since 1994. Founded by Brian & Eithne Vallely of the Armagh Pipers Club, which has been teaching and publishing traditional music widely in Armagh since 1966, the festival is named after William Kennedy (1768–1834), a blind musician, uilleann-pipe maker and inventor who died in Co Armagh. While the uilleann pipes are the focus of the Armagh Pipers Club, the festival itself celebrates the wide diversity of mouth-blown and bellows-blown pipes and bagpipes that are played across Europe and further afield, and it brings together pipers (and other musicians) from different countries and different piping traditions. Recitals, concerts, workshops, lectures, exhibitions, and impromptu sessions of piping are at the heart of the William Kennedy Festival.

Dutch designer and photographer Paul Eliasberg began learning the uilleann pipes in the 1990s, and spent some months in Ireland learning from the Dublin piper Néillidh Mulligan. With his singer wife Thirza, he settled in Armagh in 2003, where their family has been born. From 2004 to date he has been documenting the William Kennedy Festival with his camera, and has kindly donated copies of photographs in his copyright to the Irish Traditional Music Archive for public access. The selection presented here covers a wide range of north and east European pipes, and pipes from the Mediterranean countries, as played at the festival.

PS ITMA has been making audio and video field-recordings at the WKPF since its early years and these recordings are available for reference listening and viewing in its premises. In 2003 a selection of these audio recordings (made for ITMA by Glenn Cumiskey) was published by the Armagh Pipers Club on the CD Live Recordings from the William Kennedy Piping Festival. For further information visit the website here.

With thanks to Paul Eliasberg, the subjects of his photographs, and the William Kennedy International Piping Festival. ITMA always welcomes such donations or the opportunity to copy such materials.

Nicholas Carolan, 1 June 2010

Luke Cheevers, from the old Dublin fishing village of Ringsend, is a dramatic and entertaining singer specialising in Dublin songs, and he has been a familiar performer at singing festivals in all parts of Ireland since the 1970s. For many years he has also been a stalwart of the Góilín Singers Club which has met regularly in a variety of Dublin venues since the early 1980s. Luke is also a photographer, and he has donated a selection of his photographs taken at musical events in the 1990s to the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

Those reproduced here were taken mainly at the Góilín Club when it met in the Ferryman pub at Sir John Rogerson’s Quay on the Liffey and later in the Trinity Inn on Pearse St; others come from the Féile na Bóinne festival in Drogheda, and elsewhere.

With thanks to Luke Cheevers.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 August 2011

Ken Garland, of the London design company Ken Garland & Associates, has been active since the 1950s as a graphic designer, the art editor of Design magazine, a writer and lecturer on design, and a photographer with many exhibitions to his name.

In 1990 he began photographing Irish traditional singers and singers from elsewhere, and their audiences, annually at Ulster singing festivals in Derry City; Slieve Gullion, Co Armagh; and Inishowen and Fahan, Co Donegal. This work culminated in ‘The Singing’, a 1999 exhibition with catalogue of 70 sympathetic and revealing portraits of traditional singers, which was shown at these festivals. The exhibition was organised by the Slieve Gullion Festival of Traditional Singing in conjunction with the Tí Chulainn Centre in Mallaghbawn, Co Armagh, with the aid of funding from the Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust.

In 2008 Ken Garland generously donated the entire exhibition to the Irish Traditional Music Archive for public access. The following photographs are a selection of the portraits from ‘The Singing’, listed with the counties in which they were taken and their dates.

With thanks to Ken Garland and the subjects of his photographs. ITMA always welcomes such donations or the opportunity to copy such materials.

Nicholas Carolan, 1 December 2008

As usual, 2013 was a busy year for the recording staff of the Irish Traditional Music Archive who were at work at festivals and concerts, recitals and lectures throughout the country. Hundreds of hours of music, song and dance were captured on audio and video, and have been transferred to user-friendly formats, and catalogued, for access by present-day visitors to ITMA and for posterity.

The selection of audio recordings presented here from just some of the ITMA 2013 recording trips are a sampler of what is available to visitors. The recordings were made variously at the Inishowen Singers International Folk Song and Ballad Seminar in Donegal in March, at the Cruinniú na bhFliúit gathering in west Cork in April, at the Willie Clancy Summer School in west Clare in July, at the Frank Harte Festival in Dublin in September, at the William Kennedy Piping Festival in Armagh in November, and at the first-ever ITMA concert the same month in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

With thanks to the artists for permission to reproduce their performances, and to the organisers of the various events for their cooperation in facilitating ITMA’s recording activity.

Nicholas Carolan & Danny Diamond, 1 December 2013

Gerry O’Hanlon was a singer, social worker from Mullaghbawn, Co Armagh. He was a founder member of the Sliabh Gullion Festival of Traditional Singing (based on the villages of Forkhill and Mullaghbawn in south Co Armagh) which from 1982 introduced singers from all over Ireland and Britain to memorable days and nights of music in a scenic part of Ireland until then little-known to them. An entertaining and humorous companion and a great friend of the late Tom Munnelly, founding chairman of the Archive, Gerry served on the ITMA Board from 1996 to 2001, and was its Treasurer in those years.

Musician, author, and music teacher, Annie Patterson was born 27 October 1868 in Lurgan, Co. Armagh, daughter of Thomas Rankin Patterson, bakery owner, and Martha Macaulay Patterson (née Wilson), a distant relative of Lord Macaulay. She attended Alexandra College, Dublin, on a scholarship, studying music under Dr James Culwick (d. 1907). She continued her studies at the RIAM under Robert Stewart and obtained a BA and Mus.B. (1887) and a Mus.D. (1889) from the RUI. Patterson was the first woman in Ireland or Britain to receive a doctorate in music that was not honorary.. She made her debut as a solo organist at the age of 15 and was the organist at several Dublin churches (1887–97). She acted as an examiner in music at the RUI (1892–5) and at TCD (1892–5). During the 1890s she became interested in the Irish language, taking classes and joining the Gaelic League. She encouraged the notion that the development of the language should be accompanied by a revival in Irish music. She published Six original Gaelic songs (1896) and was the prime mover behind the first Feis Ceoil, which met in Dublin, 18 May 1897. She was on the organising committee of the first Oireachtas, held in the Round Room of the Rotunda, Dublin, on the day following the Feis Ceoil. She conducted a choir which had been especially assembled to sing Gaelic songs for the occasion, and composed the music for ‘Go mairidh ár nGaedhilg slán’, an anthem for the Gaelic League, the words of which were written by Dermot Foley. Her commitment to fusing classical music with the Irish cultural revival is reflected in her composition of two operas, ‘The high-king’s daughter’ and ‘Oisín’.

She had conducted the Dublin Choral Union (1891–3) and in 1898 she moved to London to become conductor of the Hampstead Harmonic Society. She lived in London until 1908, during which time she published The story of oratario (1902), Schumann (1903), and Chats with music lovers (1905). She then went to Cork to become the organist at St Anne’s, Shandon, prompting her to write a choral piece, ‘The bells of Shandon’. She was examiner in music at the Cork Municipal School of Music (1914–19) and the Leinster School of Music (1919–26). In 1924 she was appointed corporation lecturer in music at UCC, a position she held until her death. Among her other publications were How to listen to an orchestra (1913) and The profession of music (1926). She also contributed to various journals and gave a series of popular radio broadcasts. She had to cancel a broadcast when she fell ill with a cold in January 1934. The cold became pleurisy and she died 16 January at 43 South Mall, Cork. She left £1,632.

Contributed by
Murphy, William

Sources
W. A. Houston Collison, Dr Collison in and on Ireland (1908), 136; O’Donoghue; Cork Examiner, Ir. Independent, Ir. Press, 17 Jan. 1934; WWW; Stanley Sadie (ed.), The new Grove dictionary of music and musicians, xiv (1980); Anne V. O’Connor and Susan M. Parkes, Gladly learn and gladly teach (1984), 85; Donncha Ó Suilleabháin, Scéal an Oireachtas 1897–1924 (1984), 15, 95; DIH; Beathaisnéis 1882–1982, iii; John A. Murphy, The college (1995), 242; Kit and Cyril Ó Céirín, Women of Ireland: a biographic dictionary (1996); Fintan Vallely (ed.), The companion to Irish traditional music (1999), 121, 279

PUBLISHING INFORMATION
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.007229.v1
Originally published October 2009 as part of the Dictionary of Irish Biography Contributed by
Murphy, William

Last revised October 2009
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