The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland - Hardcover

White, Professor Harry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1906359784 ISBN 13: 9781906359782

Publisher: University College Dublin Press, 2013

Synopsis

The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (EMIR) is the first comprehensive attempt to chart Irish musical life across recorded history. It also documents Ireland's musical relations with the world at large, notably in Britain, continental Europe and North America, and it seeks to identify the agencies through which music has become an enduring expression of Irish political, social, religious and cultural life. In these respects, EMIR is the collective work of 240 contributors whose research has been marshalled by an editorial and advisory board of specialists in the following domains of Irish musical experience: secular and religious music to 1600; art music, 1600-2010; Roman catholic church music; Protestant church music; popular music; traditional music; organology and iconography; historical musicology; ethnomusicology; the history of recorded sound; music and media; music printing and publishing; and, music in Ireland as trade, industry and profession. EMIR contains some 2,000 individual entries which collectively afford an unprecedented survey of the fabric of music in Ireland.It records and evaluates the work of hundreds of individual musicians, performers, composers, teachers, collectors, scholars, ensembles, societies and institutions throughout Irish musical history, and it comprehends the relationship between music and its political, artistic, religious, educational and social contexts in Ireland from the early middle ages to the present day. In its extensive catalogues, discographies and source materials, EMIR sets in order, often for the first time, the legacy and worklists of performers and composers active in Ireland (or of Irish extraction), notably (but not exclusively) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It offers to the general reader a regiment of 'brief lives' of Irish musicians throughout history, and it affords the specialist a detailed retrieval of information on music in Ireland hitherto unavailable or difficult to access. Above all, it is (proverbially) encyclopaedic in its address on the plurality and diversity of Irish musical experience. To this end, EMIR represents the single largest research project on music in Ireland to have been undertaken to date.

About this title

About the Author:

Harry White is Professor of Music at UCD and a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. In 2003-6 he was inaugural President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland. He has been general editor (with Gerard Gillen) of Irish Musical Studies since 1990 and is perhaps best known as a cultural historian of music in Ireland, on which subject he has published three monographs: The Keeper's Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770-1970 (1998); The Progress of Music in Ireland (2005) and Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (2008). He was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2006. Barra Boydell was Professor in the Department of Music at NUI Maynooth until his retirement in 2010. He was a founding member of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (SMI) and served as its first Honorary Secretary. He was elected to honorary life membership of the SMI in 2011. Widely known for his work in organology and musical iconography, he has an international reputation as an historian of music in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His many publications in this area include Music at Christ Church before 1800: Documents and Selected Anthems (1999), A History of Music at Christ Church Cathedral Dublin (2004) and Music, Ireland and the Seventeenth Century (2009), edited with Kerry Houston.

From Booklist:

This two-volume work sets out to document the history of Irish music from the beginning of recorded time to the present. In the introduction, coeditor White discusses the various editions of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, for which he served as an editor and advisor, and how the focus on Irish music and its history could have been augmented. New Grove is the seminal reference work on music in general, but the granular detail that can be achieved by delving deeply into a single country’s musical heritage is beyond even the scope of those 29 print volumes and extensive online presence. According to White, New Grove did unleash a new enthusiasm for Irish musical scholarship, resulting in conferences, dissertations, and other works helping to document at least certain periods or genres of Irish music. White laments the general knowledge of Irish musical awareness since roughly the 1990s: When music made an appearance in the verbally dominated matrix of Irish culture, there was not much to go on, apart from a salute to the fantastic success of U2, The Chieftains, or Riverdance. The set comprises some 2,000 entries for performers, composers, genres, style periods, subjects, instruments, cities, venues, organizations, and more. The well-written articles come from more than 200 contributors, and many include bibliographies as well as discographies, where appropriate. They range in length from a paragraph or two to multipage entries for major topics or people. General histories of Ireland have been published, such as Oxford’s New History of Ireland (1986), with extensive chapters on music, but this is the first work of its kind on this scale. General readers and scholars alike will find something valuable in this new work. Recommended for academic and large public libraries or smaller public libraries where there is an interest in Ireland. --Steven York

About this edition

• Publisher: University College Dublin Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1906359784
• ISBN 13: 9781906359782
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 1016