Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland: The shaping of Irish musical history
Charting the musical life of Ireland
The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (EMIR) marks the first wide-ranging effort to document the full arc of musical activity across Irish history. It also traces the country's musical connections with the wider world—particularly Britain, continental Europe, and North America—and aims to uncover the forces that have made music a lasting expression of Ireland's political, social, religious, and cultural identity.
Published in September 2013 as a hardback, two-volume set in a slipcase by UCD Press, the work brings together 240 contributors guided by an editorial and advisory board of specialists. These experts cover domains including:
- Secular and religious music before 1600
- Art music from 1600 to 2010
- Roman Catholic and Protestant church music
- Popular and traditional music
- Organology and iconography
- Historical musicology and ethnomusicology
- The history of recorded sound
- Music and media
- Music printing and publishing
- Music as trade, industry, and profession in Ireland
EMIR contains around 2,000 individual entries, providing an unprecedented overview of the fabric of music in Ireland. It documents and assesses the output of hundreds of musicians, performers, composers, teachers, collectors, scholars, ensembles, societies, and institutions active throughout Irish musical history. The encyclopedia also explores the interplay between music and its political, artistic, religious, educational, and social contexts from the early Middle Ages to the present day. Through extensive catalogues, discographies, and source materials, it organizes—often for the first time—the legacy and worklists of performers and composers working in Ireland or of Irish descent, particularly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the general reader, it offers a steady stream of "brief lives" of Irish musicians across the ages; for the specialist, it provides detailed information on music in Ireland that was previously difficult to access. Above all, it is encyclopaedic in scope, addressing the full plurality and diversity of Irish musical experience. In this regard, EMIR represents the most substantial single research project on music in Ireland ever undertaken.
About the general editors
Harry White is Professor of Music at University College Dublin and a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. From 2003 to 2006 he served as the 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 best known as a cultural historian of music in Ireland. His 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)—have shaped the field. 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. A founding member of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, he served as its first Honorary Secretary and was elected to honorary life membership in 2011. Known internationally for his work in organology and musical iconography, he has built a reputation as an historian of music in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His key publications 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.