A GROUNDBREAKING new book on Irish traditional music, particularly the music of the Aran Islands, will be launched next week.
Collecting Music in the Aran Islands - A Century of History and Practice by the musician, scholar, broadcaster, and curator, Dr Deirdre Ní Chonghaile, will be launched by Prof Dáibhí Ó Cróinín in Charlie Byrne's Bookshop, on Thursday March 10 at 6.30pm.
The book provides a critical historiographical study of the collecting of traditional music in Ireland, focusing on 19th and 20th-century music collections from the Aran Islands.
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Collecting Music In The Aran Islands features case studies of five song collectors - antiquarians George Petrie and Eugene O’Curry; Séamus Ennis, the musician and folk music collector for the Irish Folklore Commission; and the American collector and ethnographer, Sidney Robertson Cowell.
Also included is the work of independent collector Bairbre Quinn, the first Aran islander to own a tape recorder and whose collection is held privately by her family.
It is also accompanied by a digital catalogue of 200 tracks of sound recordings created by Sidney Robertson Cowell in Ireland in 1955-56, which is hosted online by the Irish Traditional Music Archive.
"This book will appeal to a general readership as well as to university students,” said Dr Ní Chonghaile. “It's about Irish traditional music but it's also about history, historiography, memory, and media. I'm grateful to all of the people in Aran and beyond who continue to put their faith in my efforts to shed light on untold stories and bring unknown voices to the fore.”
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Deirdre Ní Chonghaile. Photo:- Joni Nelson
To mark the book’s publication, Raidió na Gaeltachta will rebroadcast the 12-part series, Bailiúchán Bhairbre, showcasing the recordings collected by Bairbre Quinn.
Deirdre Ní Chonghaile is from the Aran Islands. She has worked at the University of Notre Dame and the Library of Congress, and served as a consultant to Harvard University, the Irish Film Institute, English National Opera, Druid Theatre Company, and Branar Téatar do Pháistí. She currently teaches at NUI Galway.
Admission to the launch is free and all are welcome.
