Irish Traditional Music Archive
Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann
TO PERFORMERS OF IRISH TRADITIONAL MUSIC WORLDWIDE
Dear Singers, Musicians, and Dancers
Twenty years after its foundation, the Irish Traditional Music Archive has assembled the largest collection of Irish traditional music in existence, as detailed elsewhere on this website. We hold, for example, over 25,000 sound recordings, 16,000 books and serials, 6,500 ballad sheets and pieces of sheet music, 10,000 photographs, 1,000 videos and DVDs, 2,500 programmes, 400 music manuscripts, etc., etc. And these items are catalogued on computer in great detail – an enormous body of information available free of charge to anyone who visits the Archive.
The collection therefore forms the most comprehensive picture of the world of Irish music, contemporary and historic, available anywhere. It is growing daily, and its information coverage improves daily. The Archive is a securely established Irish national institution, and a premier world centre for accessing and researching Irish traditional music.
Are you represented in the Archive's collection? If not, the remedy is in your own hands.
If you donate sound or video recordings of your singing, playing or dancing to the Archive, we undertake to add them to our collections with your name as that of donor, to hold and preserve them indefinitely, to catalogue them, and to then make them available for listening/viewing or study to visitors to the Archive. We will scrupulously guard all your legal and moral rights in them, and will not make copies of them for others or publish them without your prior written agreement.
Don't be shy about putting yourself forward; it takes all kinds – beginners and virtuosos, improvers and disimprovers – to make up a musical tradition. And we are interested in the innovative and the crossover as well as the conservative and deeply traditional.
We would also be very keen to acquire associated photographs, biographical details, memoirs, artistic manifestos, music collections, press releases, programmes, flyers and posters, etc. – anything which would put the recordings in context and help people appreciate fully the meaning of what they contain.
It goes without saying that we would welcome these materials even if they are not accompanied by recordings, and that we would welcome any items which would represent your musical friends and acquaintances, including those who are dead.
We urge you to make such donations primarily so that the art form of Irish traditional music worldwide may be more comprehensively documented, even if there are practical advantages to you in such a donation. Everyone who creates a performance of Irish traditional music – whether as performer, composer, listener, or publisher – is part of the the worldwide story of the music, and should be represented.
We look forward to receiving any donations you may make, and to cooperating with you in making an increasingly comprehensive public collection of Irish traditional music past and present.
Donations and queries about donations can be sent to the Irish Traditional Music Archive, 73 Merrion Square, Dublin 2 (tel. +353-1-6619699; fax +353-1-6624585; email donations@itma.ie).
Best wishes,
Nicholas Carolan
Director
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