Printed Collections
New tranches of sample printed materials are made available on this website every two months for the personal enjoyment and interest of users. They represent only a small proportion of the printed materials of Irish music held for public access in the Archive, and are chosen to indicate the variety of materials available. They may not be used for commercial purposes.
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Early Riverdance Publicity and Other Materials
33 Items
Published: May 2013
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Riverdance
On Saturday 20 July 2013, as part of the Irish national Gathering Festival, a free Riverdance family day of music and dance will be hosted throughout Merrion Square, where coincidentally ITMA has its home.
Discussing Irish Traditional Music on Paper & Online
7 Items
Published: February 2013
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Whenever people interested in Irish traditional music meet, conversation inevitably moves to a discussion of some aspect of the music. Sometimes these private discussions are formalised and made available to a wider circle in print – in paper publications since at least the 19th century or on the Internet since the late 20th century.
Irish Music in Encyclopedias of Melody
5 Items
Published: November 2012
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Over the centuries, and especially in the nineteenth century, European scholars and publishers laboured to compile and publish large printed compendiums of unarranged melodies for the use of musicians and composers. Some of these have a specific focus, such as collections of chant and hymn tunes, but more are of general interest and include melodies from classical, popular and traditional sources. Invariably encyclopedias of melody of this universal type include Irish melodies.
Irish Song & Music in 18th-Century Dublin, Bibliography, Discography: Publications of the FMSI, 1984
6 Items
Published: October 2012
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Dublin
In its second decade of existence, the voluntary Folk Music Society of Ireland (FMSI) – Cumann Cheol Tíre Éireann – added to its annual programme of public lectures, recitals, seminars, and newsletter and journal publication, with a series of other publications intended to contribute to the documentation and study of Irish traditional music.
Ceol Tíre: Newsletter of the FMSI, 1973–89
33 Items
Published: August 2012
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Dublin
The Folk Music Society of Ireland – Cumann Cheol Tíre Éireann – was founded in Dublin in 1971 by a voluntary group of interested individuals who felt that the 1960s revival of Irish traditional music, song, and dance performance had not been accompanied by an appropriate growth in the study of traditional music.
Ceili Dancing and the Gaelic League
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Published: June 2012
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Group dancing was a core part of the social activities of Conradh na Gaeilge/ the Gaelic League which was founded for the promotion of the Irish language in Dublin in 1893.
Moffat’s Minstrelsy of Ireland, 1890s
4 Items
Published: January 2012
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Scotland
The Scottish musicologist Alfred Edward Moffat (Edinburgh 1866 – London 1950) was a highly regarded scholar and editor of music, with a specialisation in early British composers for the violin.
Cameron’s Selection of Violin Music, 1859
1 Items
Published: December 2011
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Scotland
The great relative of Irish traditional music is, of course, Scottish traditional music. The two countries have shared a closely related language and music culture seemingly for millennia now, while at the same time each has retained its own distinctly different character in both language and music.
Irish Melodies from The Citizen Magazine, 1840s
4 Items
Published: October 2011
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Dublin
Notations of Irish traditional melodies have been published in Irish magazines and other periodicals since the eighteenth century, but one of the most important such bodies of melodies appeared in the 1840s, in the Dublin periodical The Citizen or Dublin Monthly Magazine.
Charlotte Milligan Fox, Co Tyrone Collector & Arranger
12 Items
Published: July 2011
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Tyrone
Mrs Charlotte Milligan Fox (1864–1916) was born into a business and literary family in Omagh, Co Tyrone, and was a leading activist in the collection, arrangement, publishing and study of Irish traditional music in the early 20th century.
Songsters by Nugent of Dublin, 20th Century
11 Items
Published: May 2011
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Dublin
The rare and undated songsters reproduced here were published in the first half of the 20th century by the Dublin firm of Nugent & Co at 45 Middle Abbey Street, and were compiled for the company by Denis Devereux, a singer and printer who had been involved in the Independence movement as a friend of Arthur Griffith.
George Petrie Music Manuscripts in ITMA, 1850s
7 Items
Published: March 2011
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Dublin
The main music manuscripts of the traditional music collector George Petrie (c. 1790–1866) are in the National Library of Ireland and in the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
George Petrie’s Ancient Music of Ireland, 1855 & 1882
4 Items
Published: February 2011
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Dublin
George Petrie (c. 1790–1866), a Dublin professional artist, was a leading figure in the cultural and intellectual life of nineteenth-century Ireland. The benefits of his work in the areas of Irish art, archaeology, history, topography, architecture, the establishment of cultural institutions – and traditional music – are felt to this day.
Nationalist Songs on Sheet Music, early 1900s
20 Items
Published: December 2010
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Most published Irish political songs, whatever their shade of opinion, are to be found on ballad sheets, chapbooks and songsters, mainly dating from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Aimed at the general non-music-reading public, they carry only the words of the songs, not their music.
Music for the Quadrille in Ireland, 1800s
10 Items
Published: October 2010
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The extraordinary vogue for Irish set-dancing that has been in full swing since the 1970s, and shows little sign of abating, has been going international in recent years – Irish dancers have been travelling on organised set-dancing holidays to Spain and elsewhere, and dancers abroad have been eagerly taking up the Irish set-dances.
Colm Ó Lochlainn’s Claisceadal Songsheets, 1940s
1 Items
Published: August 2010
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About 1940 Colm Ó Lochlainn began the publication in Dublin of an undated series of penny Irish-language songsheets entitled An Claisceadal (‘choral singing’).
Henebry’s Irish Music and Earlier Studies, 1903
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Published: June 2010
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The Revd Dr Richard Henebry/ Risteard De Hindeberg (1863–1916) was born into an Irish-speaking farming family in Mount Bolton, Portlaw, Co Waterford.
Batt Scanlon’s Irish Fiddle Tutor from San Francisco, 1923
1 Items
Published: April 2010
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An explosion occurred in the publishing of cheap printed teach-yourself tutors for all kinds of musical instruments in the late nineteenth century in Western Europe and the United States of America, a kind of publishing that had its roots in the eighteenth century and even earlier and continues to the present.
Feis Programmes 1910–1963
8 Items
Published: February 2010
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The old Irish word feis (meaning ‘a recurring feast or festival’; plural feiseanna) began to be applied in the 1890s to the annual competitive cultural festivals organised by branches of Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League), which had been founded in 1893 for the preservation and promotion of the Irish language.
Irish-American Song Book, 1900s
1 Items
Published: December 2009
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Irish-American Song Book: ‘Come-All-Ye’s’: Six Hundred and Seventeen Irish Songs and Ballads. This compendium of mainly 19th-century Irish song texts in the English language, produced by the Wehman Brothers publishing firm of New York, is undated. The latest date it carries internally is 1890, but the volume itself may have been published about 1900.
Irish Country-Dance Collections, 1790s
4 Items
Published: October 2009
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Irish traditional dance music, in the forms that we know it today, evolved mainly in the course of the 18th century, although some of its forms were older and most of its melodies were composed later, in the 19th and 20th centuries. The same seems to be true of Irish traditional dance and its figures.
Denis Cox, Songs in Irish in Print, 1933
1 Items
Published: August 2009
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This booklet of texts of songs in Irish recorded by the Dublin-based baritone Denis Cox (Donnchadh Mac Coiligh) was published in 1933, presumably for the general educational market, by the Parlophone Company of London, the recording company which since 1928 had been issuing his many 78s of songs in Irish and English.
Grace Orpen’s Local Donegal Dances, 1931
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Published: June 2009
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The book Dances of Donegal Collected by Grace Orpen, published in London in 1931, is the first published collection of Irish traditional dances from one locality, as distinct from earlier general collections that included dances from different regions.
Versions of the Song An Draighneán Donn, 1789–1990
12 Items
Published: April 2009
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‘An Draighneán Donn’ (The Brown Thorntree or Sloe-Tree) is one of the oldest and most widely spread songs now sung in the Irish language.
J.J. Sheehan’s Guide to Irish Dancing, 1902
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Published: February 2009
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This rare item was printed in Dublin but published from London by the Liverpool-Irish journalist and political activist John Denvir (1834–1916), who produced an Irish nationalist series of historical, political and cultural publications around the turn of the 20th century.
P.W. Joyce’s Collections of Irish Music: 1873, 1888 & 1906
4 Items
Published: December 2008
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Patrick Weston Joyce (1827–1914), from Glenosheen in south-west Co Limerick, was a noted Irish educationalist and popular historian, and from his youth a collector of Irish traditional music and song.
Popular Irish Sheet Music, 1900s
10 Items
Published: October 2008
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Irish popular song and music of many kinds (including national music and traditional music) has been published in sheet-music form in Ireland since the 18th century.
Leslie Shepard Irish Ballad Sheets, 1800s
20 Items
Published: August 2008
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The late Leslie Shepard (1917–2004), born in London, was a world authority and prolific writer on street literature, early film, the paranormal, and many other subjects.
