Paddy O’Brien was born in 1945 near Daingean, Co. Offaly.  There was plenty of music around him growing up and he developed a keen ear from a young age.  He started playing the accordion when he was about 11 and even at that early age that he showed his interest in collecting tunes, often recording tunes from the radio.  He moved to America in the 1980s and continued to play music and gather tunes there.

Between 1995 and 2013 Paddy published three tune collections, comprising 33 CDs and 1,500 tunes in total. This collection features all of the sessions standards and more, including unusual tunes, different settings and 285 compositions, of which 47 came from the pen of Paddy O’Brien himself. For each tune the book contains a paragraph of text that tells the reader where Paddy got the tune from, who played it, where he heard it, and interesting details about versions and titles.  This treasure trove of information was a go-to resource in the library of the Irish Traditional Music Archive for tune information in the days before the internet.

In early 2024 ITMA received an email from Mark Bickford, a long-time supporter of Paddy and a musician himself.  He had received an inheritance and wondered if ITMA was open to helping to make Paddy’s collection publicly available.  This welcome philanthropy aligned perfectly with ITMA’s long-held ambition to re-imagine the presentation of the 10,000+ interactive scores already on the ITMA website.  Discussions with Mark led to the development of PORT, an online resource that will ultimately hold 12,000+ traditional melodies from over 100 different sources, with the 1500 tunes from The Paddy O’Brien Tune Collection as the initial cornerstone.

The missing piece of Paddy’s collection has always been the transcriptions of the tunes themselves. In this Mark proved himself not only generous with his finances, but also with his time.  He personally transcribed almost all of the 1,500 tunes, and proofed those transcribed by others.   These transcriptions are now available on the ITMA website as interactive scores, along with PDF downloads and ABC notation for each tune.

The new PORT interface allows for more detailed searches, including faceted searches based on composer, key signature, tune type and number of parts. At the same time Mark’s generous donation allowed ITMA to add another feature to its website – the ability for users to create their own shareable playlists from all of the recordings across the site (- coming soon)

Port is powered by the online platform Soundslice and a script written by fiddle player Danny Diamond from Atlantic Arts.

If you spot any errors in this beta version please let us know by emailing [email protected] along with the URL(s) of the tune(s) in question.

ITMA would like to thank Paddy O’Brien for his generosity in making his collection publicly available for free;  Mark Bickford for his financial backing of the project but also for the many hours of transcription that he has put in, and Urszula Waszkiewicz and Hanna Bondar for their help in transcribing the tunes.