The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland
Barra Ó Séaghdha
The very first Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, the most comprehensive publication on music ever to have been undertaken in Ireland, is currently in preparation and scheduled to be published in 2010. Including over 2,500 articles reflecting Ireland’s musical culture, it will be the standard work of reference on musical life in Ireland for many years to come. But, writes Barra Ó Séaghdha, given the controversial views on Irish musical culture of one of the two principal editors, and the lack of debate surrounding them, what form will the encyclopaedia’s coverage of classical and contemporary Irish music take?
At first sight, it may appear odd to the uninvolved outsider that anybody should get worked up about any encyclopaedia, let alone one that does not yet exist. To understand the thinking behind the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, which is coming into being as we write, to understand why it is important, and to understand why we should care, we may have to journey through the recent and more distant past. In 1990, in the first of the Irish Musical Studies series of books that he co-edited, Harry White, Professor of Music in UCD, makes a case for an encyclopaedia of music in Ireland. In his foundational article, White is looking not only at the internal culture of music but at ways of levering music into the centre of critical consciousness:
If music is at the edge of Irish intellectual consciousness, how to move it to the centre? Certain precedents argue the case for one solution to these questions above all others. That solution lies in the making of an encyclopedia of music in Ireland.
Fifteen years ago it was to Canada – another country use to being overlooked – that Harry White turned. The editors of the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada explained their...
