Within a Mile of Dublin: Songs and Tunes Live from ITMA is a 3-part live radio broadcast from the history-rich surrounds of our Georgian premises on Merrion Square. Join ITMA and NearFM for a series of a performances and interviews that focus on bringing the archival collections at ITMA to life.

The final broadcast of the Within a Mile of Dublin 2 series focuses on the PW Joyce Collection, bringing together conversation, song, and music to show how the work of a 19th-century collector continues to shape the practices of musicians in the 21st century.

Featuring:

Liam O'Connor, fiddle
Máire O'Keeffe, fiddle
Nicholas Carolan, speaker

This is a free event but booking is essential via Eventbrite.

The collection:
Patrick Weston Joyce (1827–1914) was born in the Ballyhoura hills on the borders of south-east Limerick and north Cork. Unlike the earlier important collectors of Irish traditional music Edward Bunting (1773–1840) and George Petrie (c. 1790–1866), Joyce came from within a local oral-music tradition and was immersed in it. In this he resembles the other younger nineteenth-century collectors James Goodman (1828–1896) of Co Kerry and Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) of Co Cork and Chicago. His detailed reporting of a living local tradition, from a time when the population of Ireland was at its highest-ever levels and Irish traditional music accordingly was in a flourishing state, gives his work a unique value. He published four music collections in his lifetime, the first in 1873 and the last in 1909. Manuscripts of a final unpublished work, which contain 878 songs and melodies with notes, remained unpublished in the National Library of Ireland until ITMA, courtesy of the Library, copied them for facsimile publication on the P.W. Joyce microsite.

Other events:

Within a Mile of Dublin 2: The Goodman Collection | Within a Mile of Dublin 2: The Góilín Song Project & The Inishowen Song Project

This broadcast and performance is brought to you as part of Explore Your Archive 2018. Sponsored by the Archives & Records Association of Ireland and the UK, this campaign aims to open the phenomenal archival collections held by organisations—public and private—across the UK and Ireland, whatever their size and scale, and wherever they are.