Full Description
An absorbing study of the development and reception of musical culture in Ireland by a pioneering and deservedly renowned author.
This volume is a collection of fourteen essays on the history and reception of Irish music and music in Ireland. It addresses three prevailing themes: the historiography of Irish music, the influence of music on Irish writing (and vice versa), and the cultural identity and reception of Irish music both domestically and in the world at large. Its principal protagonists include Thomas Moore, W. H. Grattan Flood, George Moore, Edward Martyn, Charles Villiers Stanford, James Joyce, Dora Pejačević, Ina Boyle, Aloys Fleischmann and Jennifer Walshe. These essays also identify and interrogate key questions underpinning a general crisis of reception in relation to Irish music, and particularly art music, within the domain of Irish studies. Fieldwork examines this crisis in the aftermath of The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (published in 2013) and a major retrospective of Irish art music, Composing the Island (curated and presented in 2016). It thereby engages closely with contemporary Irish art music and the challenges which this music has faced in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
This well-conceived and beautifully written work testifies to Harry White's central place in the shaping of the discourse surrounding the cultural history of Irish music over the last 40 years. White's gift for expression and memorably poetic turns of phrase allows the complexity of ideas and range of historical and literary knowledge examined in these essays to be deftly excavated and evaluated. Curiosity, provocativeness, imagination and literature are threaded through his exploration of how Irish history and experience have been imagined musically.
Contents
Foreword by Diarmaid Ferriter
Preface & Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One: Irish Musicology and its Affordances
1. Remembering Grattan Flood
2. Aloys Fleischmann and Musicology in Ireland
3. The Lexicography of Irish Musical Experience
4. Musicology and Irish Studies
5. Alternative Histories
Part Two: The Irish Writer and Music
6. Thomas Moore and the Irish Harp
7. A George Moore Quartet
8. The Enthusiasms of Edward Martyn
9. Joyce's Priesthood
Part Three: Irish Music and its Contexts
10. Ireland in the European Ear
11. Courtyards in Delft
12. Reclaiming Stanford
13. Amongst Women
14. The Irish Composer and the World
Harry White: A Bibliography of Writings on Irish Music and Music in Ireland, 1984-2024
Index
