The Irish Traditional Music Archive – Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann is a national public archive, information centre, and resource centre for everyone with an interest in the contemporary art forms of Irish traditional song, instrumental music, and dance, and in their history.
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The Archive holds and preserves the largest multimedia collection in existence of the materials of Irish traditional music. Its holdings currently comprise more than
and a mass of other materials such as posters, flyers, and catalogues.
The Archive also holds the largest body in existence of information about Irish traditional music, contemporary and historic, organised on customised computer databases, indexes and stock-lists. More than half a million content items have been catalogued to date, making this a unique and invaluable resource.
The Archive’s area of interest covers the performance traditions of the island of Ireland and the Irish diaspora – Irish-Britain, Irish-America, Irish-Australia, etc. – and those of all other performers of Irish traditional music throughout the world. In its attitude to the Irish and connected traditions, the Archive defines ‘traditional music’ in a broad and inclusive way.
The aims of the Archive are:
The Archive’s secondary aim, of collecting traditional music from other countries in a representative way, is to provide a national access point to these musics and to the world of ethnomusicology. It has a particular coverage of those traditions closest to the Irish: the Scottish, Manx, English, Welsh, Australian, and North American.
In recognition of its status as a national archive of Irish traditional music, the Archive has recently achieved significant support from the Irish State. It has been allocated as its premises a historic Georgian house in central Dublin through the Office of Public Works, which has conserved and restored the building to the highest standards.
The Archive’s premises include a large access facility, open to the general public. In the Archive’s public library, its materials and information are made fully available for reference to all personal visitors, without qualification and free of charge. Guidance to the collections and catalogues is given, as well as general information and consultancy on the music. Services are bilingual in English and Irish, as arises from the nature of the collections. No appointment is needed for a general visit. Public hours are currently 10 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday and one Saturday each month. A limited information service is also given directly by phone, post and fax. Materials and information are also made available through lectures, exhibitions and publications by Archive staff, and through the Archive’s extensive cooperation with the performing, teaching, broadcasting, publishing and archival activities of others. Materials can be copied, but only in accordance with copyright law and Archive resources; users must arrange copyright clearance where necessary. In a new initiative, which began on 29 July 2008 when the Archive celebrated the 21st anniversary of its establishment in 1987, the Archive’s digitised materials and information are beginning to be made available worldwide. A systematic programme has been in progress of making its computerised catalogue records and sample digitised materials accessible on the Internet via its website [1]. New material and information – contemporary and historic sound recordings, ballad and music sheets, printed collections of song, instrumental music and dance, photographs and other images – are added to the site every month.
The Archive’s premises have public areas equipped for listening to, viewing, reading and studying items from the collections, and accessing its databases; an audio and video recording studio; specialist rooms for the preservation, processing, copying and cataloguing of audio, video, manuscript and print materials; reception and administrative areas; and specialist storage areas.
The Archive is widely used on a daily basis. Users include singers, musicians, dancers, traditional music followers of all kinds, students at all levels, teachers, researchers and writers, librarians, broadcasters and publishers, arts administrators, and the general public. A significant number of the Archive’s visitors come from abroad, and a new worldwide community of users is being created through interaction with the Archive’s website.
The collection has grown to its present size as the result of widespread public support from many individuals and many institutions. The foundation collection of the Archive – and its core collection today – is the Breandán Breathnach Collection, a series of large and unique resources created by the great expert on Irish traditional music who died in 1985. In addition, the Archive now owns a large number of special collections initially made by private collectors, which they have entrusted to the Archive. Copies of material have been acquired from major institutional collections such as those of BBC Radio, RTÉ Radio and Television, TG4 Television, the National Library of Ireland, the Bodleian Library, the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Boston Public Library, etc.
The Archive has published two major printed publications deriving from historical manuscript collections of Irish traditional music: Tunes of the Munster Pipers: Irish Traditional Music from the James Goodman Manuscripts, 500 pre-Famine melodies edited by Dr Hugh Shields from a Trinity College Dublin collection; and The Irish Music Manuscripts of Edward Bunting (1773–1843): An Introduction and Catalogue by Dr Colette Moloney, a guide to 1,000 18th- and early 19th-century melodies and 500 song texts held in Queen’s University Belfast. The Archive has recently begun a programme of publishing historical and archival sound recordings with the release of the EP-CD Adam in Paradise by the County Londonderry singer Eddie Butcher (in conjunction with the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum). Other significant publications are in preparation.
The Archive is also currently cooperating with the national broadcasters RTÉ Radio and RTÉ Television in two major projects. In the radio project the archives of Irish traditional music of RTÉ Radio, dating back to the 1940s, are being remastered, copied and catalogued for public access in the Archive. Over 15,000 items have been processed to date and many radio programmes drawn from them. In the television project Archive staff have researched since 1994 the traditional music holdings of the early decades of RTÉ Television (1961–1991) and other television and film archives such as those of Ulster Television in Belfast. The Director of the Archive has presented a popular traditional music TV programme Come West along the Road derived from archival footage. In twelve series to date, and in nine series of a related TG4 Irish-language series Siar an Bóthar, more than 900 historic performers of Irish traditional music have been brought to the screen in over 270 programmes, and in an RTÉ-published video and two DVDs of selected performances. Ever-increasing audiences of over a quarter of a million view each episode.
Other outreach activities of the Archive include two travelling audiovisual exhibitions. The first, The Northern Fiddler, features images, texts and recordings of Donegal and Tyrone fiddle players of the 1970s, collected and created by Allen Feldman and Eamonn O’Doherty. This was the opening exhibition of the Ceol traditional music centre in Dublin, and it has since been shown in such venues as the Fowler Museum of the University of California at Los Angeles, glucksman Ireland House in New York, and the Re-Imagining Ireland conference in Virginia. The second exhibition, They Love Music Mightily, is a cooperative exhibition of the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum (facilitated by its then Curator of Music, Robbie Hannan) and the Archive, which features contemporary traditional performers throughout Ireland. This has been shown in such venues as the Museum at Cultra outside Belfast, at the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barracks in Dublin, Fermanagh County Museum in Enniskillen, the Glór Irish Music Centre in Ennis, and the Millennium Forum in Derry.
The Archive is a Company Limited by Guarantee, and as such keeps audited accounts and makes annual returns to the Companies Office. It is a member of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, the Library Council, and many other international and national bodies. It has been registered as a Scientific Society by the Registrar of Friendly Societies, and is recognised by the Revenue Commissioners both as a Charity and as an Approved Body under the gifting terms of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997.
The operations of the Archive are directed by a Board of twelve directors with performing, collecting, broadcasting, archival, financial, marketing and management experience. One third of the members is replaced annually by election.
The Archive was founded in 1987 as the result of initiatives from the traditional music community and a policy decision of the Arts Council/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon which appointed the Archive’s first Board and provided it with its constitution. It is funded year-on-year by the Arts Council/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon in Dublin and also by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in Belfast, and by individual donors, especially through its support group Friends of the Archive. It receives project funding from sponsors such as the Heritage Council, the Ireland Newfoundland Partnership, the Mícheál Ó Domhnaill Trust, the Temple Bar Cultural Trust, and other bodies. In addition it receives support in kind from publishers and hundreds of private donors, and from the State through the Office of Public Works.
The Archive’s long-term need for adequate permanent premises has now been met, and it has been able to increase its staff numbers through the support of both Arts Councils and other funding. This enables the Archive to now press ahead with its programmes of building up its collections and improving its information services to the public, with a range of activities and development plans that fit its guiding principles of ‘public access’ and ‘public education’. The most recent of the Archive’s current activities is its new ongoing programme of making its unique catalogues and sample digitised materials available worldwide via the Internet at [www.itma.ie].[1]