Encyclopaedia of Music reveals Ireland's achievements
The guiding hands for this massive scholarly undertaking were Harry White, professor of music at UCD; and Barra Boydell, who recently retired as professor of music at NUI Maynooth.
As we admire the volume in a Dublin coffee shop, White admits he is thrilled with the book’s appearance. “That was really the great payoff after 10 years of working on it,” he says. “I attached a certain importance to how it symbolised the significance of the project, at least for those of us who were working on it.”
The origins of the encyclopaedia, which has been christened EMIR, lie with White himself. His time as a graduate student in Canada in the early 1980s coincided with the publication there of the Encyclopaedia of Music in Canada, which was the first such encyclopaedia devoted to the music of one country. Canadian music per se was not a particular interest for White, but the ways in which music interacts with a specific host culture has been a key theme in his work. He has published several monographs on the subject.
It wasn’t until 2003, however, that the idea of an Irish encyclopaedia seemed like it might become a reality. “In 2003,” says White, “the philanthropist Chuck Feeney offered funding to the music department in Maynooth for a research project. The professor there, Gerard Gillen, said now’s the chance to get going on this encyclopaedia.”
White and Boydell appointed a team of 10 subject editors and 10 advisory editors. They began to add to a list of 1,000 potential subjects White had compiled. The figure grew to 3,000, before being whittled down again to the approximately 2,000 that make up the book. “The whole thing was a labour if love,” says White. “Everyone was doing this for no remuneration. The beauty of the book is one thing, but the degree of scholarly co-operation and shared expertise is mind-blowing. I’ll never experience anything like it again, I am sure. In universities and colleges and so on, almost axiomatically these days, there’s this institutional rivalry, with rankings and so on, but the truth of it was that this represents one of the most pervasively co-operative projects ever undertaken between people from different institutions.”
What all that co-operation has produced is a comprehensive map of musical experience in Ireland. The bulk of entries cover the period from the 12th century, with several articles on music and musical instruments in pre-Christian Ireland. “What we wanted to avoid was responding to people’s clichéd ideas of what music in Ireland is about, which is mainly traditional music — and there is a huge amount on traditional music in this book — and the prestige of popular music, especially rock music. They are extensively represented, but there are seams of church music, classical music, art music, opera, and so on and so forth, that this book engages in. Whether people are aware of it or not, it’s actually part of the layered life of Irish musical experience.”
Given the prestige of rock and traditional music in Ireland, EMIR levels the playing field and makes equal the experience of all music in Ireland. “If you stop somebody on the street and asked them to name an Irish composer, they might say Bill Whelan, and why not? He’s a very good composer,” says White, “but there would be a long pause after that. You might get Seán Ó Riada. But that is so at odds with the actual state of affairs. A book like this is trying to redeem that balance.”
Of course, the fate of many composers in Ireland has been somewhat poignant, their efforts never gaining the prestige of the country’s writers and poets. “I’m thinking of people like Frederick May, who met with sublime indifference to what they were doing,” says White. “And that indifference attains even yet, so I think that it’s good a book like this retrieves that hidden life, and exposes it and celebrates it. We are a European country, but we have had a very strange relationship with music for a very long time.”
White also mentions jazz guitarist Louis Stewart as an example of how we are slow to properly celebrate musicians outside the mainstream. “Stewart,” says White, “is without doubt, one of the most distinguished musicians in the world, and certainly in Europe. He’s been at the very front line of artistry, and without wanting to suggest that he is not fully appreciated in Ireland, there is definitely a sense that we are somewhat careless with artists of that magnitude. There is that sense that there are many such people whose artistry, because it doesn’t fit in with popular culture or traditional music, can tend to fall below the radar.”
In the age of Wikipedia and Google, publishing any sort of encyclopaedia is itself a contentious issue, but bringing all this information together for the first time is a powerfully symbolic act. Somehow, a volume like this stands as a more fitting representation and summation than any website would. Of course, against the internet, published works must accept exclusion as a necessary condition. As White aptly puts it, “A map that is as large as the territory it surveys is worse than useless.”
Yet, there cannot be an ideal EMIR, and White admits that there will be people who will say, ‘What about so-and-so?’.
“And my answer, is, exactly, what about it? Now at last we have something that determines the absences or how the map might be drawn in another way, whereas before this we had nothing. I hope people become aware of it as opening out that discourse. The people who are in there are meant to represent degrees of inflection or degrees of change in Irish music experience, rather than simply an occasion of vanity.”
President Michael D. Higgins with editors Barra Boydell and Harry White at the launch of ‘The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland’. Picture: Peter Houlihan
Given Ireland’s reputation as a musical country, it is perhaps surprising that no general history of music in Ireland has been written since 1905. And, when it comes to international surveys of music in the country, such as the Oxford Companion, or Irish entries in the monumental New Grove Dictionary, the bias is towards traditional music.
How pleasing then, and how necessary, is the arrival of the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, a domestic survey of the full complexity of Irish musical experience, and its links to the rest of the world.
Harry White, a general editor along with Barra Boydell of the encyclopaedia, was a contributor to the revised New Grove in 2001, and he refers in his introduction to that dictionary’s “fundamental commitment to entries on composers above all other categories”.
The same cannot be said of EMIR, which expands categories, grouping them broadly under the rubrics of early music, 17th-21st century art music, church music, pop music, organology, iconography, musicology and ethnomusicology. As White writes in his introduction: “EMIR countenances antiphoners and breviearis, poets and instrument makers, band managers, the web and electro-acoustic music. It sets in order, for the first time, the legacy and worklists of composers active in Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries. It strategically represents the work of musicologists and ethnomusicologists in relation to Ireland, and it celebrates those master-intelligencers, the performers, across a whole spectrum of divergent and diverse practices. It recognises and repeatedly salutes jazz.”
Composers, naturally, feature strongly, but as is fitting for Ireland, so too do rock stars, instrument makers, monks, singers, vicars choral, traditional players, concert pianists, ensembles, institutions, events, competitions and so on.
Art music, in particular, has played little or no role in forming Ireland’s image of itself, or in standing as part of its cultural “brand”, to put in the political-promotional terms so often used regarding matters cultural. Where Germany has Bach and Beethoven, where Italy has Verdi and Vivaldi, we have Beckett and Yeats and Joyce. While there might be an element of the qualitative here — those guys were good, respectively the greatest dramatist, poet and novelist of the 20th century — it is a narrowing of Irish cultural experience to reduce the musical life of the country to U2, Riverdance and traditional music.
Those exist side by side with the less acknowledged activity of art music, which, despite its marginal status, has perhaps never been more vibrant. This vibrancy in so many genres is an aspect of EMIR best experienced on paper, and is part of what makes the book a joy to read, and a scene of serendipitous discovery. You can open the page for The Dubliners and beside them find an entry on Matthew Duborg. An 18th-century violinist. Duborg was “the illegitimate son of a court dancing master” who became master of the king’s music in Ireland, and led the violins for the premiere of Handel’s Messiah. There is also much for the specialist here, with a page-long list of Duborg’s compositions, the result of some painstaking research.
Gerald Barry gets a five-page entry, compared to U2’s one. There is something glorious in that — an indifference to reputation, but an acute awareness of what can be said about the music itself. And Barry writes music of a far greater complexity, a complexity which the non-specialist can find well explained here.
As a survey of musical life in Ireland, the encyclopaedia is comprehensive in its breadth, with much to reward the specialist and the general-interest reader. Given the week that’s in it, incidentally, the €100 edition would make an ideal gift for any music lover.
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