Erick Boustead

Living Clay: The Archive in Cultural Practice (see below for abstract)

Erick Boustead is a video artist and Irish Studies scholar whose great-grandparents hail from County Mayo. He recently completed a Masters in Irish Studies: Literature & History through the National University of Ireland-Galway, where he focused his thesis on nineteenth-century Chicago Irish male assimilation through the lens of archived media. Erick was also a participant in the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s ‘2021 Art and Politics Summer School’, which led to collaborating with several artists focusing on issues related to collective grief and relationships to (de)colonization. Erick is interested in cultural practices as sites of belonging and (re)connection in the Irish diaspora.

Nick Brown

Tracing the music used in Oscar & Malvina

Nick Brown was born in Illinois and raised in Ontario, and first started playing Irish music when he was in his late teens. From the beginning he has been interested in the origins of the music: his first two recordings of Irish music, given by his teacher, were field recordings of Willie Clancy and Seamus Ennis; and in 2005, he met Pat Sky and was introduced to the O'Farrell collections of music. Nicolas has not only become a proficient musician and sought-after music teacher; he has also developed a vast knowledge of the history of Irish music, old musicians, tune origins, Irish music in America, and more. In 2020, during the isolation of the pandemic, he released his solo album Good Enough Music For Them Who Love It. The album consists of music from the late 1700s, played on an antique set of Irish or Union pipes made at the same time.

The grand ballet pantomime Oscar & Malvina premiered in 1791, and featured one of the first stage performances of the instrument that became known as the uilleann pipes. The music used for the pantomime was both newly composed and repurposed, a practice that continues in Irish traditional music to this day. During the pandemic, I recorded three tracks of material associated with Oscar & Malvina. In this presentation I'll present the archives, collections, and other resources used to find and compile the music that was used in the pantomime, I will identify which pieces were mostly likely newly composed and which were reused, as well as from where, and I'll discuss the process I followed to select this material for my recording. Of special note, some of their material is still commonly played by Irish traditional musicians to this day.

Siobhan Butler (she/her)

Bridging the Gap: Uncovering the Bond Between Traditional Irish Dance and Music

Siobhan Butler is a traditional dancer and dance researcher whose creative and academic work aims to “bridge the gap” between traditional Irish music and dance. A fierce advocate for traditional dance in archives, Siobhan attributes much of her knowledge of Irish dances to the documentation and archiving of traditional dance. Combined with kinesthetic embodiment and ethnographic field work, she regularly uses archives to offer a more holistic understanding of the dancing and its historic and/or cultural contexts. Recently, Siobhan has been uncovering some of the audio recordings from the 1920s and 30s that featured traditional dance. This research has led her to further explore the possibility of using dance as a musical instrument (even theorising the bodhran replacing dance’s rhythmic accompaniment), and to question the narrative that Irish dance and music have become irreversibly divergent. 

This presentation will engage the role of creative practices in partnership with research methodologies, and how such an approach affects the way knowledge and creative interpretations are transmitted. She will also present the early stages of her new online archival project which highlights prominent traditional instrumentalists who also danced, but aren’t remembered as dancers. Her work is intended to inspire a new perspective on how Irish dance and music are related, and how this relationship can potentially be accessed through archives.

Marta Cook

Jenny Picking Cockles: Performance-Based Research on the Irish Harp

Marta Cook is a traditional musician with roots in Limerick and Clare. Her singular approach to the development of the Irish harp as a solo instrument in traditional music has been heard throughout Europe and North America. She is also known as a versatile accompanist on both the harp and piano. Her article “Subjects of Tradition” appears in the 2024 Irish Studies Review special issue on Irish Capitalism, edited by Aidan Beatty and Conor McCabe.

The modern lever harp is a percussion instrument. Sound production happens before each pluck, during the approach to and manipulation of the string, and in the manner of leaving the string; it does not happen continuously as a note is sustained. Pitches must be re-articulated if interrupted. Legato, on what we now call the “Irish harp,” is the impossible made practical by the creative imagination of the musician. 

The instrument I play is simultaneously a futuristic artifact (to the likes of Donnchadh Ó hAmhsaigh,) an emblem of hegemonic power, and a gateway for engaging embodied knowledge. My artistic practice in traditional music focuses on the practicalities of the impossible, of archives as time travel, of an entangled world that exists simultaneously before, now, and in the future. 

The creative process for Jenny Picking Cockles (2021, 2’10”), a harp performance inspired by a 1953 recording of Donegal fiddler Néillidh Boyle (1889-1961), deeply engaged these questions. By presenting my practice-based engagement with archival material, I aim to provoke impossible but practical futures that arise from archived knowledge animated by embodied processes of imaginative action. 

Listen. Rewind. My fingers flick: feedback. How many flicks before I notice that nothing starts in the fingers at all? How many, before poetic imagery transforms into practical advice? If the sounds I dream become real, what else could?

Aileen Dillane

Aileen Dillane is an Associate Professor in Music at the University of Limerick where she co-directs the Centre for the Study of Popular Music, Popular Culture. Aileen received her Phd in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago, and is currently finishing a monograph on Irish & Irish American music based on over 20 years of engagement with the scene in Chicago and in Ireland. She also writes on Irish Popular Culture and is starting work on a short book about an Irish protest singer.

Patrick Egan (Pádraig Mac Aodhgáin)

Key factors for interacting with Irish traditional music in North American archives: Some survey results
 

Patrick Egan (Pádraig Mac Aodhgáin) is an independent researcher based on Cork, Ireland. He has spent 10 years at University College Cork as a scholar and lecturer of ethnomusicology with digital humanities. His PhD project explored ways of developing digital visualisations using metadata from the archival records of the Seán Ó Riada Collection at the Boole Library. In 2019, he moved to Washington DC for a year as a Fulbrighter and Kluge Center Digital Studies scholar at the Library of Congress, where he was researching collections of audio in the American Folklife Center. His recent publications include topics such as digital cultural heritage, open science, and interdisciplinary studies. A concertina player since the age of seven, Patrick has recorded two commercial albums and continues to teach and perform Irish traditional music in Ireland and internationally.

In 2019 I conducted a survey of over 528 practitioners of Irish traditional music across North America. This was the first survey of its kind to develop a comprehensive understanding of this group and collect feedback about engagement with archival audio files. Insights emerged about the musical landscape and a diversity of cultural practices with archival audio. This is grounded by a forthcoming study analysing survey results, demonstrating overall trends, practitioner backgrounds, and their experiences with a wide range of media formats and materials. 

In this paper I build upon that work and focus on demographics within the survey to examine three ways that respondents may relate to archival materials. Drawing upon open-text responses this research engages deeply with participant insights. The evidence presented will demonstrate: 1) Respondents' descriptions about their attitudes towards archives of Irish traditional music 2) Resources that they shared and how those resources break down within different demographics and 3) Suggestions that were presented by these practitioners on how material could be made more relevant to performers in North America.

Sarah Gerk

Reading Irish-American Archives Against the Grain

Sarah Gerk is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Binghamton University (SUNY). Her current book project, titled Music in a Nation of Immigrants: U.S. Musical Practice and Irish Diaspora in the Nineteenth Century explores ways that Irish immigration shaped American music. She has published on Irish-American topics in Journal of the Society for American Music, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and a collection of essays on Thomas Moore.
 

Irish immigrants to the US have always been more diverse than archival sources can tell us. Biased structures and unequal power relationships in Irish-American culture, in research institutions, and in libraries have meant that those whose lives and work are deemed valuable enough to preserve and study have been cis-male, hetero, English-speaking, and middle class or wealthy. Moreover, Irish-American popular culture and historical writing have asserted particularly hagiographic histories that vaunt a chosen few and ignore sociological perspectives.

The archival invisibility of massive constituencies who should be included in our histories is not unique to Irish-American studies. Facing a near total absence of indigenous musical records in nineteenth-century Columbia, Anna Maria Ochoa entreats us to read the archive “against the grain.” In this paper, I suggest ways that we can build a more complete and equitable understanding of Irish-American musical history by following Ochoa’s lead. I review my research projects on variety theater phenoms Harrigan and Hart, and their very popular series of pieces that include Dan Mulligan that were premiered in the 1870s and 1880s, to show how the methods developed in postcolonial studies and by ethnomusicologists have allowed me to develop very different ways of seeing the Mulligan series that account for anti-Black racism, the influence of English comic theater on this crucial time in US-based theatrical history, and ways in which popular music developed towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Kathryn Holt 

Dancing with the Archive

Kathryn Holt holds a PhD in Dance Studies from the Ohio State University. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Jane Nelson Institute for Women’s Leadership at Texas Woman’s University. Her research focuses on dance and the politics of gender, race, and ethnicity, primarily in Ireland and the Irish diaspora. Her most recent publication in the Irish Studies Review investigates the relationship between Irish American identity and whiteness in commercial Irish dance shows like Riverdance and The Lord of the Dance.
 

In this presentation, I explore how the written archive acts in concert with embodied practice to allow artists and scholars in Ireland and Irish America to connect to the past in their bodies and through the written word. This presentation will explore two important aspects of the relationship between the archives and dance in Ireland and Irish America. First, I will discuss the significance of archival research in writing about Irish dance history to help fill in gaps and better understand embodied histories that may not have been passed down through a clear lineage. Using examples from archives across Ireland and the United States, I will demonstrate how newspapers, legislation, personal writings, and correspondence help to paint a picture of the contexts surrounding dance practices and provide further insight into the social and cultural significance of these practices. Second, I will analyze how dancers use archives to inform their work in various ways. Analyzing work by choreographers like Colin Dunne, Jean Butler, Áine Stapleton, and junk ensemble, I demonstrate the myriad ways dancers embody archival materials in their choreography as a means of bridging the past and the present.

Samantha Jones

Samantha Jones is an ethnomusicologist, dancer, and musician. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, where she also earned her PhD. Her current book project examines the role of musicality in Irish dance transmission. Her interests in the intersection of memory and embodiment also extend to research into early American film production, sensory experiences at music festivals, and the Folk Dance Education Movement. Samantha is an active teacher and performer of Irish traditional step dancing, the improvised style of sean-nós dancing, and social Irish Set Dancing. She joined the board of the Ward Irish Music Archives in 2022.

Helen Lawlor (she/her)

‘Hear the Harp of Tara’: Research-Led Performance of the Princess Grace Song Sheet Collection

Dr. Helen Lawlor (neé Lyons) specialises in research on music in Ireland with a focus on the musical practice, education and history of the harp.  She lectures in music at the TU Dublin Conservatoire. Her latest book, co-edited with Sandra Joyce is Irish Harping: World Harp Traditions (2024). She is author of Irish Harping 1900–2010 (2012) and co-editor with Sandra Joyce of Harp Studies: Perspectives on the Irish Harp (2016). Her work is also published in The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, Ancestral Imprints, Sonus, American Harp Journal, JSMI and JMI. Helen is Executive Editor of the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (JSMI) and Secretary of Performance Research Ireland. She is an advisory board member of Irish Musical Studies and previously served as Chair of the Irish national committee of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM Ireland). Her current research projects include a collaboration with the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco based on the PGIL Song Sheet Collection. Other ongoing work includes Sounding Empowerment, an edited collection of essays co-edited with Adrian Scahill. Her research is grounded in the discipline of ethnomusicology, drawing also on performance practice and musicological methodologies. Helen has shared her research both nationally and internationally. She has lectured/performed at Harvard University, Boston College, New York University, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, University of Limerick, University College Dublin and at many music festivals including the Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy and Gaelic Roots. Television appearances include: Comhluadar Ceoil (2021, TG4) and The Flourishing (2022, RTE 1). Helen has supervised PhDs and Masters by research in Irish traditional music, arts practice, ethnomusicology, music education, musicology and composition.
 

Princess Grace acquired a unique collection of 1,682 sheets in 1978 from Michael E. O’Donnell (USA). She was known internationally before her marriage to Prince Ranier III of Monaco as Grace Kelly, Academy Award winning actress. Her paternal grandfather emigrated from Mayo to the United States in 1867. Her Irish heritage is celebrated through the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco. 

This paper is focused on my ongoing research into the PGIL collection. The research engages with the imagery, musical style, and thematic content of the collection to produce a curated cross-section of songs by both male and female composers. The collection tells, through music, the story of Irish emigration and diasporic community formation. Symbolic identifiers of Ireland are employed by song writers to express diverse notions of ‘Irishness’ through song. I will discuss my approach to curating performances of the collection and how artistic and academic considerations are combined to showcase the musical and cultural richness of this collection. 

Daniel Neely

Daniel Neely is a musician and ethnomusicologist (Ph.D, New York University 2008). He's written the weekly column about traditional music for New York's Irish Echo newspaper since 2012 and has been a member of Ward Irish Music Archive's board of directors since 2021.  From 2008-2023, he was the Public Relations Officer for the Mid-Atlantic Region of Comhaltas Ceoltoirí Éireann and from 2012-2016 he was the artistic director of the Augusta Irish Week in Elkins, West Virginia.  In addition, he led the popular traditional music session at Lillie’s Bar and Restaurant in Manhattan from 2009-2017, he played tenor banjo with the champion New York Céilí Band in 2016-2017, and from 2005–2013 he led the Washington Square Harp and Shamrock Orchestra, a New York-based group that was modeled on the Irish-American dance bands of the 1920s and 1930s.  He learned to play the tenor banjo with Mick Moloney and is a fiddle student of Brian Conway's.  He's taught master's level courses on Irish music at NYU's Glucksman Ireland House and has given invited lectures on Irish music history at Boston College, Technical University Dublin, Na Píobairí Uilleann, the Catskills Irish Arts Week, the Baltimore Irish Banjo Summit, and the Ward Irish Music Archives.

Michael O’Malley

Michael O’Malley is professor of US history in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. His research focuses mostly on the era from 1865-1919, with publications that engage the history of music, technology, money and exchange, digital media and digital history, and the history of immigration. His most recent book is on the life of Capt. Francis O’Neill - The Beat Cop: Francis O’Neill and the Invention of Irish Music, published by the University of Chicago Press in May 2022.

Richie Piggott

Chicago Archive of Irish Traditional Musicians & Storytellers

Richie Piggott was born in Cobh, Co. Cork and has lived in Chicago for the past twenty-five years. His father, Johnny Piggott, was an accordion player from Dooks, near Glenbeigh, Co. Kerry, and his mother, Margaret Flannery, came from Dingle. Her family were involved with the Dingle marching bands down through the years. Although not a musician himself, his love of the music has led to a life-long interest in the social history of Irish traditional musicians and he has amassed a vast collection of traditional music recordings, music books and music manuscripts. He has contributed several historical recordings and manuscripts to the Irish Traditional Music Archive and Na Píobairí Uilleann and delivered lectures on his researches in Chicago, Boston and Ireland. In 2022 he published the results of 12 years research into Irish Music in Chicago in a book entitled Cry of a People Gone (richiepiggott.com).
 

Over the past 12 years I have researched Irish immigrants (and some of their children) who played traditional music in Chicago over the past 100 years (1920-2020), the results of which I have self-published in a book entitled Cry of a People Gone. The fieldwork was done through personal interviews of these musicians or with the families of those who passed. During my interviews, I received many donations from the families of these musicians, resulting in a large archive of photos, manuscripts, videos and recordings which I started to upload onto my website (richiepiggott.com) to freely share with all interested parties. My presentation will detail this archive through live (online) demonstrations.

Elizabeth (Beth) Sweeney

An Archival Partnership to Document Boston's Irish Music

Elizabeth (Beth) Sweeney curates the Irish Music Archives at Boston College’s Burns Library. As a librarian with a music background, she has worked for over two decades to acquire music materials for the interdisciplinary Irish collections at Burns Library. As a curator, she also helps make music materials available to the public while engaging with classes and outreach. She played a key role in editing and producing the Boston College Libraries’ 2016 digital collection The Séamus Connolly Collection of Irish Music and has collaborated with BC’s Irish Studies Program in organizing many music events. For the 2023 RTÉ documentary, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin: Between Worlds, she was honored to speak about Ó Súilleabháin’s 1990 founding vision for BC’s Irish Music Archives. She is delighted to be a participant in the 2024 conference, “Archiving Irish America.”
 

In 1990, the pioneering composer, pianist, and academic Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin (1950-2018) helped establish an Irish Music Archives at Burns Library, Boston College. In this effort he was inspired by the work of the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA), a national reference archive that had been established just a few years earlier in Dublin. In 2023, the connection between Burns Library and ITMA came full circle in a partnership to document Irish music in Boston and New England. The components of this project, as outlined by ITMA, will require a high degree of collaboration between the two archives over multiple years. To help facilitate collaboration between the two institutions, Burns Library’s Irish Music Archives is hosting a student internship in 2023-2024 funded by the Bookbuilders of Boston Education Fund. The rationale is that learning about Burns Library archival holdings and practices while assisting with tasks will help the intern contribute effectively to the joint Boston/New England project once the internship has ended. This presentation will offer details about the internship as well as observations on the impact of the partnership at Boston College.

Sean Williams

Sean Williams is professor of ethnomusicology and Irish Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her musical interests focus strongly on fiddle tunes and Irish-language songs, but also musics from Indonesia, Brazil, and Japan. She plays over twenty musical instruments (not all of them well!). Her books include Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song-Man, which she co-wrote with Lillis Ó Laoire, and the textbook Focus: Irish Traditional Music. Her current research explores liminality—the in-between—and the role of music in making connections. Sean was very fortunate to have studied with the sean-nós (old-style) Connemara singer Joe Heaney in the last several years of his life, and counts him as one of her most important musical influences. She has also worked with Gearóidín Breathnach, Máirín Uí Chéide, Lillis Ó Laoire, Celia Ní Fhátharta, Bridget Fitzgerald, and many others.

About the Ward Irish Music Archives

The Ward Irish Music Archives (WIMA) collects, promotes, preserves, and disseminates Irish and Irish-American musics in all their forms.  WIMA makes these cultural resources available to researchers, artists, and the general public now and into the future for the purposes of teaching, scholarship, and practice.

Established in 1992, WIMA houses one of the largest public collections of Irish music in America. The pieces in the Archives, as well as events, traveling exhibits, CD projects and our online digital collections ensure this important part of Irish American history is preserved and accessible to collectors, enthusiasts, students and lovers of music in any form.