Best Irish Music history Book(s)?

[maki]

What book or books do you recommend for the n00b/general reader?
Why?


Sorry if this has been covered, but I've searched without good results.

Thanks.

[kkrell]

Not sure what exactly you're looking for. Maybe Fintan Vallely's "The Companion to Irish Traditional Music"? A new edition is supposed to be forthcoming.

[maki]

Not sure what exactly you're looking for. Maybe Fintan Vallely's "The Companion to Irish Traditional Music"? A new edition is supposed to be forthcoming.

http://www.amazon.com/Companion-Irish-T ... 0814788025
And that maybe exactly what I'd like, Thanks!

[Nuggets]

I'd recommend these:

A Pocket History of Irish Traditional Music http://www.amazon.co.uk/OBrien-Pocket-H ... 129&sr=8-1;

The Rough Guide to Irish Music http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Guide-Iri ... 250&sr=1-2;

and.

The Story of Irish Dance http://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-Irish-Dan ... 294&sr=1-1.

[maki]

Thanks Nuggets.

[LorenzoFlute]

I read Fintan Vellely's book (first edition), but it's more like an encyclopedia on irish music. Lots of names of musicians you never heard of, put in alphabetical order, and then some more interesting articles. But not an intuitive reading IMO, although very valuable and probably the most complete...

[highland-piper]

Depending on what you're looking for, "Irish folk music: a fascinating hobby, with some account of allied subjects ..." by Francis O'Neill might be worth reading. If you're in the USA it's on google books for free.

It seems to be more a memoir than a history. I've only read bits and parts of it.

[talasiga]

here is a historical tome itself on the history of the music ......

[maki]

Thanks Highland-piper and Talasiga!
I love free books!

Linky for the Irish Folk Music book;
http://books.google.com/books?id=QggtAA ... &q&f=false

[Mr.Gumby]

It is probably useful to realise Grattan Flood is considered totally unreliable. His work is full of made up facts and strange notions with no grounding in reality. I believe I have seen him described as 'a notorious crank'.

[MTGuru]

Grattan Flood is a fun read, but as musicology and history it needs to be taken with a large grain of salt - as the intro to the 1970 reprint apparently suggests. His tone and style remind me of the classic "history" by Seamus MacManus, "Story of the Irish Race" from the same period. Both heavily biased by the mythologizing, nationalist agenda of the Gaelic League, Celtic Twilight, etc., with a fixation on "ancient" this and that.

This post on Mudcat summarizes some of the objections:

http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=105562#2174253

[MTGuru]

Another article to the point:

Barra Boydell (NUI Maynooth), History, myth and invention: Grattan Flood and the creation of Irish music history, 4th annual conference of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 5-7 May 2006.

Abstract: The roles of music in the establishment of national traditions and identity and of music history as an agent of nationalism, in particular during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are widely acknowledged. Within the British Isles, in Ireland, Scotland and Wales in particular, 'ancient' musical traditions were identified, revived or reinvented as characteristics of distinctive national identities. In Ireland the defining mythologies of the Irish harp and folk music traditions played a significant role in the emergence of nationalism, while the invention in the 1890s of modern 'traditional' Irish dance illustrates Hobsbawm's concept of 'the invention of tradition'.

W.H. Grattan Flood (1859-1928), organist and prolific amateur historian and musicologist, contributed to Musical Quarterly, Music & Letters, SIMG and other internationally-recognised journals. He is best known today for his History of Irish Music, first published in 1905, which combines much factual but often unreliable information with invention and unsubstantiated myth. In the absence of any extended local tradition of art music composition, previous writers on Ireland’s musical past, writing for the most part from a strongly nationalist perspective, had concentrated almost exclusively on 'folk music' and 'minstrelsy'. Espousing the nationalist cause, Flood sought to establish Ireland’s credentials within the wider European art music tradition. He claimed Irish origins for composers including Lionel Power and John Dowland, and the theorist Johannes de Garlandia; he dismissed Sumer is icumen in, recently raised by Charles Grove in his dictionary to iconic status in English national musical history, as 'merely a harmonised arrangement of a phrase taken from [an] old Irish tune'. In this paper Flood’s writings are assessed within these contexts of local music history, nationalism, and contemporary historiography.

[Mr.Gumby]

He was the 'inventor' of the name 'uilleann pipes' which he based on totally spurious reasoning (Shakespear's 'Woollen pipes' anyone?). There's no base in history for the use of 'uilleann'. But it was became accepted and as Breathnach said 'it would be pedantic to object to it's use'.

De-bunking his work kept a generation of scholars busy but some of the myths he generated still linger on.