A towering figure in the musical and cultural evolution of modern Ireland, Brian Boydell (1917-2000) has been described as a 'renaissance man' and by President Mary Robinson as a 'tireless wheeler-dealer for music'. One of Ireland's leading twentieth-century composers, he was also an outspoken agitator and positive disruptor for the enrichment and expansion of music and cultural identity in Ireland. He became a household name as composer, broadcaster, adjudicator, public lecturer, performer, musicologist, professor of music at Trinity College Dublin and long-term member of the Arts Council. Stimulated by the centenary of his birth in 2017, this collection of 15 essays presents a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on Boydell's legacy and provides fresh perspectives on his diverse contributions to Ireland's music and culture. The wide range of contributors to the book parallels the breath of connection that Boydell continues to engender in generations of scholars and fellow enthusiasts. Essays consider his music, from his earliest works to his orchestral music and his pioneering compositions for Irish and concert harp; others focus on his dynamic contributions including his musicology, his decisive involvement as a founding member of the Music Association of Ireland, his transformational professorship at Trinity College Dublin, and his illuminating radio broadcasting. Less well known is that Brian Boydell exhibited as a painter in the 1940s, an aspect of his artistic creativity that is also explored in this book, as is his extensive collection of private papers now in Trinity College Library. Above all else, Creative Impulses, Cultural Accents: Brian Boydell's Music, Advocacy, Painting and Legacy celebrates an entirely fascinating figure who contributed immensely to the cultural evolution of a modern nation.

The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (EMIR) is the first comprehensive attempt to chart Irish musical life across recorded history. It also documents Ireland's musical relations with the world at large, notably in Britain, continental Europe and North America, and it seeks to identify the agencies through which music has become an enduring expression of Irish political, social, religious and cultural life. In these respects, EMIR is the collective work of 240 contributors whose research has been marshalled by an editorial and advisory board of specialists in the following domains of Irish musical experience: secular and religious music to 1600; art music, 1600-2010; Roman catholic church music; Protestant church music; popular music; traditional music; organology and iconography; historical musicology; ethnomusicology; the history of recorded sound; music and media; music printing and publishing; and, music in Ireland as trade, industry and profession. EMIR contains some 2,000 individual entries which collectively afford an unprecedented survey of the fabric of music in Ireland. It records and evaluates the work of hundreds of individual musicians, performers, composers, teachers, collectors, scholars, ensembles, societies and institutions throughout Irish musical history, and it comprehends the relationship between music and its political, artistic, religious, educational and social contexts in Ireland from the early middle ages to the present day. In its extensive catalogues, discographies and source materials, EMIR sets in order, often for the first time, the legacy and worklists of performers and composers active in Ireland (or of Irish extraction), notably (but not exclusively) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It offers to the general reader a regiment of 'brief lives' of Irish musicians throughout history, and it affords the specialist a detailed retrieval of information on music in Ireland hitherto unavailable or difficult to access. Above all, it is (proverbially) encyclopaedic in its address on the plurality and diversity of Irish musical experience. To this end, EMIR represents the single largest research project on music in Ireland to have been undertaken to date.

Christ Church cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in a catholic country. Musical and archival sources (the most extensive for any Irish cathedral) provide a unique perspective on the history of music in Ireland. Christ Church has had a complex and varied history as the cathedral church of Dublin, one of two Anglican cathedrals in the capital of a predominantly Catholic country and the church of the British administration in Ireland before1922. An Irish cathedral within the English tradition, yet through much of its history it was essentially an English cathedral in a foreign land. With close musical links to cathedrals in England, to St Patrick's cathedral in Dublin, and to the city's wider political and cultural life, Christ Church has the longest documented music history of any Irish institution, providing a unique perspective on the history of music in Ireland. Barra Boydell, a leading authority on Irish music history, has written a detailed study drawing on the most extensive musical and archival sources existing for any Irish cathedral. The choir, its composers and musicians, repertoire and organs are discussed within the wider context of city and state, and of the religious and political dynamics which have shaped Anglo-Irish relationships since medieval times. More than just a history of music at one cathedral, this book makesan important contribution to English cathedral music studies as well as to Irish musical and cultural history. BARRA BOYDELL is Senior Lecturer in Music, National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

"The 17th century is a pivotal but unfamiliar period in Irish musical history: reflecting political and cultural changes, the ancient harp tradition declined as European musical styles became more widespread. In this volume, the 10th in the Irish Musical Studies series, musicologists begin to establish a picture of music in Ireland at that time. Contents: Barra Boydell, The 17th century and the history of music in Ireland; Raymond Gillespie (NUIM), 17th-century Irish music and its cultural context; Sean Donnelly, The harp in 17th-century Ireland; John Cunningham (U Leeds), The Irish harp in non-Irish contexts in the 17th century; Adrian Scahill (NUIM), 'Traditional' music in 17th century Ireland; Barra Boydell, The earl of Cork's musicians; Barra Boydell & Maire Egan-Buffet (UCD), Books on music in the library of Lord Edward Conway (1602-55); Christopher D.S. Field (U Edinburgh): Birchensha's 'Mathematical way of composure'; Andrew Robinson, Narcissus Marsh; Martin Adams (TCD), Henry Purcell and the 'Awful matron'; Kerry Houston, The repertoire in the Dublin cathedrals at the restoration of Charles II; Denise Neary (RIA of Music), Church music in the 17th century." (Series: Irish Musical Studies)