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Product Description
Third Revised and expanded edition, May 2024. Cork University Press.
This extraordinary encyclopedia covers all aspects of traditional music song and dance in Ireland. Six-hundred thousand words in fourteen-hundred main topics explore people, tunes, aesthetics, ideology, gender balance, history, organisations and affiliations, linking all dance and recreational music forms to biographies of stylists and figureheads, to regional music associations and practices. Extensive specialist articles give the widest range of one-stop information to date on all aspects of the subjects of dance and song, and on instruments—especially harp, uilleann pipes, fiddle, flute, bodhran, concertina, banjo and accordions. This immense volume of biography, history, hard facts and opinion is diverse and comprehensive, a knowledge base that has been drawn from the expertises of some two hundred musicians, researchers and teachers in the field. Now in its third edition, the Companion also uniquely includes county by county, regional and gender analysis of all 70 years of All-Ireland fleadh prizewinners in dance music and song competitions. Other major awards are reported, as are the role of media, and the practice of the music not only in each county on the island of Ireland, but also in the major diaspora cities, and other countries where the music is also played. The book is a vital, grounded resource in an era where superficial and artificial-intelligence internet data can be false and misleading. It lays out the canon of the traditional music of Ireland, an essential asset and a core reference for all sociological and musicological research and analysis in Irish music and Irish studies.
A companion website for the book is available at https://comitm.com
Dr Fintan Vallely is a musician and writer on Traditional music. He was a critic with The Irish Times and The Sunday Tribune, and has been a university lecturer on Traditional music in Ireland and abroad. Among his numerous edited books are the 1999, 2011 and 2024 ( this edition) encyclopedia Companion to Irish Traditional Music.
