Collecting Music in the Aran Islands, a critical historiographical study of the practice of documenting traditional music, is the first to focus on the archipelago off the west coast of Ireland. Deirdre Ní Chonghaile argues for a framework to fully contextualize and understand this process of music curation.

Irish traditional music has been practised in the Aran Islands over the last two hundred years at least. In that time, Aran has acquired a cultural importance in local, national and international contexts. Aran is now a palimpsest buried almost 'Pompeii-deep in interpretations' (Robinson 1992b, xvii). Yet, surprisingly, comparatively little of the rich Aran canon engages directly with Irish traditional music or, indeed, with any genre of music. In fact, music has been marginalised with the Aran canon. As a result, the music of Aran has also been marginalised within the wider contexts of Irish traditional music and Ireland. This is largely because of Aran's island location and because the Aran canon is authored mostly by visitors and not islanders. For Aran islanders, music is an essential element of life, performed and experienced in times of joy and in times of sorrow. Issues of context, perspective, authority and authorship are, therefore, key to understanding representations of music in Aran. Addressing these issues, this dissertation will focus on music collectors, who play such a vital part in creating the canons by which we often measure the musics of the past and of the present. It will question what inspired, motivated, influenced and challenged four visiting collectors and one local collector of music in Aran, and it will query their methods of representing traditional music. It will bring a critical eye to these representations of traditional music and to the processes of selection, collection and publication behind them. It will shed new light on the parts that performers, collectors and publishers play in making Irish traditional music such an evocative and pervasive element of Irish culture. Ultimately, it will begin a process of redressing the marginalisation of the music of Aran, and of bringing the music of Aran to a new audience.

California Gold offers a compelling cultural snapshot of a diverse California during the 1930s at the height of the New Deal, drawing on the career of folk music collector Sidney Robertson and the musical culture of often-unheard voices. Robertson—an intrepid young woman armed only with a map, her notebooks, and the recording equipment of the time—proposed and directed a New Deal initiative, the WPA California Folk Music Project, designed to survey musical traditions from a wide range of English-speaking and immigrant communities in Northern California. In California Gold, Catherine Hiebert Kerst explores Robertson's distinctive and modern approach to fieldwork and examines the numerous ethnographic documentary materials she generated with WPA project staff to capture a cross-section of the music that people were actively performing in their communities. Kerst highlights some of the most notable songs, images, and ephemera of the collection, capturing and contextualizing the diverse musical traditions that California immigrant communities performed during the New Deal era. Kerst also foregrounds the ethnographic insights and accomplishments of a significant woman folk music collector who has received less attention than she deserves.

This book engages with ageing masculinities in Irish literature and visual culture, including fiction, drama, poetry, painting, and documentary. Exploring the shifting representations of older men from the early twentieth century to the present, the contributors analyse how a broad range of literary and visual texts construct, reinscribe, or challenge perceptions of older age. In doing so, they trace a shift from depictions of authority figures - often symbolising patriarchal dominance and oppression - to more nuanced, complex, and heterogeneous explorations of older men’s embodied subjectivities and vulnerabilities. Exploring artists and writers such as Seán Keating, J.M. Synge, Teresa Deevy, Marina Carr, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Kate O’Brien, John Banville, Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty, Mike McCormack, Anne Griffin, and Claire Keegan, the chapters in this book attend to the symbolic as well as social significance of older men in Irish cultural expression.

The history of Irish traditional music, song and dance from the mythological harp of the Dagda right up to Riverdance. Exploring an abundant spectrum of historical sources, music and folklore, this guide uncovers the contribution of the Normans to Irish dancing, the role of the music maker in Penal Ireland, as well as the popularity of dance tunes and set dancing from the end of the 18th century. It also follows the music of the Irish diaspora from as far apart as Newfoundland and the music halls of vaudeville to the musical tapestry of Irish America today.

Anáil an Bhéil Bheo brings together a stimulating range of interdisciplinary essays considering the connections between orality and modern Irish culture. From literature to song, folklore to the visual arts, contributors examine not only the connections between oral and textual traditions in Ireland, but also the theoretical concept of “orality” itself and the corresponding significance of oral texts in Irish society. Featuring work by emerging scholars in the fields of history, literature, folklore, music, women’s studies, film and theatre studies and disciplines contributing to Irish Studies, this multifaceted volume also includes contributions from scholars long engaged with issues of orality such as Gearóid Ó Crualaoich and Henry Glassie.