This title was first published in 2000. John Ireland (1879-1962) was as elusive as the music that he composed. His music resists easy categorization, in part because it is linked so closely to specific events, places and people in Ireland's personal life. The Music of John Ireland explores the expressive and extramusical qualities of Ireland's compositions and their complex system of personal musical symbols, images and ideas. Fiona Richards interweaves biography and musical analysis in a series of chapters which take their themes from the significant influences in Ireland's life: Anglo-Catholicism, paganism, the countryside, the city, love and war. Ireland emerges as highly individual, struggling with his religious beliefs, his sexuality, and an uncertainty as to his success. His music, often an expression of a state of mind, is given, for the first time, the close investigation that it merits. Ireland preferred to compose on a small scale, showing a masterful command of form and a gift for melody. Richards reveals how the essence of the man shines through in the miniatures that he wrote.
Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his death, this book presents new articles by leading authorities on John Ireland and his music, together with transcriptions of his broadcast talks and of interviews with the composer. John Ireland [1879-1962] was one of the most distinctive and distinguished of a generation of exceptional British composers that included Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frank Bridge and Arnold Bax. They emerged in the decade before the First World War and, in the inter-war years, produced a remarkable body of music. In Ireland's case his was not only the most popular British Piano Concerto of its time, but he also composed a splendid repertoire of songs, piano music, chamber music and orchestral and choral scores. This richly illustrated Companion will be essential for all admirers of the composer. Not only for the performer - pianist, singer, conductor - but for thewider musical public, record collectors and music historians, academics and anyone interested in British music of the earlier twentieth century. Lewis Foreman has drawn on his extensive research into Ireland's life and letters over many years, and, in association with the John Ireland Charitable Trust, has not only commissioned a wide range of chapters from leading performers and writers of today, but has brought together in one convenient format Ireland's own writings on music, the memories of his friends and students (including Britten, Moeran and Arnell) and a selection of important earlier articles. The Companion also includes a complete list of works and themost comprehensive discography of Ireland ever compiled. The accompanying CD contains historical recordings featuring the voice of John Ireland, with two of his broadcast talks, as well as otherwise unobtainable performances of Ireland's music from the composer himself and from other well-known performers of the past. LEWIS FOREMAN is author of Bax: A Composer and His Time [Boydell, 2007] and London: a Musical Gazetteer [Yale 2005]. Contributors: FELIX APRAHAMIAN, RICHARD ARNELL, BENJAMIN BRITTEN, JOCELYN BROOKE, ALAN BUSH, GEOFFREY BUSH, GEORGE DANNATT, JULIE DELLER, JEREMY DIBBLE, EDWIN EVANS, LEWIS FOREMAN, NORAH KIRBY, FREDERICK LAMOND, PHILIP LANCASTER, STEPHEN LE PROVOST, STEPHEN LLOYD, CHARLES MARKES, ROBERT MATTHEW-WALKER, E.J. MOERAN, ANGUS MORRISON, ERIC PARKIN, BRUCE PHILLIPS, C. B. REES, FIONA RICHARDS, ALAN ROWLANDS, R. MURRAY SCHAFER, MARION SCOTT, COLIN SCOTT-SUTHERLAND, HUMPHREY SEARLE, FREDA SWAIN, KENNETH THOMPSON, RODERICK WILLIAMS, KENNETH A. WRIGHT
This title was first published in 2000. John Ireland (1879-1962) was as elusive as the music that he composed. His music resists easy categorization, in part because it is linked so closely to specific events, places and people in Ireland's personal life. The Music of John Ireland explores the expressive and extramusical qualities of Ireland's compositions and their complex system of personal musical symbols, images and ideas. Fiona Richards interweaves biography and musical analysis in a series of chapters which take their themes from the significant influences in Ireland's life: Anglo-Catholicism, paganism, the countryside, the city, love and war. Ireland emerges as highly individual, struggling with his religious beliefs, his sexuality, and an uncertainty as to his success. His music, often an expression of a state of mind, is given, for the first time, the close investigation that it merits. Ireland preferred to compose on a small scale, showing a masterful command of form and a gift for melody. Richards reveals how the essence of the man shines through in the miniatures that he wrote.
"O'Connell presents an excellent biography of the first archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, who rose from poverty to become an internationally known clerical figure and friend of presidents. . . . Well written and well researched, this biography brings to life an important figure in American religious history. Recommended."--Library Journal
John Ireland (1879-1962) was one of the leading composers of the English Musical Renaissance at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. Born of literary parents in Bowdon, near Manchester, he went to London at the age of fourteen to study at the newly-founded Royal College of Music where he eventually became a pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford. Among his near contemporaries at the College were Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Thomas Dunhill, William Y. Hurlstone, Henry Walford Davies and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Ireland is best known for his songs (such as Sea Fever, The Bells of San Marie and the cycle of Housman settings, The Land of Lost Content), his piano and chamber music, his church music and his relatively small number of choral, orchestral and brass band works. This catalogue of Ireland's compositions, a revised and enlarged edition of the one published in 1993 by the Clarendon Press (Oxford University Press), in association with the John Ireland Trust, lists his compositions from 1895 to 1961. Full details are given of dates of composition; people or bodies responsible for a work's commission; instrumentation; first performance; publications; location of the autograph manuscript; critical comment in the bibliography from the contemporary press and music journals, and recordings on compact disc. Appended is a general bibliography and classified index of main works. A list of personalia supplies details of people connected with Ireland and his music during his lifetime.
Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond represents the first interdisciplinary volume of chapters on an intricate cultural field that can be experienced and interpreted in manifold ways, whether in Ireland (The Republic of Ireland and/or Northern Ireland), among its diaspora(s), or further afield. While each contributor addresses particular themes viewed from discrete perspectives, collectively the book contemplates whether ’music in Ireland’ can be regarded as one interrelated plane of cultural and/or national identity, given the various conceptions and contexts of both Ireland (geographical, political, diasporic, mythical) and Music (including a proliferation of practices and genres) that give rise to multiple sites of identification. Arranged in the relatively distinct yet interweaving parts of ’Historical Perspectives’, ’Recent and Contemporary Production’ and ’Cultural Explorations’, its various chapters act to juxtapose the socio-historical distinctions between the major style categories most typically associated with music in Ireland - traditional, classical and popular - and to explore a range of dialectical relationships between these musical styles in matters pertaining to national and cultural identity. The book includes a number of chapters that examine various movements (and ’moments’) of traditional music revival from the late eighteenth century to the present day, as well as chapters that tease out various issues of national identity pertaining to individual composers/performers (art music, popular music) and their audiences. Many chapters in the volume consider mediating influences (infrastructural, technological, political) and/or social categories (class, gender, religion, ethnicity, race, age) in the interpretation of music production and consumption. Performers and composers discussed include U2, Raymond Deane, Afro-Celt Sound System, E.J. Moeran, Séamus Ennis, Kevin O’Connell, Stiff Little Fingers, Frederick May, Arnold
Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology and musicology of 20th- and 21st-century Irish popular music. The volume consists of essays by leading scholars in the field and covers the major figures, styles and social contexts of popular music in Ireland. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Irish popular music. The book is organized into three thematic sections: Music Industries and Historiographies, Roots and Routes and Scenes and Networks. The volume also includes a coda by Gerry Smyth, one of the most published authors on Irish popular music.
