49f House Of Trad
Geoff Walsh describes what goes on behind the door of the Irish Traditional Music Archive.
D
ublin always seems to be at its best in spring. Though the days may sometimes be chilly (and that has happened more often than not this year), there is something about the sharp quality of the light as it reflects off the waters of the Liffey or applies a steely glistening to The Spike, together with the briskness of the wind, which seems to cleanse the city. And, boy, Dublin always seems to need thorough spring cleaning.
On one such recent bright morning I strolled through the city, finally reaching my destination, and one of Dublin’s major landmarks and attractions, Georgian Mer- rion Square, on which worked commenced in 1762. The Square’s focus is a park featur- ing neatly laid-out walks and gardens, as well as a statue of Oscar Wilde sprawled louchely on a rock. Just across the road to the west lie the National Gallery, Leinster House (home to the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament), and the National History Museum and, on Sundays, the park’s rail- ings are bedecked with work for sale by local artists. However, my goal is one of the four-storey Georgian houses, number 73, the current home of the Irish Tradition- al Music Archive (ITMA) since 2006. Before then ITMA occupied a rather tattier build- ing ten doors down from whose windows one morning, during the height of Ire- land’s economic boom in the 1990s, Harry Bradshaw (ITMA’s erstwhile sound record- ing specialist) and Nicholas Carolan (ITMA’s director since its foundation in 1987) once counted seventeen cranes towering above the Dublin skyline.
Number 73’s own construction was completed in 1792 (a date to which we shall shortly return) and it remained a pri- vate residence until 1936 when it was acquired by the government and housed various official departments until its allo- cation to ITMA. Public access to the Archive has always been restricted to the library (Monday–Friday 10am–5pm, extended until 8pm on Thursdays with once-monthly Saturday opening too). Nowadays that also includes computer access to ITMA’s massive multi-media col- lection, the most extensive collection glob- ally of Irish traditional music materials, featuring: 30,000 commercial and non- commercial sound recordings; 23,000 books and serials; 12,000 photographs and negatives; 10,000 melodies in digital form; 7,000 ballad sheets and items of sheet music; 2,500 programmes; 1,500 video- tapes and DVDs; 400 music manuscripts and a host of other items. Then there’s the massive online catalogue (
www.itma.ie), but more of that anon.
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