A ‘RISM Ireland’ working group has been set up in association with the SMI: see below for membership of the group and contact information.

RISM Ireland is working in close co-operation with the RISM UK Trust to undertake the systematic cataloguing of musical sources in Ireland, both north and south. Religious and secular manuscript and printed music, music librettos and books about music are central to the project, as is the issuing of RISM sigla to previously unidentified music repositories. Physical objects relating to music such as instruments, paintings, etc. are also being noted for the purposes of a future project. Sources may be either public or private but must be accessible to bona fide researchers: totally private repositories are therefore excluded from the project.

The resulting database of Irish RISM A/II music manuscripts will be incorporated within the RISM UK Trust’s free-to-access website. It is intended that the many previously uncatalogued items relevant to RISM series A/I, B and C will be published in one or more dedicated volumes. A new, revised list of Irish repositories has been prepared and the sigla approved for musicological use by the RISM Central Editorial Office.

The DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama is hosting the first funded RISM-related research project, with Triona O’Hanlon working at postgraduate level on the ‘Mercer’s Hospital Part-Books and Music in Eighteenth Century Dublin’. As part of her work Triona is cataloguing the 55 part-books (now held in the Department of Manuscripts, Trinity College Dublin) which were used at the Mercer’s hospital benefit concerts in Dublin during the eighteenth century. Triona has received formal RISM training, and her catalogue of this collection will be added to the RISM UK Trust’s online database. This is a good example of how a relatively small collection of relevant material may be catalogued according to RISM guidelines as part of a wider research project.

Researchers and other interested parties are invited to contact any member of the RISM Ireland working group with information they may possess regarding hitherto unidentified, uncatalogued or little-known music sources or any other repositories in Ireland. We also welcome any information regarding any completed or ongoing cataloguing or research projects. Any assistance given to the RISM Ireland project will be appropriately acknowledged.

RISM Ireland working group

Dr Ann Buckley (Trinity College Dublin): Hon. Treasurer

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Specialist field: Music to c.1600

Dr Catherine Ferris (DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama)

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Specialist field: Music in nineteenth-century Dublin; music cataloguer

Dr Kerry Houston (DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama)

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Specialist field: Church music from c.1600

Dr John Howard (University College Dublin)

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Specialist field: Musical traditions of the Lutheran church; history of music theory; informatics/ digital humanities

Dr Sarah McCleave (Queen's University, Belfast): Hon. Secretary

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Specialist field: Eighteenth-century secular music; Thomas Moore; Northern Ireland contact

Dr Maria McHale (DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama)

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Specialist field: Musical culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland.

Dr Karol Mullaney-Dignam (NUI Maynooth)

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Specialist field: Music in Irish country houses

Mr Bryan Quigley (Independent)

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Specialist field: Music cataloguer

Dr David J Rhodes (Waterford Institute of Technology): Chair

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Specialist field: Eighteenth-century music

Dr Adrian Scahill (NUI Maynooth)

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Specialist field: Irish Traditional Music

Address for non-email written communications:

Dr David J Rhodes

RISM Ireland

Music Department

College Street Campus

Waterford Institute of Technology

Cork Road

Waterford, Rep. Ireland

RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) is the ‘International Inventory of Musical Resources’ – an international non-profit joint venture which aims at comprehensive documentation of existing musical sources worldwide.

The Central Editorial Office (RISM Zentralredaktion) in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, coordinates the contributions of the various RISM national working groups to the projects RISM Series A/I (printed music before 1800) and Series A/II (Music Manuscripts after 1600, with a cut-off point of c.1800-1850: this varies from country to country). It also prepares information for both series for publication and helps co-ordinate the publications of RISM Series B [specialist music collections] and C [directory of music research libraries].

For further details, see the RISM website: http://www.rism.info/