2008
The annual conference of the Society for Musicology in Ireland was hosted by the Music Department of Waterford Institute of Technology at the College Street campus from Friday 9th to Sunday 11th May 2008 with more than 100 delegates in attendance. Leading academics and postgraduate students presented a total of 68 research papers on a wide variety of topics, ranging from Renaissance to Romantic to Twenty-first-century classical music studies, Irish Traditional Music, jazz, popular and film music, music theatre, social aspects of music in Ireland, pedagogy and performance studies, aesthetics and music analysis. The keynote speaker was Professor John Tyrrell of Cardiff University, co-editor of the monumental 29-volume revised edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and, most recently, of two major books on the composer Leos Janácek, who died 80 years ago this year. There was also a recital to mark the tercentenary of the death of the composer John Blow and of the bicentenary of the initial publication of Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies given by renowned tenor John Elwes accompanied by harpsichordist Malcolm Proud.