LAUNCH IN MAY, 2024. The ultimate reference for all players, devotees and students of Irish music, an indispensable guide to Ireland’s internationally-celebrated and performed traditional music, song and dance. A comprehensive body of information, it has an unparalleled broad historical and contemporary, geographic and social, coverage that is relevant to organisers, teachers and students of the music alike. This makes it also a productive foundation for further aesthetic and sociological investigation within not only Irish music, but the now-international cultural field of Irish Studies.A vital source-book, the Companion is now substantially revised, expanded and re-focused on modern-day issues and practices—the most extensive collection to date of such diverse data. It brings together the knowledge of 217 contributors in an A—Z format with c. 600,000 words, 190 images, 90 music transcriptions and 1800 entries…

A unique, newly-researched, full history of the tambourine and bodhrán in Ireland.

The bodhrán drum has become a symbol of Ireland, as well known by now as the classic harp. Remarkably, it became visible only in the mid-1900s, but rapidly achieved a tremendous popularity. It is typically assumed to be the ancient, Irish percussion, but investigation of museum objects, images, fiction and history, newspaper reports, advertising and folklore shows that there is no historic, percussion dimension to Irish music at all: it is demonstrably melodic. There was, however, since the ancient past, a well-documented (but now defunct) device called bodhrán that was a subsistence-era, household container and winnowing tool that came to be improvised as a drum on rituals like the Wren each winter. But in the mid-1700s the European tambourine was introduced to Ireland by the music trade and popular stage-shows, was copied by rural artisan sieve-makers, and took over as the Wren’s symbolic percussion. Development of the Wren as a cultural festival in the 1950s led not only to the tambourine being adopted into revived Traditional music, but to the old term ‘bodhrán’ being reclaimed to describe it, a re-branding that took hold after 1960. Today the bodhrán has been hugely developed through interaction between the expanding expertise of its most virtuosic players and the innovations of its makers in Ireland and abroad, and is played widely in not only traditional Irish music, but in other genres as well. All of this marks the bodhran as not the oldest Irish-music instrument, but the newest, in such recent time that, remarkably, most of those who created its styles and forms are still part of today’s Irish music scene.