Na Píobairí Uilleann

Discussion with Terry Moylan, Librarian & Archivist at Na Píobairí Uilleann

Budget & Funding

The budget allocated to the library/archive last year was about €6,000 which went towards acquisitions, maintenance, binding, conservation, recordings, artefacts and pipes.

Funding for Na Píobairí Uilleann (NPU) derives mainly from the Arts Council, but also from membership subscriptions and mail order. They are currently building an online catalogue and it is hoped that the soon-to-be launched website will significantly increase book sales. This would be a timely boost given the expected budget cuts from the Arts Council. There is a steady demand for NPU-published material.

Low-cost means of acquiring reference material

In discussing the cost of reference material, Terry suggested that online sources can be readily utilised in an effort to keep costs down. Several books in NPU's reference library have been downloaded from the internet, printed and professionally bound. The books in question rarely come to market, and, in any case, would far exceed NPU's means. Such books are sometimes made available by the owners, to be scanned by collectors. The best and most substantial example that NPU have in their reference collection is John Rook's Multum in Parvo (or 'A Collection of Old English, Scotch, Irish & Welsh Tunes'). The Rook manuscript, which dates from about 1840, contains well over a thousand tunes collected for the Northumbrian pipes and other instruments. Links for the Rook Manuscript on the Ross Anderson page:

Cover: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/musicfiles/rook/

Index: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/musicfiles/rook/rook_pages/index.htm

Thanks to the tireless work of those who scanned this vast work, it can now be printed, bound and added to a reference collection at a comparatively small cost.

Acquisition Policy/Donations/Weeding

Generally, NPU try to acquire anything that comes to market concerning the pipes including photography, artefacts, books, magazines, journals, tapes, vinyl records, CD's and rare sets of pipes.

Donations are occasionally offered, and all formats are accepted – given that a large proportion of pipe music has never been converted to digital format. The question of material being out-of-date is irrelevant, and, as such, there is no weeding policy. Over the years, NPU have received some unusual sets of pipes from as far afield as France.

Means of finding and reviewing resources for the reference collection

The library is in regular communication with publishers, collectors, and musicians regarding new material, conferences and so forth. Terry referred to the following as regular sources of material:
abebooks.com
googlebooks – digitized pdfs
The National Library of Ireland

Essential Reference Material
Terry considers the following titles to be of central importance to a reference collection concerning traditional Irish music:

Breathnach, B., Folk Music & Dance in Ireland

Flood, G., History of Irish Music

Fleishman, A., Sources of Irish Traditional Music c.1600 – 1855

Shields, H., A Bibliography of Irish Music

Also, another excellent title available to download from the Library of Congress is James P. Cassidy's A Treatise on the Theory & Practise of Dancing (1810).

Further to the above, Terry suggested some recordings that he deems essential-listening for the would-be librarian of a traditional Irish music reference collection, e.g. a 1960's recording of Connemara singer Joe Heaney – available on Topic Records – of traditional songs in Irish and English. For a pipes-specific recording, Terry recommends 1950's archival recordings of Leo Rowsome.

Here is a tune performed by the famous piper Willie Clancy. Clancy took up the pipes after seeing them being played by the great Johnny Doran (a travelling piper from Wicklow) at the races in 1936. He went on to play in a quartet with Leo Rowsome: