Earlier this year, Boston College’s Burns Library had the distinct pleasure of hosting visitors from the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA), Ireland’s national reference archive of traditional music, song, and dance. Over lunch and a library tour, we exchanged ideas and updates with ITMA’s director Liam O’Connor, Padraic Mac Mathúna, and Seán Potts. A central theme of our discussions was ITMA’s plan for a digital exhibit that will document the traditional Irish music and dance communities of Boston and New England.
Over the summer we continued to discuss the Boston / New England exhibit and brainstormed how Burns Library could help facilitate. We determined that a foundational step would be to set up an academic-year internship in Burns Library’s Irish Music Archives, enabling a Boston College student to contribute to the ITMA exhibit upon the internship’s completion.
With support from the Bookbuilders of Boston Education Fund, Burns Library was delighted to offer an eight-month internship to Andrew Caden, a BC senior majoring in economics and minoring in both music and Irish Studies. The Maryland native spent a semester at University College Cork and is a highly-respected performer on Irish traditional fiddle.
At Burns Library, Andrew is contributing to research and documentation projects that are designed to help make our New England-related collections of Irish music more visible to the public. “I am very grateful for the opportunity to work in an Irish music archive, researching the historical context of the Boston Irish music scene that I’ve become a part of during my time at Boston College,” said Andrew. “I aim to gain a better understanding of the different aspects that go into archival maintenance, and uncover some incredible music as well.”
As we begin collaborating with ITMA we recall the influence of Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin (1950-2018), who as a visiting professor from UCC in 1990 created the Boston College Irish Fiddle Festival, taught ethnomusicology, and advocated for the creation of an Irish Music Archives at Burns Library. He credited ITMA, which had been established in Dublin just a few years earlier, as his inspiration for creating such an archive at Boston College. We were honored to share some of these recollections recently in both a film screening and an evening of stories about Mícheál. We continue to be inspired by the work of ITMA and look forward to expanding Mícheál’s archival vision through a cross-Atlantic institutional partnership.
Elizabeth Sweeney, Irish Music Librarian, Burns Library
irish music archives @ burns library 