NO 73 MERRION SQUARE, DUBLIN 2 - Irish Traditional Music Archive

The Premises of the Irish Traditional Music Archive 13
The Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of
Ireland 1851
Many of those prominently involved in the Society for the Preservation
and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland, the first formal Irish
traditional music society, lived on Merrion Square or in its vicinity. The
Society was established under the presidency of George Petrie in
December 1851, in the aftermath of the Great Famine, to preserve, study
and publish ‘the immense quantity of National Music still existing in
Ireland’. 34 It was directed by a twenty-three-man Council. As well as
David Richard Pigot and John Edward Pigot, Thomas Beatty MD and
William Stokes MD lived on the Square, at nos 18 and 5 respectively. In
the vicinity of the Square lived the Treasurer of the Society Robert
Callwell (Herbert Place), its other joint Hon. Secretary Robert D. Lyons
MD (Merrion Street), Rev. Charles Graves DD (Fitzwilliam Square),
Benjamin Lee Guinness (Dawson Street), Thomas Rice Henn (Upper
Mount Street), Henry Hudson and Samuel Maclean (St Stephen’s Green),
Joseph Huband Smith (Holles Street), Rev. Jas. H. Todd (Trinity
College), and William Wilde (later Sir William, father of Oscar; Westland
Row). 35 Most of those associated with the Society were members of the
Royal Irish Academy, which was then situated in Grafton Street.
One of the aims of the Society, never realised, was ‘the formation of a
central depôt in Dublin, to which persons... may be invited to send
copies of any airs which they can obtain, either in Ireland or among our
countrymen in other lands’. 36 The Irish Traditional Music Archive might
be said to be a realisation of that aim. Its collections contain the
published works of the Society and later editions of them.
The Arts Council & Breandán Breathnach
The Arts Council/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon, the Irish state’s development
agency for the arts (including the traditional arts), has been based in no
70 Merrion Square since 1959. In 1980 it appointed a Traditional Music
Officer for the first time, and it currently has a Traditional Arts section
through which it funds traditional artists, projects, festivals, and arts
organisations (including the ITMA) – see www.artscouncil.ie.
From the early 1980s until his death, Breandán Breathnach (1912–85),
the great expert on Irish traditional music whose personal collection is
the foundation collection of the ITMA, had an office in the basement of
no 70 in which he worked principally on his monumental index of Irish
traditional dance music. A member of the Arts Council from 1984, he
chaired for it a committee on the establishment of a national archive of
traditional music and was the author of its report.
— Nicholas Carolan