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Council Chamber, Queen’s University Belfast
10.30-11.30am
Registration and Coffee
11.30-11.45am
Welcome
11.45-1.00pm Plenary Lecture:
• John Moulden, ‘“... the best English-Irish poetry before Yeats...”(?)’
1.00-2.00pm. Lunch (provided in the adjoining Canada Room)
2.00-3.30pm. Panel 1: Genre and Performance Practice: Historical Perspectives
• Miriam Uí Dhonnabháin (UCC / Melbourne), ‘Two Munster Agallaimh [Dialogue Songs] from the
James Goodman Song Manuscript of 1857’
• Conor Caldwell (QUB), ‘Developing dance music from the song tradition’
• Lillis Ó Laoire (NUIG), ‘Reifying Irish Song: in the interstices of orality and literacy’
3.30-4.00pm. Tea / Coffee break.
4.00-5.00pm. Panel 2: Printed Songs in early eighteenth-century Dublin
• Andrew Carpenter (UCD), ‘Swift and Song’
• Moyra Haslett (QUB), ‘Singing at the Club: the Drapier and the Guilds in early eighteenth-century
Dublin’
6.15-7.45pm. Wine reception and Irish Song Performance: Panel (3)
• Maurice Leyden and Ian Ó Loingsigh, ‘Urban singing in the nineteenth century’
7.45pm. Symposium dinner for speakers and interested participants.
Friday 19 th September, 2014
Training Room 2, McClay Library
9.30-10.45am. Trialling the Irish Song Project web-site.
In this session, participants will conduct exploratory searches on the current web-site of the Irish
Song project in discussion with the Project Team.
Old Staff Common Room.
11.00-12.15pm. Plenary Lecture
• Nicholas Carolan (ITMA), ‘The Irish-Language Songs of Patrick Lynch’
12.15-1.15pm Lunch (provided in the Canada Room)
1.15-2.45pm. Panel 4: Varieties of Irish Song in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
• Joanne Burns (QUB), '"Our finest and most popular airs are modern": Thomas Moore on Irish Song'
• Sheila Rooney (QUB), ‘Landscapes and Songscapes: landscape and nature in the songs of Moore’

• Colette Moloney (WIT), ‘Irish song of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as transcribed by
James Cody’
2.45-3.15pm. Coffee / Tea.
3.15-4.15pm. Panel 5: Investigating Ireland’s Oldest Song Repertories
• Sorcha Nic Lochlainn (UCC), ‘The Early Irish cepóc and some possible parallels in early modern
Gaelic song’.
• Ann Buckley (QUB), ‘Varieties of song in medieval Ireland’
4.15pm. Closing remarks
Attendance at the symposium is free, but participants (excluding speakers) should register their intention to attend on the symposium web-site before Monday 15 th September, 2014 for catering purposes: www.irishsongsymposium.com.
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Abstracts (in order of symposium programme)
Plenary lecture (Thursday)
• John Moulden, ‘“... the best English-Irish poetry before Yeats ...”(?)’
Thus, in The Listener, in 1970, John Holloway, Professor of English at Cambridge, of a genre of exuberantly worded songs that employed complex patterns of rhyme deriving from Irish-language poetry that were among the nineteenth-century ballad sheet collections of Sir Frederic Madden in the Library of the University. Such items seem to have first surfaced in the mid-eighteenth-century, soon after the appearance of the earliest eight-page song books to be printed in Ireland, and probably the first song books in this form anywhere in the 'British Isles'. This presentation traces the development of this genre towards, perhaps, its finest manifestation, the luxuriously florid bawdry of ‘The Cuckoo's Nest’ (probably by the northern-born but Drogheda-based, weaver poet, John
Sheil). It is in bawdry that this prosodic genre seems to find its most secure voice. The combination of verbal flourish and double entendre may be overwhelming.
Panel 1: Genre and Performance Practice: Historical Perspectives
• Miriam Uí Dhonnabháin (UCC / Melbourne): ‘ Two Munster Agallaimh [Dialogue Songs] from the James Goodman Song Manuscript of 1857’
Goodman has a number of agallaimh in his collection, both in the form of poems such as An
Figheadóir agus a bhean and as sung agallaimh, two of which I propose to discuss in this paper.
They are: Seaghanín Aorach and William Reilly. Seaghanín Aorach is a dialogue between
Seaghanín and Death on the road to Limerick. I propose to look at this from a historical standpoint, examining similar dialogues from 12 th –14 th -century Germany and elsewhere while siting it firmly in the living tradition in the Gaeltacht today. William Reilly's title is an oddity. It has nothing to do with the 'O'Reilly from the County Cavan' songs nor is it one of the 'Broken
Token' O'Reilly songs. The song is in Irish, never mentions O'Reilly apart from the title and is in the malmariée tradition, although here the young woman is reasonably restrained and it is the old man who is vitriolic. I have chosen these two agallaimh as a good representation of the breadth of material in the Goodman Song Manuscript. In each case I shall also be looking at versions of these songs from elsewhere in Munster, including Múscraí and Uíbh Ráthach.
• Conor Caldwell (QUB), ‘Developing dance music from the song tradition’
While the traditional music revival of the 1960s brought with it a vast repertoire of music composed specifically for instrumental performance, the Irish dance music canon contains numerous melodies that are derived directly from the song tradition. This paper explores the development of some of these tunes over the last four hundred years and demonstrates how they spread across borders, instrument-specific repertoire and survived amidst ever changing social trends. In particular this paper focuses on the Scottish folk-song ‘The Wee, Wee Man’ and its evolution from a seventeenthcentury Scottish folk-song to become a part of the twentieth-century Donegal dance repertoire.
• Lillis Ó Laoire (NUIG). ‘Reifying Irish Song: in the interstices of orality and literacy’
Irish song has been documented for over 200 years. Both an oral and a literate tradition, the ways that these two dimensions of song intersect provide a fascinating way to understand their effects on
Irish tradition. Although primacy today is supposedly given to the oral over the literate, it is interesting to study how the views of the early collectors continue to inform perspectives on both words and music. In this paper, multiforms of the same song will provide material for a discussion on

4 form and structure in order to understand how literate views of tradition still continue to permeate attitudes to authenticity and excellence.
Panel 2: Printed Songs in Early Eighteenth-century Dublin
• Andrew Carpenter (UCD), ‘Swift and Song’
Swift was surrounded by songs and singing – from his days as a student in Dublin in the 1680s to his death in the deanery in the Dublin liberties in 1745, street singing sounded in his ears. He was certainly aware of the power of song and wrote several poems, particularly political ones, that seem designed for singing. Yet he also wrote parodies of songs and was, famously, uninterested in music or secular singing – having a particular aversion to Italian opera. This paper asks how valid it is to consider Swift as a writer of songs.
• Moyra Haslett (QUB), ‘Singing at the Club: the Drapier and the Guilds in early eighteenth-century
Dublin’
Several Dublin-printed collections and song-sheets in 1724-27 advertise songs sung ‘at the Club of
Mr Taplin’s, The Sign of the Drapier’s Head’ or ‘at the Drapier’s Club in Thick Street’. These publications give us a rare glimpse of club life in early eighteenth-century Dublin. They are also among the first Dublin-printed songs. This paper considers early examples of Dublin-printed songs, and of songs published in London as ‘Irish’ song, to consider the cultural meanings of Irish song in
English in this period. The paper will also consider the songs’ settings, where they are known, and what these might tell us of the relationship between Jonathan Swift and popular urban culture at this time.
Panel 3: Urban singing performance panel
• Maurice Leyden, ‘Urban singing in the nineteenth-century: Belfast’ and
• Ian Ó Loingsigh, ‘Urban singing in the nineteenth-century: Dublin’
Both of these papers will be presented as a performance panel in which features of historical song will be explained through sung examples.
Plenary lecture (Friday)
• Nicholas Carolan (ITMA): ‘The Irish-Language Songs of Patrick Lynch’
Patrick Lynch, Pádraig Ó Loinsigh, a Co. Down schoolmaster and an associate in the 1790s of the
United Irishmen of Belfast, was commissioned by the Armagh musician Edward Bunting to collect for publication the Irish-language words for song melodies that Bunting himself had been collecting since the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792. In spite of many difficulties in the disturbed Ireland of the time, Lynch gathered hundreds of song-texts, chiefly in Connaught from 1802. But he was dropped by Bunting after his inadvertent involvement in the political trial of Bunting's friend Thomas Russell.
The texts survive but have largely gone unpublished. They form an important corpus of material for the understanding of the Irish-language song tradition, before and after Lynch's time.

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Panel 4: Varieties of Song in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
• Joanne Burns (QUB), '"Our finest and most popular airs are modern": Thomas Moore on Irish
Song'
Thomas Moore’s “'Prefatory Letter on Music'" (1810) has been a relatively neglected source in
Moore studies. This paper reads this letter closely for what it reveals about Moore’s attitude towards, and perception of, Irish song. It takes as its starting point Moore’s comment in the preface that: 'Though much has been said of the antiquity of our music, it is certain that our finest and most popular airs are modern'.
• Sheila Rooney (QUB), ‘Landscapes and Songscapes: landscape and nature in the songs of Moore’
• Colette Moloney (WIT), ‘Irish song of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as transcribed by
James Cody’
James Cody, a piper and Irish teacher, was employed by the Irish-music collector Edward Bunting
(1773-1843) to transcribe music and lyrics in the early nineteenth century. Cody’s contribution, of mainly Ulster material, is preserved in MSS 5, 6, and 33(4) of the extant Bunting Collection in the library of Queen’s University Belfast. A further Cody manuscript, probably part of Cody’s work for
Bunting, is held by in the National Library of Ireland (NLI G 569). In addition, James Cody also appears to have contributed to the manuscripts of Patrick O’Neill (1765-1832), Owning, Co. Kilkenny which are also preserved in the National Library of Ireland (NLI MS 44.806). The paper will consider the contribution of Cody to both the Bunting and O’Neill manuscripts, and the nature of Irish song in the era, as evidenced by the Cody transcriptions.
Panel 6: Investigating Ireland’s Oldest Song Repertories
• Sorcha Nic Lochlainn, ‘The Early Irish cepóc and some possible parallels in early modern Gaelic song’.
The nature and performance context of the Early Irish cepóc have long intrigued Gaelic scholars, and this song-genre has been the subject of much speculation. We know that the cepóc was a choral panegyric song, which was almost certainly performed exclusively by women; sources from the Early
Irish period inform us that this type of song was performed in the contexts of praise and lamentation. This paper will build on the innovative observations made by John MacInnes (1968) in examining the possible parallels between the Early Irish cepóc and the genre of women's praisesongs in early modern Gaelic.
• Ann Buckley, ‘Varieties of Song in Medieval Ireland’
This paper presents a short discussion of some of the earliest examples of song in Ireland from the liturgical and secular repertories, with a view to showing the variety of musical and linguistic forms that make up its history, culturally and socially.