Tag Archives: Ireland

A Letter from the Editor on the 25th Anniversary of The Journal of Music

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The inaugural issue was published in the first week of November 2000.

Published in The Journal of Music on 4 November 2025.

Dear Reader,

Some of you have been with me since the beginning. For others, this may be the first piece you have read from this publication. For the past twenty-five years, The Journal of Music has been documenting and discussing music in Ireland. One never knows the impact of this work, and it is not easy in the current media environment, but I would be concerned were it not there.

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A Review of ‘What Ireland Can Teach the World About Music’ in Ethnomusicology Ireland

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Review by Kara Shea O’Brien, University of Limerick, in Ethnomusicology Ireland, Issue 10, 2025. https://www.ictmd.ie/ethnomusicology-ireland-10

What Ireland Can Teach the World About Music
Toner Quinn
The Journal of Music, 2024
ISBN: 9781739577407 (HB)

Writer, publisher, and fiddle player Toner Quinn has long championed the Irish music industry, leading and facilitating discussion through his creation and editorialship of the Journal of Music. In his new book, Quinn brings together selections of his own writing in the Journal from 2000–2023. The essays cover a wide variety of topics from performance reviews to obituaries and to thoughtful opinion pieces that shed light on many aspects of Irish music over the last two decades. The book offers a unique retrospective on a tumultuous period in Irish music history: a thoughtful, critical, wide-ranging exploration that will serve both as a primary source for future historians and, hopefully, as a starting point for further discussion.

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The World Can Criticise Kneecap, But They Have Started Something

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The controversy surrounding the Irish rap band has obscured deeper questions about power, conflict and resistance, but they won’t go away. (Article first published in the Journal of Music on 30 April.)

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What’s Next for Irish Music?

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What does the recent trajectory of the arts in Ireland – from Arts Council funding increases to the Basic Income pilot – mean for musicians? How can we further strengthen music across Ireland? And what do these developments mean for the tradition of the Irish harp? This is an edited version of the Harp Ireland/Cruit Éireann Annual Lecture, given by Toner Quinn on 17 November 2024 at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

It is now ten years since I submitted the Report on the Harping Tradition in Ireland to the Arts Council in October 2014. Commissioned by the Council, it was a 96-page report with 14 recommendations for the future of the instrument in Ireland.

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A Report on My Lecture at Belfast

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Below is a report by Robert McMillen of the Irish News on on my recent lecture at the Belfast International Arts Festival. The lecture was titled ‘How Ireland Thinks About Music’ and took place at the Oh Yeah Centre in Belfast on 9 November 2024.

Beyond the political: What Ireland can teach the world about music

by Robert McMillen

Above the cacophony that surrounds Irish traditional music – the endless debates about the “tradition”, the politics of it all, what purpose it serves, is it any good – one voice, it seems to me, rises above all the din: that of Toner Quinn.

Son of film-maker Bob Quinn, Toner is editor of the Journal of Music which was in print for 10 years and online for the past 14 but the Journal also publishes books including its latest, Toner’s own What Ireland Can Teach the World About Music.

As part of the Belfast International Arts Festival, the Conamara resident gave a talk on the book and what he has learnt since its publication last December and as usual, like all his articles, it raised many issues.

One of the reasons Toner started writing about music 25 years ago was because of the way music, particularly traditional Irish music, is often used in society.

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What Will the 2024 Election Mean for Music and the Arts?

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Now that the US election is over, we can remind ourselves that we are not citizens of that country, and that all of the airtime it has taken up in Irish media is time not spent talking about what matters on the ground in Ireland.

For those in music and the arts, there is much to discuss, particularly now that a general election has been called for 29 November.

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A Glimpse into Irish Music in the 1980s and 90s

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In 2011, a treasure trove of music and arts photos from the 1980s and 90s was rescued from a skip outside the offices of the Sunday Tribune newspaper in Dublin. Among the thousands of images were those documenting Ireland’s classical, jazz, pop, rock, theatre, dance and opera scenes. In this selection of 24 photos, we offer a glimpse into the musical life of Ireland during those decades.

The Sunday Tribune Photo Archive – An Introduction
In 2011 in Dublin city centre, Nicholas Carolan and Brian Doyle of the Irish Traditional Music Archive spotted a skip outside the offices of the Sunday Tribune. The newspaper was closing down and in the skip were thousands of photos in clearly labelled brown A4 envelopes. Carolan and Doyle and another staff member, Grace Toland, rescued the music and arts photos before the skip was taken away that day, stored the traditional music ones in the Archive, and suggested that I keep the others in case they could be used in the Journal of Music. 

The photos cover classical, jazz, pop, rock, theatre, dance and opera in Ireland in the 1980s and 90s. In recent months, I finally had a chance to look through them all and have included here a selection of 24. Together, they provide a fascinating glimpse into musical life in the 1980s and 90s in Ireland. We plan to publish more selections in the future. Should you have further information about these photographs, please email editor@journalofmusic.com.

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A Review of ‘What Ireland Can Teach the World About Music’ in Sound Post magazine

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What Ireland Can Teach the World about Music – and other essays
By Toner Quinn
Published by: The Journal of Music
Available from: https://journalofmusic.com/shop

Book Review
By David Agnew
Published in Sound Post magazine (published by the Musicians’ Union of Ireland), Autumn 2024. Visit https://mui.ie/

I like creative doers. People who do something different, find a way to set out their stall, for themselves as much as for everyone else to take part. Toner Quinn wanted a space for regular, thoughtful writing on music and culture in Ireland, to stimulate deeper intellectual debate, without being academic, and started it himself in 2000 through The Journal of Music. This book is a compilation of his writings in four sections on that journey. Initially in hard-copy to 2010, exclusively online from 2014, with a stark pandemic section 2020–2022, finishing with a list of impossible ideas for the future, all of which are entirely reasonable, if utopian.

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How Ireland Thinks About Music

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Does Ireland have its own way of thinking about music? How might this perspective have developed? And could it explain the current dynamism in Irish musical life? In this essay, the edited text of a talk given at Farmleigh House on 11 May, Journal of Music Editor Toner Quinn explores these questions and more.

Almost four months ago, I published the book What Ireland Can Teach the World About Music, and I realise this title may sound presumptuous, but in reality every country has something to teach the world about music, because every country has its own history and musical traditions. Ireland, therefore, should have something that it can offer the world, particularly given the impact our music has had, and even if, publicly, we tend not to talk too much about what that might be.

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SXSW Protest is About More than Palestine

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The national news cycle has already moved on: a brief appearance by Kneecap on Morning Ireland, followed by Soda Blonde on The Tonight Show and Newstalk, but apart from some coverage by what remains of the music press, the public discussion about the SXSW protest by Irish bands over Palestine has all but ended. We have become used to the conveyor belt nature of the news ticker and don’t expect more. It would be convenient for Ireland’s official agencies if the issues at the heart of the protest also went away once the bands came home, but they won’t. 

Palestine has become a flashpoint for the frustration of a generation, the high end of a line of grievances and clearly where their patience has run out. Ten Irish bands refused to play at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, because they learnt that it was being sponsored by the US Army and US arms manufacturers. The slaughter in Palestine, enabled by these entities, made the thought of performing in such a context ‘abhorrent’, as Faye O’Rourke of Soda Blonde said. 

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