Tag Archives: music

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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How to Achieve the Impossible, With Very Little, and When Everyone Says You Are Wrong

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An extract from Count Me Out: Selected Writings of Filmmaker Bob Quinn. To order the book, visit https://journalofmusic.com/shop

These days, my father and I meet once a week. From Leitir Péic in Conamara I drive the half-hour west along Cois Fharraige and through the moon-like landscape of Bóthar Loch an Iolra to the townland of Tuairín, where Bob’s dwelling is almost entirely hidden from thirty years of tree-planting. He is now 89 and there are always practical things to discuss, but we are rarely in the mood. Instead, we continue on to the village of An Cheathrú Rua where in the early evening we have our choice of seats in An Chistin pub and we settle down to talk about what matters – writing, thinking, ideas, music, the world. 

It has always been like this. My father is known as a filmmaker, photographer and writer, but beneath these pursuits is a relentless inquiry. That is why his artistic work is so polymathic, from the anarchic Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire to the first Irish-language feature film Poitín to the intellectual explosion that is Atlantean. ‘A low threshold of boredom,’ is his bald explanation, but there is more at play of course.

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Catherine Martin Swept Aside the Old Excuses for Not Supporting the Arts

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When Catherine Martin was appointed Minister for Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Gaeltacht in June 2020, three months into the pandemic, those working in music and the arts had become accustomed to low expectations. 

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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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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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30 Years of Questions in One Hour: An Interview with Martin Hayes

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A recording of a public interview with fiddle player Martin Hayes, conducted by Journal of Music editor Toner Quinn at Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann 2024.

It is just over thirty years since I paused on my way out of J. McNeill’s music shop on Capel Street in Dublin to look at the tapes for sale. They were held in a tall, slender wooden case by the door with the most recent at the top. This is where I first came across Kíla’s Handel’s Fantasy as well as the re-release of Kevin Burke’s Sweeney’s Dream. On this day there was just one tape on the top shelf. The cover seemed purposefully blurred to represent motion and presented a musician standing holding the fiddle with the bow hanging from one finger. New tapes were not cheap for a student, but somehow I had precisely the right amount of money. On impulse, having never heard the name of the musician before, I bought it and jumped on the bus to Waterford.

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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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