Tag Archives: travel

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

A Report on My Lecture at Belfast

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

SXSW Protest is About More than Palestine

Posted on by

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. 

Continue reading →