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The Making of Irish Traditional Music by Helen O’Shea
Hardback, 236 pages, ?39.00 Special Pre-Publication Offer: €30.00

Dr Helen O’Shea is a Research Fellow at Monash University, Victoria, Australia and her work has been praised by Professor Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, University of Limerick, who says it is, “A breath of fresh air in the growing literature on music in Ireland. The debate it will provoke will itself form a part of the great wild yell of Irish traditional music in a new century.”

The book claims to be first critical historical study of Irish traditional music. The Making of Irish Traditional Music also draws on the author’s experience as a musician to analyse the encounters of foreigners playing Irish music at summer schools with the tourism industry’s, ‘Ireland of the Welcomes’ and their experiences in the heart of Ireland’s traditional music empire, County Clare. The book concludes that a view of Irish traditional music, as expressive of an ethnically pure, territorially bound, masculinist, national culture, is an inadequate basis for a multi-ethnic Irish society.

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