The Breandán Breathnach Collection at ITMA contains at least 40 reel-to-reel recordings featuring Denis Murphy with potentially hundreds of individual tracks of his playing. The majority of tunes on these tapes were recorded by Breathnach during his field trips to Sliabh Luachra while others are on working copies of materials borrowed from the Radio Éireann archives and other sources.

Limiting the scope of sources for the research was the first challenge Anton Zille faced as part of cooperation with ITMA. The selection has been guided by the materials from Breandán Breathnach’s CICD index. Around 200 of the cards digitised by ITMA in time for the project contained transcriptions of Denis Murphy’s playing that could be verified against source recordings.

A total of 35 tunes and one song have been selected for this project. It is the first time these recordings have ever been cleared for publication. To reflect the richness of Denis Murphy’s repertoire special care has been given to the proportional representation of tune types. The recordings are accompanied by – and are best studied with – the scans of the CICD cards, which are also being published for the first time.

CICD stands short for An Cnuasacht Iomlán den Cheol Damhsa (Full Collection of Dance Music). This is one of the three card indices made by Breandán Breathnach and the one most frequently cited in the materials related to Denis Murphy. ITMA’s AtoM catalogue, which offers a short description of the index, says there are 6544 CICD cards in total.

Breathnach described his system of cataloguing in detail in an article titled “Between the Jigs and the Reels” published in the Ceol magazine in 1977 (vol. 5, no. 2). The article focused on Breathnach’s concept of the music code for which he believed the first two bars of the tune and its fundamental note were sufficient. However, this text was describing what is now known as the Post-Retirement Index (PRI), the compact version of Breathnach’s card index that he intended to make public. Unlike the PRI, which only showed incipits and concise catalogue notes, CICD index cards often contained full transcriptions of tunes as well as notes on their performance and history based on the comments made by the musicians. These details, as well as the titles provided by Denis, added a new dimension to the project: the cards could help recover some context about the tunes that had perhaps been lost even in Sliabh Luachra.

An example of a CICD card shows the following key elements: card number (top left corner), tune title (below the card number, sometimes with temporary comments or left blank), numeric code of the first two bars (sometimes with the tonic sol-fa translation below) and tune transcription. The flip side of the card contains notes referencing the source recording and comments about the tune; notes in pencil below cite specific ITMA-REEL items – these were made by sound archivist Jackie Small (star or asterisk means the transcription comes from this particular recording).

Most of the CICD cards related to Denis Murphy reference the recordings made by Breathnach in October 1966, November 1967 and November 1970. Breathnach referred to the corresponding reel-to-reel tapes as Kerry 1 (K1) 1966, Kerry 2-4 (K2-4) 1967 and Kerry 1-3 (K1-3) 1970. Most of the Denis Murphy tunes published in Ceol Rince na hÉireann were sourced from these recording sessions.

The seven selected reel-to-reels feature recordings of Denis Murphy and several other musicians from the Cork-Kerry border, offering a window into the music played in the area in the late 1960s. The items are fully annotated in the ITMA catalogue and in addition, all the tracks with Denis Murphy have now been referenced in #ProjectDenis, making it easy for the future researchers to navigate their way through the tunes.

The combined tune data from the selected archival items and #ProjectDenis has been used to analyse the tune types found in Denis Murphy’s recorded repertoire. This data – with a total sample size of 550 tunes including duplicates – helped determine the breakdown of the selected tunes by type.

Reels make up some 37% of Denis Murphy’s recordings, followed by jigs with over 17% and slides with about 16%. Polkas represent some 13% of all recorded tunes while hornpipes make up around 11%. The rest of the tunes fall under miscellaneous tune types such as airs, flings, single reels, marches, barndances etc. 

Breathnach did not collect any slow airs from Murphy – but he did record a number of songs and ditties. An example of each has been included in the 36 recordings published here.

In total, 12 reels, 6 jigs, 5 slides, 4 polkas, 4 hornpipes, 4 miscellaneous tunes and one song recorded by Breandán Breathnach have been selected for the project.

Each chapter offers detailed description of findings for every recording in the playlist and CICD card attached as well as some general context for the tunes. The author hopes that this work will further the understanding of the music and musicians of Sliabh Luachra, help overcome some longstanding stereotypes – and serve as a worthy tribute to Denis Murphy’s creative genius.