The Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) is committed to providing free, universal access to the rich cultural tradition of Irish music, song and dance. If you’re able, we’d love for you to consider a donation. Any level of support will help us preserve and grow this tradition for future generations.
A Chairde, tá súil agam go raibh Nollaig Shona agaibh go léir agus guím gath rath oraibh don bhliain úr nua ceolmhar atá romhainn.
Wishing you all a Happy New Year, and best wishes for a musical and fulfilling 2024.
This year bookends ITMA’s Strategy 2019-2023. It proved to be a transformative year for the archive and for the service we provide to the public.
Our Annual Report 2023 will provide more details on the diverse range of activities and projects delivered by the staff, board, artists and supporters. In the meantime, I’d like to share a few highlights from 2023 and a few things to look forward to in 2024.
Highlight of 2023: Digital Infrastructure
ITMA’s digital infrastructure has been transformed in 2023 with new digital storage and preservation suites, a huge increase in digitisation capacity and a new website.
Democratising Access through Digital Services
ITMA will continue to grow its digital offering as we increasingly prioritise our services to remote users. We want to democratise access to the physical archival material we hold in Merrion Square by making as much material as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. We will make more archival material more accessible to more people. Digitisation is key to making this possible.
While anyone can visit ITMA’s Library at 73 Merrion Square without an appointment or invitation, and while we do not have any paywall barriers or membership fees, I am personally conscious that only a small number of privileged visitors can actually attend ITMA’s premises in Dublin during working hours, Monday to Friday. The number of in-person visitors pales in comparison to the number of people who access our digital services worldwide from the comfort of their homes at times that suits their own personal schedule.
In 2023, we built many parts of the digital systems we need to deliver on our ambitions for the digital archive of the future.
Broadening Our Funding Base (Strategy 2019-2023)
The year 2023 saw ITMA receive significant private financial donations of over €200,000. The generosity shown by individual donors helped to significantly bridge the gap between our ambitions and what we deliver.
We remain very grateful to our main funders The Arts Council of Ireland, who have themselves secured increased funding for the Arts Sector from their parent Department and Government since 2019. Without their support ITMA could not function. We salute the extraordinary success of their Director Maureen Kennelly and out-going Chair Kevin Rafter in securing a monumental increase in funding for the Arts in Ireland in recent years.
ITMA received standstill allocations in 2023 and again in 2024, so the support of philanthropists and donors ensures that we can deliver an increasingly better service. Without this private support, the transformative year we have experienced in 2023 would not have been possible.
For potential donors based in the USA, donating to ITMA can be a tax efficient way of supporting our mission of making more and more archival material accessible to remote users. ITMA is eligible for 501(c)3 donations and working through the Ireland Funds, our donors have had an amazingly positive impact on the work we delivered this year.
Irish-based donors can see their donations augmented by the State through the CHY3 form which any donation above €250 will be worth an additional 44.93%. So if you donate €250, we can claim €112.33 tax back from revenue – meaning your original donation is worth €362.33 towards ITMA’s archival work.
Artistic Programming
Our commitment to commissioning artists to creatively engage with the archive, and inspire the public to do the same, continues unabated. With more than 150 artists engaged every year, ITMA’s spend on artists fees has grown exponentially over the course of this Strategy. For example, ITMA spent €211,246 on over 160 artists in 2022.
Our Drawing from the Well series continues to develop and grow. It is shaped by a belief in the process of connecting artists with archival material to inspire new art and new interpretations of the tradition.
Field recording in 2023 saw unprecedented numbers of in-depth interviews. Highlights include over 60 people interviewed as part of an Arts Council of Northern Ireland project documenting the experiences of traditional musicians during the Troubles. Another 20 interviews were conducted with musicians, singers and dancers during Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy in Miltown Malbay, adding to one of our largest audio-visual collections. We continued to collect and lend a platform to minorities within the tradition through projects such as The Thomas McCarthy Song Collecting Project and our partnership in Trad is Amach.
The new feature on Tommy Peoples on our website is part of ITMA’s Portrait of an Artist series, which will be augmented in 2024. It was pleasing to see archival work on Tommy Peoples being curated by his daughter Siobhán with Conor Caldwell and Ciarán Ó Maonaigh. Their work was celebrated on stage as part of a sold-out Drawing from the Well concert with our partners in the National Concert Hall.
The Heritage Council funded a Rights and Permissions project which will unlock potentially thousands of audio recordings. For example, we now have permission to make available all our +500 recordings of Seamus Ennis through the website. This process of engaging with the community of donors, recordists and artists is an onerous but very necessary one as many of the recordings we receive were made by well-meaning enthusiasts in an era where requesting consent to record were not always considered necessary.
All our work is predicated on having sufficient funding to run the archive. We would like to acknowledge the support of all our funders, who have empowered the staff and board to deliver a phenomenal amount of archival work in 2023.
In addition to our main annual funder, The Arts Council, we are very appreciative of the support shown by the Office of Public Works, who have been tremendously supportive of ITMA in not only giving us use of 73 Merrion Square, but actively helping to deliver a new Artist/Archivist-in-Residence Space at the Mews to the rear of the building. The design for the development of the residence is sympathetic to the needs of artists and archivists while also sensitive to the conservation and design aesthetic of the Georgian architectural heritage of Merrion Square. This development is funded by the Government of Ireland through the Shared Island Initiative and should be operational by Q4 2025.
The Challenges Ahead in 2024-28
2024 will see ITMA publish a new Strategy. While much work has already been conducted in scoping out the main elements of the plan, you can expect see it published in Q2 2024.
We see the mission of maximising remote digital access as being crucial. We will be guided by the principles of democratising access to our shared musical heritage.
To do this we need the digital infrastructure to:
We will also explore ways to maximise mutually beneficial synergies to connect local, national and international communities in creating an integrated archive that serves their needs.
As we continuously move towards more digital access, we will seek to empirically quantify the percentage of material we make universally accessible online.
On an artistic and curatorial front, you can expect our flagship programming such as Saothar (new compositions for the tradition), Drawing from the Well, Saoithe (interviews with senior artists offering sage advice) and A Portrait of an Artist series to continue to develop.
ITMA’s film making capacity is becoming more widely recognised and a new source of potential income for the archive. In 2024, TG4 will broadcast a 5-part series Taoscadh ón Tobar, which sees leading artists engage with the archive to present highlights of their research in an engaging way. You can look forward to the premiere of Brendan Gleeson’s Farewell to Hughes’s at the Dublin International Film Festival in February 2024. A new film on Seán Keane is due for premiere on 28 January 2024 at the IFI.
We have a huge volume of interviews to make accessible from our field recording work and we look forward to making literally thousands of recordings available as a direct result of the Rights and Permissions work in Q4 2023.
Watch out for very exciting news about Christy Moore’s Archive in 2024…
The ACNI have funded cataloguing work on Cathal and Maura McConnell’s collections which contain exceptional and unique recordings made in the mid/late 20th century.
Ever conscious of the Irish tradition in North America, we are looking forward to Don Meade’s cassette collection of recordings made in New York. This material has been digitised and is being prepared for the next installment of the From the Bridge digital exhibition on our website in June 2024. This digitisation work on New York related materials is funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs Emigrant Abroad Scheme.
We are delighted and excited to have announced partnerships with Notre Dame and Boston College Universities in 2023, which will develop over the coming years. We will welcome interns from Notre Dame to Merrion Square again this summer. We will also host outstanding fiddle player and BC-graduate Andrew Caden to work in the Archive in 2024.
A milestone project in 2024 will see the publication of a book on Tommie Potts researched and written by Sean Potts. It draws from archival sources to help readers and listeners to get a better understanding of the nuances of one of the most iconic traditional musicians of the 20th century. We are delighted to have contributions from Aoife Ní Bhriain, who is preparing detailed musical transcriptions of previously unheard archival recordings of Tommie, and Aoife Nic Chormaic, who is editing the publication. A special Drawing from the Well concert celebrating Tommie Potts will see the launch of the book on 14 March 2024 at the National Concert Hall.
Challenges for 2024
The two biggest challenges ITMA face in 2024 are insufficient funding for our ambitions and insufficient cataloguing capacity.
As mentioned above, we will receive a standstill grant from the Arts Council for our activities in 2024. The exceptional private donations of over 200k from individuals in 2023 enabled a huge amount of additional work to be undertaken. We cannot be guaranteed that we will be as successful in accessing philanthropy on this scale in 2024, or in the years ahead. We will continue to try to expand our funding streams and to grow our earned income.
The second challenge is to develop new innovative ways of scaling up our cataloguing capacity without compromising on the professional standards. We will need to find engaging ways to harvest the knowledge in the community to scale up our metadata creation in an orderly system. Given that our digitisation capacity has now grown approximately 10-fold YOY, the volume of material we can digitise in 2024 will be huge. However, the rate at which ITMA staff can catalogue and make available newly digitised material is already out of sync. The new digitised files won’t be accessible to the public until this bottleneck is resolved.
The crux of the challenge in 2024 will be to grow our cataloguing capacity to the point that it can outpace our capacity to digitise material. If we can solve that, we will have a clear road-map to becoming the best digital archive of its type in the world by maximising the percentage of the archive that is available outside of the building 24/7.
Thank you all for your support, encouragement, and engagement throughout the year. Looking forward to serving the Irish traditional music, song and dance community’s archival needs in 2024 and beyond.
– Liam O’Connor
