The very first Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, the most comprehensive publication on music ever to have been undertaken in Ireland, is currently in preparation and scheduled to be published in 2009. Including over 2,500 articles reflecting Ireland’s musical culture, it will be the standard work of reference on musical life in this country for many years to come. Given the controversial views on Irish musical culture of one of the two principal editors, and the lack of debate surrounding them, Barra Ó Séaghdha asks questions about the encyclopaedia’s coverage of classical and contemporary Irish music.

At first sight, it may appear odd to the uninvolved outsider that anybody should get worked up about any encyclopaedia, let alone one that does not yet exist. To understand the thinking behind the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, which is coming into being as we write, to understand why it is important, and to understand why we should care, we may have to journey through the recent and more distant past. In 1990, in the first of the Irish Musical Studies series of books that he co-edited, Harry White, Professor of Music in UCD, makes a case for an encyclopaedia of music in Ireland. In his foundational article, White is looking not only at the internal culture of music but at ways of levering music into the centre of critical consciousness:

If music is at...