Harry Bradshaw, recipient of the ‘Gradam na gCeoltóirí’ award of the TG4 Television Gradaim Ceoil 2008, in an RTÉ radio studio 1992. Photo by RTÉ photographer John Rowe.

Harry Bradshaw, radio producer, record producer and sound engineer, and writer and lecturer on Irish traditional music, is Ireland’s leading expert in the remastering of archival recordings. He is pictured here at the time of an archival award from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, USA. Bradshaw, born in Wicklow and reared in Dublin, worked in Eamonn Andews Studios before joining RTÉ as a sound engineer in 1968 and becoming a radio producer there in in 1979. He specialised in traditional music programmes and was the producer for seventeen years of the RTÉ Radio 1 flagship series The Long Note. Other series included An Droichead Beo, Folkland, Music of the People and The Irish Phonograph. He has carried out intensive fieldwork throughout Ireland, making recordings of over 1,000 individual singers and musicians, as well as of festivals and summer schools, and of musical oral history. Producer and engineer of many classic albums for companies such as Gael Linn and Claddagh Records, he specialises on his own label Viva Voce in research into Irish musicians of the 1920s and 1930s in America and the restoration of their recordings. In recent years he has also remastered some 15,000 items from RTÉ’s earliest field recordings of Irish traditional music.

Photo courtesy RTÉ and Irish Traditional Music Archive, © RTÉ