Author Biography
MARY LOUISE O'DONNELL holds a doctorate from the University of Limerick and is a former Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar and postdoctoral fellow. Her research on the history and performance practice of the Irish harp has been published in Utopian Studies, Eire-Ireland, and The American Harp Journal, and she has also published widely on topics relating to Irish cultural history, semiotics, and performance studies. She is a renowned harpist and has given lecture/recitals throughout Europe, North America, and Australia.
Description
The image of the harp - symbolic of the political and cultural landscape of Ireland for centuries - evokes strong sentiments in the collective Irish imagination. This iconic instrument became the emblem on Irish coinage in the sixteenth century. Since then it has been symbolic of Irish culture, music, and politics - finally evolving into a significant marker of national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most important period in this evolution was between 1770 and 1880. In these years, the instrument became central to many utopian visions of an autonomous Irish nation and the harp's metaphoric significance eclipsed its musical one. Mary Louise O'Donnell uses these fascinating years of major social, political, and cultural change as the focus of her study on the Irish harp. From the revolutionary symbolism of the harp to the cultural curiosities that were the blind Irish harpers, the many permutations of Ireland's harp are thoroughly examined. O'Donnell also discusses how the protection and patronage of the Irish harpers passed from the aristocratic Gaelic order to the Ascendancy and affluent middle classes in Dublin and Belfast.Ireland's Harp brings to light the monumental importance of this instrument by highlighting the central place the harp occupied in the formation and expression of Ireland's cultural and national identity.
‘Ireland’s Harp is a valuable contribution to the ongoing critical debate regarding why the harp’s symbolic significance eclipses its musical one … [it] serves as a very useful purpose: to condense for the reader a significant amount of historical detail about the Irish Harp … this text fills an important gap and will energise the burgeoning field of harp studies.’
Emily Cullen, Ethnomusicology Ireland, 2016
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‘The result of this study is an engaging and lively account of the Irish harp during a little-studied period of its history, with a generous amount of illustrations, figures and colour plates … The last pages of the book also include mention of the limited amount of scholarship on the Irish harp, something that the present study very ably addresses.’
Denis Collins, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, 2016
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‘… this is a widely researched and thought-provoking study that synthesises a large amount of material and addresses significant gaps in existing scholarship on Irish music and cultural history.’
Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 2015
‘The achievement of this book in placing Irish music in context cannot be over-stated: in one single volume, the author manages to cover more than 150 years of the history of harps in Ireland, from musical, iconographic and symbolic points of view.’
Études Irlandaises, 40–2 (2015)
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‘In northern Europe we take our national symbols lightly … Many might assume that [our national symbol] is the shamrock, but it is the harp, whose background as icon and instrument is vividly charted by O’Donnell … O’Donnell takes us deep into the symbolism and practice of the harp [and] takes us beyond the commonly accepted narratives of the male/female harper and the wire/gut-strung instrument into subtle, scholarly dissections of their roles and modes of depiction.’
Books Ireland, May/June 2015
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‘This is a revealing study not just for the musically inclined, but anyone concerned with Irish popular culture and its political and social dimensions.’
The Irish Catholic, 17 September 2015
‘[Ireland’s Harp] is a valuable resource in an under-researched and under-published field and will help historical musicologists, and others, to think about, discuss, and perhaps reassess, the matters she brings to the fore. This book contains a wealth of information on matters organological, historical, social, cultural, religious and political. By weaving them together, Mary Louise O’Donnell provides the first full-length overview of many aspects of harp history in Ireland that highlight not only how Ireland’s colonial rulers thought about the Irish and how the Irish viewed themselves over the last number of centuries, but how that changed the way they played music.’
Siobhán Armstrong, The Journal of Music, March 2015
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'O'Donnell traces the monumental importance of the harp, and the central place it occupied in the formation and expression of Ireland's ever shifting cultural and national identity'
'an immensely scholarly but approachable new work'
Cahir O'Doherty, Irish Voice, New York, March 2015
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‘No musical instrument has ever had to carry so much baggage, surely, as the Irish harp. It has been the symbol both of Ireland under English rule and of Ireland independent. Unadorned, on a green background, it was a rebel flag in 1916. On blue, it still represents this island – or a bit of it – on the British royal standard.
There, the Irish part of the quadrant is unique in not containing wildlife – England, Scotland, and Wales being epitomised by lions and dragons instead. But the harp is also unique as the only musical instrument anywhere that serves as a State symbol.
And along with adorning all official documents in Ireland, it doubles – in reverse or abstracted form – as the logo of certain unofficial flagships, notably Guinness and Ryanair.
Its complex political history is the subject of a new book called Ireland’s Harp: The Shaping of Irish Identity c.1770-1880. But in concentrating on the relatively modern period between those dates, author Mary Louise O’Donnell also reminds us of the instrument’s much more ancient roots.’
Frank McNally
An Irishman’s Diary, Irish Times, 5 March 2015
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'For centuries, the Irish harp, the revered instrument of early Gaelic society with over a thousand years of history, has been the ultimate signifier of Ireland and Irishness. Throughout the centuries, changes to its image and practice have always anticipated or reflected major shifts in Irish politics, society and culture.'
Irish Times, December 2014
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