Music Collections in the National Library of Ireland

Together, these collections chart the evolution of art music, traditional music, and popular culture, offering an unparalleled resource for researchers, performers, and music lovers alike.

Historic Music Collections

NLI’s Joly Music and Additional Music collections contain what is probably the largest corpus anywhere of music published in Ireland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These holdings reflect a thriving music-publishing trade and a flourishing musical culture among the Anglo-Irish elite of the period, with more than sixty music publishers operating in Dublin alone.

Dublin attracted visiting musicians not only from England but also from continental Europe, and several foreign composers ultimately settled in the city. Figures such as Paul Alday, Francesco Geminiani and J. B. Logier were active in Ireland, alongside Irish composers including John Field, Thomas Cooke, Philip Cogan, Michael Kelly and Timothy Geary. Later nineteenth-century composers such as Michael William Balfe, William Vincent Wallace, and George Alexander Osborne are also well represented in NLI’s collections.

Twentieth-century orchestral music features prominently in the Bryden Thomson Collection, which comprises scores from the personal library of the influential conductor and offers valuable insight into Irish engagement with modern orchestral repertoire.

Several years ago, pianist and musicologist Una Hunt established the National Archive of Irish Composers in collaboration with NLI. Currently hosted by TU Dublin, this archive provides a growing repository of digitised music drawn primarily from the Joly and Additional Music collections. This material is also discoverable through NLI’s own catalogue, and will be expanded further through an ongoing programme of music digitisation at the Library.

Traditional Irish Music in NLI

Ireland’s rich heritage of traditional music is strongly represented at NLI. The Library’s substantial collections trace the history of collecting and notating Irish traditional music, from early printed sources to major manuscript collections assembled by Edward Bunting and George Petrie. These antiquarian collections emerged from the growing interest in Ireland’s Gaelic heritage among members of the liberal Protestant ascendancy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. NLI also holds early editions of Thomas Moore’s works and important manuscripts by P. W. Joyce, further documenting the transmission of traditional song and melody.

Of particular interest is the manuscript collection of Patrick O’Neill (1765–1832), one of the earliest collectors of Irish traditional music. Unlike Bunting and Petrie, O’Neill was himself a traditional musician. His notebooks draw on a wide range of sources, including elements of classical music, and provide rare insight into living musical practice at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Manuscript Collections and Archives

NLI preserves a small but significant body of manuscript music, including works by C. V. Stanford, Michele Esposito, James Culwick and Joan Trimble, and Irish-language operas by Robert O’Dwyer and Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer. A number of these works remain unpublished or unavailable in modern editions, making NLI’s holdings particularly valuable.

The Library also holds a rich array of music-related archives, including the papers of the Irish Musical Fund (1798 – 1969), the Feis Ceoil (1897-1972), the Oireachtas Irish Music Competitions, Music Association of Ireland and the Charles Acton archive of annotated concert programmes. The activities of Cumann na bPíobairí, an early twentieth-century piping organisation, are documented in the Eamonn Ceannt Papers.

Popular music culture is represented historically through an extensive collection of broadsheet ballads (usually anonymous, single-sheet publications decorated with woodcut illustrations). The Peggy Dell collection provides strong coverage of popular song from the early to mid-twentieth century.

Rock and pop music from the 1960s onwards is documented through music journals such as Hot Press and New Spotlight Magazine, alongside a range of short-lived and underground publications. More recently, NLI acquired the archive of the Band Aid Trust (1985–2015) and has digitised a selection of photographs that currently feature in the Live Aid exhibition at the National Photographic Archive.

Contemporary Engagement 

In recent years, NLI has developed a close relationship with the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM). In January 2025, an inclusive ensemble of RIAM composers and musicians of differing abilities, led by composer Karen Power, co-created Sounding the Hidden at NLI, a work drawing on sounds that capture the distinctive atmosphere of the National Library.

With the establishment of a new Music Curator position, NLI and RIAM are well placed to activate these collections through innovative research and performance projects rooted in historic materials and archives. This work will be supported by an extensive cataloguing programme aimed at revealing the remaining unlisted print and manuscript music held by the Library.

If you have any queries or would like to explore the music collections of the National Library of Ireland in more detail, please contact Philip Shields, Music Curator, at pshields@nli.ie.