March 2006
Where are your music records?	Show Menu

Raymond Refaussé, Librarian and Archivist
Representative Church Body Library, Braemor Park,
Churchtown, Dublin 14; e-mail: library@ireland.anglican.org

The Representative Church Body Library is the theological and reference library of the Church of Ireland and the principal repository for the Church's archives and manuscripts. In pursuit of its archival responsibilities the Library currently manages records from over 900 parishes, 20 cathedrals and 18 dioceses as well as holding almost 800 collections of manuscripts. These sources are used for a variety of research purposes — historical, genealogical,architectural, legal and, insofar as they allow, musical.

The most substantial musical archive in the Library is that of Christ Church cathedral, Dublin, which together with the other records of the cathedral was transferred in the second half of the 1980s. The score books were indexed by Eamon O'Keeffe as part of a UCD MA project in 1993 and the collection was more generally indexed by title and composer, by Sue Hemmens, the Christ Church music librarian in 1995-6. These invaluable projects, which made the collection intellectually accessible, complemented the transfer of the collection to the RCB Library where it was, for the first time physically accessible after years of lying in piles on office floors and stuffed in presses in various parts of the cathedral. This new accessibility resulted in the collection being used for research purposes. MA dissertations by, among other, Andrea Moranand Carol Cunningham began the process of highlighting the importance of the collection for Irish musical studies, a process which reached fruition in the ground breaking research of Barra Boydell both in his contributions to the history of Christ Church, which appeared in 2000, and in two subsequent volumes which concentrated on the cathedral's music.

Yet despite the benefits which have undoubtedly flowed from transferring the Christ Church music collection to the Library no other cathedral has followed suit. The St Patrick's collection, which is the only other substantial manuscript collection, is still being used as a research tool in the cathedral notably by Kerry Houston but of the musical holdings of the other cathedrals, little is known.

At parish level the documentation of musical activity is, as is the case in most aspects of the life of the Church of Ireland, decidedly mixed. Denise Neary's 1995 Maynooth MA on music in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Dublin churches dissertation showed how vestry minute books could be successfully mined for details of musical activity and similar research projects might be feasible for city parishes in Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Galway or parishes in older town parishes like Kilkenny. However, the most obvious conclusion from Neary's work was the absence of any parish musical archives, which, had they survived, might have been expected to surface in the major Dublin parishes which she studied.

A greater sense of parish musical life is apparent for the 19th century when printed orders of service for special events became more common and parishes which produced regular magazines began to print monthly schedules of worship thus revealing the hymns, psalms and canticles which were used. But even so it is frequently nigh impossible to discover what, if any musical dimension there was for many Church of Ireland parishes. Recently we received an enquiry about the musical repertoire of a rural parish. The parish had a Telford organ and the supposition was that it must, therefore, have had a musical diet which was more sophisticated than that which would have been normal for a country church but, quite literally, we could find nothing to assist the enquirer.

We, in our day, cannot, of course, be held responsible for the informational deficiencies of the past but we can ensure that there is, for the most part, an adequate record of church musical activity in our own time. Parishes should keep a record of services, concerts, recitals. For those which produce their own orders of service it should be a simple matter to keep two copies of each, one for the archives and one for reference: for those which do not generate orders of service, a manual record should be kept. In larger parishes where there is a choir there ought to be records of membership and attendance and a chronicle of the choir repertoire. Similarly, information files should be kept on organs and other parish instruments. And, of course, if you are fortunate enough to be able to make recordings ensure that you keep file copies of the tapes or CDs.

From the perspective of a church archivist such suggestions are elementary but in the context of parish life where, all too often, a lot is left to a few, I am acutely conscious that someone has to undertake these responsibilities. Much will inevitably depend on the organist/director of music to ensure not only that during his/her tenure of office musical records are kept but also, as far as possible, to ensure the survival of records of previous musical regimes, and to make appropriate arrangements before resignation/retirement for the safekeeping of current records. The transfer of choir records from Christ Church, Leeson Park, and from Rathfarnham by David McConnell are examples of good practice in this respect.

The Representative Church Body Library, as the Church of Ireland's archival repository is more than happy to take custody of musical records which we regard, for the most part, as part of parish or cathedral archives. Most material which is transferred to the Library can be speedily catalogued and therefore readily made available for research purposes. There is more interest and curiosity about the Church of Ireland today than ever before; more students anxious for research topics; more academics looking for new angles; more genealogists seeking for interesting details of family members. The records of the musical life of the Church of Ireland are a vital part of this intriguing jigsaw.

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