Continuing demand led to CUP’s then Director Mike Collins committing to produce a third edition which was commissioned pre-Covid. In addition to major commercial and educational changes, the intervention of the pandemic had introduced or highlighted sufficient new parameters to justify a totally new edition. As with the second edition, opinions were sought from teachers in particular as to what was most and least useful to them.
Out of these ideas certain items were dropped in order to make space for other newer or revised concepts and issues. This reasoning led to abandoning the detailed index, the extensive sister-cultures articles, and reducing the extent of the timeline. Alteration was also partly driven by the fact that major studies on the related cultures of Scotland, Brittany, Man, Cape Breton, England etc were by now well covered in other dedicated books, and so information on them in an Irish-music encyclopedia was no longer needed.
Storytelling was dropped too as it is not strictly part of everyday music-making, and – as a form of drama – seems deserving of a more focused and extensive independent treatment. (These ‘dropped’ subjects are provided for reference elsewhere on this website). Much sociological content was expanded to take account of changing mores in Irish society, not least with regard to the participation of women in professional music-making.
The major addition, however, has been the inclusion of senior-level competition results for all of the seventy-three years of the All-Ireland fleadh, something fortuitously made feasible only by the mammoth database work voluntarily undertaken by Kildare fiddle-player Fintan Farrell from whose tediously-assembled figures statistics and analyses were extracted by Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw; this body of information is unique to the Companion at this time.
Also, as regards music, a companion album is now part of the production—almost three-quarters of the tunes notated in the book can be heard on a digital-download album, performed in the mixed-tune-type fashion that was pioneered by Seán Ó Riada, a style symbolic of the revival years. This music programme was initially developed out of the second edition, and has already been performed live in Ireland and internationally. Other unique information includes a refined history of the bodhran, an instrument greatly misrepresented in much web and other commentary. Women in Traditional music are commented on in specific articles as well as in an ongoing manner, and among the book’s significant additions is regional and gender analysis of All-Ireland fleadh winners in the major categories.
The cover of the third edition reverts to a contemporary painting style, again by the pioneer of this in Traditional music, JB Vallely, imagery that comes from inside the music, this time depicting the more-modern instruments fiddle, accordion and low whistle. Regional information is now city- and locale-based, reflecting CCÉ’s emigré-based organisational ethos, and the large song and dance sections have been substantially structurally revised for clarity. With 934 pages, there are 2200 leading articles with 596,000 words.
The launch of this edition was again held at the Royal Irish Academy, with the view of placing the subject and its assembly of information in a prominent learning institute that is associated with the earliest writings on Irish music and its renowned commentators and analysis. The launch was opened by Cork University Press’s incoming director Sinéad Neville, marking almost a century since that Press in 1928 published the first major analytical text on Irish Traditional music—A Handbook of Irish Music by Richard Henebry. The event co-ordinator was Liz Doherty, a leading figure in Traditional-music education and promotion initiatives since the 1990s, an engagement that began with her being taught fiddle in Donegal by a noted master player. She studied music at UCC under Prof. Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, did her doctoral research on the Cape Breton fiddle, and post-doc lecturing on the UCC programme. The formal launch address was given by musician and researcher Conor Caldwell of University of Limerick’s IWAMD, whose PhD was on Donegal fiddle, and who is a joint editor of The Oxford Handbook of Irish Song (2024). This acknowledged the remarkable pioneer role of his university under Ó Súilleabháin’s direction and inspiration, as did the provision of music for the occasion by a group of his college’s students.
