PW Joyce Interactive Music Scores
486 Online Melodies from Unpublished NLI MSS

A new addition to the centenary ITMA PW Joyce Irish Music Microsite is notations
of 486 melodies from National Library of Ireland manuscripts 2982 and 2983.

Facsimile scans of these music and song manuscripts are already available in their entirety on the microsite, courtesy of the NLI, and 486 melodies have now been set from them by ITMA staff as interactive music scores for audio playback and online reading. Each score is also available in PDF format for printing.

The two manuscripts were being prepared by Joyce for publication at the time of his death in 1914. They were said to have been found by his bedside, and they have remained unpublished until this centenary year of his death. They contain in all some 878 songs and melodies. About half of these had come from his childhood recollections or had been collected by him in his native Co Limerick in the 1840s and 1850s, or had been sent to him by various correspondents from all over Ireland. This half constitutes the tranche of interactive scores presented here.

Joyce himself had selected and copied the remaining half of the melodies in the two NLI manuscripts from the large manuscript collections of four other major collectors: William Forde, John Edward Pigot, William Elliott Hudson, and James Goodman. As these four important collections require separate editions, the tunes drawn from them by Joyce have not been included in these interactive scores.

Regards,
M.