The book of music

THERE are some books you just know are going to get dog-eared. For anyone in the musical world, the Music Network's new Irish Music Handbook is pretty sure to be one. It's a directory which is intended to serve as "a comprehensive guide to music in Ireland, North and South". It lists everything potentially useful to musicians and music lovers, from government departments, state agencies, festivals, venues and promoters down to instrument repairers, music copyists and programme note writers.

Niall Doyle, the Music Network's chief executive, points to the dearth of reliable information as the motivation for the book. The Network found itself regularly fielding "Who?" and "Where?" queries by researching the answers individually. Now those individual replies (and others to questions not yet asked), have at last been brought together. He sees the publication of the book as "a very, very good spending of resources, in terms of encouraging lots more musical activity around the country. Simply having this information would be a great enabling device for an enormous number of people who might never be in touch with us directly otherwise".

For instance, I discovered during a discussion forum at the Sligo Early Music Festival in May that the organisers of a similar event in Galway hadn't known how to contact and secure publicity through the Early Music Organisation of Ireland (which is not listed under that name in the phone book). The Irish Music Handbook, naturally enough, now lists the Galway and Sligo festivals as well as EMOI itself.

The book's editor, Ann Swift, distributed 2,344 questionnaires, of which 1,709 were returned, 231 from music-related organisations, 225 from educational establishments, 121 from music promoters, 139 from festivals, 189 from venues, 207 from suppliers and services, 564 from competitions and scholarships (international as well as national), and 33 from the media - the last two categories being the only ones for which all the questionnaires sent out were completed. The Music Network is offering a phone service for enquiries beyond the details printed in the book itself and plans are already underway to have at least parts of the book on the Internet some time next year.

Such a large collection - 250 pages - of hitherto uncollated information presents a myriad of patterns for anyone who wishes to seek them out. There are, perhaps [unsurprisingly, more contacts listed for Local Authority Arts Officers in the North than in the Republic, which has yet to reach an average of one per county. Macintosh computers lead the field in computerised music typesetting, though there are three copyists still working by hand and only one who has adopted the much-vaunted Sibelius 7 system which works on an Acorn computer.

Facilities on offer at the University Concert Hall in Limerick (though not yet at the National Concert Hall in Dublin), include a harpsichord. The O'Reilly Hall at UCD is now claiming a higher seating capacity (1,000) than the RDS Concert Hall (800). The Ulster Hall, however, is not mentioned at all (was the questionnaire not returned, or was the information not included?).

A listing of performers was originally planned as part of the project, but the number of names turned out to be too high for immediate inclusion. Performers will either get a directory of their own, or feature in future editions, which are planned to appear annually.

The Music Network was set up by the Arts Council just over 10 years ago, and earlier this year secured major sponsorship from the ESB, without which the Irish Music Handbook would never have made it into print. And the developing co-operation between the Network and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland has worked to ensure that the project has been an all-Ireland one.

Niall Doyle, who's in a position to know better than most what's going on musically in the country, says the one thing that surprised him was "the number of people who are involved in music at all sorts of levels, and how widely spread they were. We suspect that there are even more of them out there."