Women and Music in Ireland is the inaugural volume of the new series of Irish Musical Studies, published by Boydell & Brewer. The original series, published initially by Irish Academic Press (from 1990 until 1995) and subsequently by Four Courts Press (from 1996 until 2019) comprised twelve volumes, making this new volume the thirteenth in all to appear. Each volume of the original series was designed to explore specific themes within the general domain of Irish musical scholarship, including the development of musicology as an Irish discipline, music and Irish cultural history, documents and sources of Irish musical history, the growth of theory and analysis in Ireland, as well as period-based collections devoted to Irish art music in the seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Two volumes of conference proceedings also appeared, one to mark the first international musicological conference in the history of the state in 1995 and the other to publish selected papers in Bach scholarship originally presented at the Ninth Biennial Conference on Baroque Music held at Trinity College Dublin in 2000. The series also featured an anthology of Irish church music, preceded by a companion volume of essays on the same subject.

The distinguishing feature of these volumes was that all of them, with the exception of the Bach volume, addressed topics that had hitherto received little or no previous scholarly attention, and certainly not to the extent of a collected volume of essays exclusively concerned with the topic in question. In this specific regard, Women and Music in Ireland is likewise a pioneering collection, and it thereby reflects the pervasive ambition of the series as a whole to open out and indeed to deepen our scholarly comprehension of Irish musical life. As the chapters in this new volume individually and collectively attest, the general discourse of women and music here attains not only to an Irish inflection of purpose and scholarly enquiry, but a decisive retrieval of the role of women in shaping the complexion of Irish musical life from the eighteenth century to the present day.

In this enterprise, many of the essays published here skilfully interrogate or deconstruct historical, social and cultural assumptions that have either eclipsed or distorted – often through the agency of gender politics – the originality and significance of women to the profession and practice of music in Ireland.