Harry White
Irish musicologist Harry White
Born4 July 1958
Dublin, Ireland
Occupation(s)Musicologist and poet

Harry White (born 4 July 1958) is an Irish musicologist and university professor. With specialisations in Irish musical and cultural history, the music of the Austrian baroque composer Johann Joseph Fux, and the development of Anglo-American musicology since 1945, he is one of the most widely published and influential academics in his areas of research. White is also a poet, with two published collections of poetry (2012, 2018).

Education

Harry White was born in Dublin to Frank White (1926–2013) and Sheila, née Danaher (1928–1988), the joint eldest (with twin brother, John) of six children. He received his early musical training at the Municipal School of Music, Dublin and at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM), where he studied cello with Aisling Drury Byrne. He was a member of the Schola Cantorum at St Finian's College, Mullingar from 1971 to 1976. He took bachelor's degrees in Music and English at University College Dublin (UCD) in 1981 and wrote a master's thesis on the plays of Harold Pinter. He completed an MA in musicology at the University of Toronto (1984), where he was elected a Junior Fellow of Massey College in 1983. Returning to Dublin, he completed his PhD at Trinity College Dublin in 1986 with a thesis on the oratorios of Johann Joseph Fux,[1] written under the supervision of Hormoz Farhat.

Teaching appointments

After teaching for a year at St Patrick's College, Maynooth (today: Maynooth University), White was appointed lecturer in music in 1985 at UCD, where he succeeded Anthony Hughes as Professor of Music in 1993. He has held visiting professorships in musicology at the University of Western Ontario (1996), University of Munich (1999), King's College, Cambridge (2005) and the University of Zagreb (2006, 2017), and he has given invited lectures and keynote addresses at conferences and symposia across North America and Europe.[1]

Achievements

White is "an exceptionally productive scholar, whose work has been transformative. His monographs and edited volumes have been reviewed as being major works of scholarship".[2]: 19  In 1990, he established the ongoing book series Irish Musical Studies, of which he is joint general editor with Gerard Gillen. In 1992, he instituted at UCD the first Irish taught master's degree in musicology.[1] In 1994, he was appointed a national advisory editor for the revised, 2001 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; and in 1995 he co-organised (with Patrick Devine) the first major international musicological conference ever to be held in Ireland, at Maynooth.

The founding of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (SMI) is largely due to his vision and effort, and he served as its inaugural president from 2003 to 2006. Likewise, the publication of the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (2 volumes, 2013) would have been unthinkable without White, who has argued for such a publication repeatedly from as early as 1989.[3] He became its joint editor, with Barra Boydell.

In his many articles on Irish music and in three monographs – The Keeper's Recital (1998), The Progress of Music in Ireland (2005) and Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (2008) – he has shed new light on the central role of music in Irish cultural and intellectual life; for the last-named book he was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS).[4]

Honours received

In 2006, White became the first historical musicologist to be elected to the Royal Irish Academy after Aloys Fleischmann (1966) and John Blacking (1983). Other honours include Fellowship of the RIAM (2007) and the first DMus awarded by the National University of Ireland for published work in musicology (2007). He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of St Cecilia (London). In acknowledgement of the publication of the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, both editors received the Harrison Medal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland in 2014. In 2015, he was elected to the Academia Europaea,[5] and in 2018 he was elected Corresponding Fellow of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the first Irish person to receive this honour.[citation needed]

On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 2018, he was honoured with a festschrift, edited by Lorraine Byrne Bodley with contributions from more than 40 authors that is a testimony to White's wide research interests and his impressive circle of academic friends across the globe.[2] David Hiley wrote of it: "This book is a fine tribute to a remarkable scholar. Not only has Harry White revealed unknown musical riches in Germany and Austria, he has set the music of Ireland in a clearer, truer perspective".[6]

Poetry

The eloquent, expressive and often poetic style of Harry White's musicological writing finds a more artistic outlet in his poetry. As a master's student in Toronto, he had already won the university's gold medal for poetry in 1984. Two published volumes of his poetry have appeared to date: Polite Forms (2012) and The Kenmare Occurrences (2018). Polite Forms has been described as "a sequence of poems that meditates on family life" that "remember and reimagine scenes from childhood and adolescence"[7] Of his second collection, a Canadian critic wrote: "White's strength is to hold both speaker and listener at a distance that is a kind of proximity; the poems acknowledge that memory is flawed, baffling, and all we have to go on."[8]

Selected writings

Monographs

Edited books

Articles

(without forewords and book reviews)

Poetry

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ a b c White, Harry; Boydell, Barra (15 September 2013). The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. ISBN 978-1906359782.
  2. ^ a b Bodley, Lorraine Byrne; Elliott, Robin (2018). Music Preferred. Essays in Musicology, Cultural History and Analysis in Honour of Harry White. Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag. doi:10.2307/j.ctv6jm9gm. ISBN 9783990124024. JSTOR j.ctv6jm9gm. S2CID 243870866.
  3. ^ White, Harry (1989). "The Case for an Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland". The Irish Review. Cork: Cork University Press. 6 (Spring 1989): 39–45. doi:10.2307/29735420. ISSN 0790-7850. JSTOR 29735420.
  4. ^ "Durkan Prize Recipients". American Conference for Irish Studies. 2018. Retrieved 31 March 2020.
  5. ^ "Harry White". Academia Europaea. Archived from the original on 4 April 2019.
  6. ^ Quoted from the book jacket.
  7. ^ "Polite Forms". Carysfort Press. 30 March 2012. Retrieved 31 March 2020.
  8. ^ Chantel Lavoie, Professor of English Literature, Royal Military College of Canada, on the reverse cover of the book.
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