Michael Quinlin Earns Boston Public Library Fellowship to Research Irish Music

The Boston Public Library has awarded its biennial Alicia Monti Research Fellowship this year to Michael P. Quinlin who will use the time to create an annotated bibliography for the Library’s extensive collection of 19th century Irish music.

Quinlin’s research at the Library will cover the works of important Irish musicians and composers like Michael Kelly, Thomas Moore, Michael W. Balfe, and Patrick S. Gilmore, whose works helped to shape Boston’s musical life in the 19th century. He’ll also chart the library’s inventory of sacred music, folk music, classical music, and minstrelsy and vaudeville songs that are Irish-influenced.

According to Diane Ota, curator of music at the BPL, the one-month fellowship is intended to stimulate the use of the library’s special collections and manuscripts and to provide new or additional access to original sources. The library’s Music Department is well known in scholarly circles for its Allen A. Brown Collection of more than 60,000 volumes on 19th century music.

The author of Irish Boston (2004) and editor of Classic Irish Stories (2005), Quinlin is writing a book on the influence of Irish musicians on Boston’s musical milieu over the past 200 years. He is president of the Boston Irish Tourism Association