Dr Maria McHale

Maria McHale is a Lecturer in Musicology at TU Dublin Conservatoire where she teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.  Her research is concerned with musical culture in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Ireland and Britain. After undergraduate studies at University College Cork (BMus) and postgraduate studies at City University, London (MA), she undertook a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, with a study of British musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century.

She is co-editor Documents of Irish Music History in the Long Nineteenth Century (Four Courts Press, 2019) and was both Executive Editor and a Subject Editor for the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (UCD Press, 2013). She was the lead researcher for two Research Ireland funded projects: Music at the Abbey Theatre and Music and 1916. More recently, her publications focus on the place of opera in fin-de-siècle Ireland and music and Gaelic Revivalism.

She has been an elected member of the Council for the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2009-12; 2012-2015, 2021-24 and 2024-27). She is a founder member of the Conservatoire’s Research Foundation for Music in Ireland.  She served on the Editorial Board for the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2019-24)  and is on the Advisory Board for Irish Musical Studies (since 2020) and the Editorial Board for UCD Press (since 2025).  

Music in Ireland and Britain in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; opera in Ireland; music and Gaelic Revivalism; music and theatre; reception history and historiography.

Edited volume

Kerry Houston, Maria McHale and Michael Murphy, eds. Irish Musical Culture, 1790–1920: Sources, Documents and Perspectives (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2019)

Book chapters and articles

‘Ireland: Revival and Revolution’, Elizabeth Maconchy in Context, eds. Justin Vickers and Lucy Walker, (Cambridge University Press, in press, 2025)

‘Opera as Gaeilge: revivalism and reception in fin-de-siècle Irish opera’, Opera and Print Culture ed. Christina Fuhrmann and Alison Mero, (Clemson: Clemson Press, 2023)

‘”Dublin can still justly boast of being a music-loving city”: Joseph Holloway and opera in Dublin, 1880–1922’, Kerry Houston, Maria McHale and Michael Murphy, eds. Irish Musical Culture, 1790–1920: Sources, Documents and Perspectives (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2019)

“Hopes for Regeneration”: Opera in Revivalist Dublin, 1900–1916’, Music Preferred - Essays in Musicology, Cultural History and Analysis in Honour of Harry White ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley, (Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag, 2018)

Articles for the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland ed. Harry White and Barra Boydell (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013):  Abbey Theatre; Carl Rosa Opera Company; Percy French; Gaiety Theatre; Joseph Holloway; John Kells Ingram; Masonic songs; Repeal movement; Royal Irish Academy; Temperance movement; Theatre Royal; Wolfe Tone; United Irishmen; Volunteers; Laurence Whyte.

‘Music publishing in nineteenth-century Ireland’, Oxford History of the Irish Book, vol. iv, ed. James H. Murphy (Oxford: OUP, 2011)

‘Moore’s Centenary: Music and Politics in Dublin, 1879’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C, vol. 109 (2009)

‘Moore’s Melodies: legacy and reception’, My gentle harp: Moore’s Irish Melodies, 1808– 2008, ed. Siobhán Fitzpatrick (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2008)

‘Singing and sobriety: music and temperance in Ireland, 1838–43’, Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland eds. Michael Murphy and Jan Smaczny (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007)

‘How could an English composer be so utterly and entirely unEnglish? Elgar and the Dream of Gerontius’ in The Musicology Review (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007) [Winner of the UCD Musicology Prize 2007)