Our esteemed colleague, Dr Ita Beausang, passed away in November 2024. Here, John O'Flynn (President of the SMI, 2021-24) writes of her life's work and legacy.
The SMI community was deeply saddened to hear of Ita Beausang’s passing on 20 November 2024. It was nonetheless heartening for us to know how she had lived a long and fulsome life and that she died peacefully as would befit her warm, gracious and generous character. It also seemed serendipitous that Ita reposed at her home in Clontarf, Dublin on St Cecilia’s Day before the funeral mass took place the following morning. Alongside her loving family and wide network of extended relatives and friends, colleagues from various fields of musicology, performance, composition, music education and church music came out in force to celebrate Ita’s wonderful life – a life that included a substantial and in many respects groundbreaking career.
Just over two years ago, also on St Cecilia’s Day, I had the honour of awarding the IRC-Harrison Medal to Dr Beausang on behalf of the Council of the SMI. This was in recognition of Ita’s outstanding contribution to contextual studies of music in Ireland, from the late-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Prior to the IRC-Harrison Medal, in 2010 the SMI bestowed honorary membership to Ita, and she was subsequently awarded honorary life membership by the Society for Music Education in Ireland in 2014. Respectively, these marked Ita’s enormous contribution to the musicology community in Ireland, and to local and national developments in music education.
Ita was an outstanding and leading musicologist who demonstrated exceptional historical knowledge and academic scholarship, as well as innovative and creative approaches to research. Born Ita Hogan in 1936, she was accomplished as a young pianist, studied at University College Cork (UCC), and subsequently held a long pedagogical and academic career that culminated in the role of emeritus scholar at TU Dublin Conservatoire from where she retired in 2001.
Studying at UCC when the Professor of Music there was Aloys Fleischmann, she graduated with a BMus in 1956, going on to be awarded an MA in 1958, and completing her PhD on Anglo-Irish music in 1962. Notably, hers was the first Irish PhD in Musicology. Having taught at the Cork School of Music from 1954-1960, she much later worked as research assistant on the Royal Irish Academy’s New History of Ireland (published by OUP), once again working with Aloys Fleischmann. Appointed lecturer at the Vocational Education Committee (VEC) College of Music, Dublin in 1986 (later DIT Conservatory and now TU Dublin Conservatoire), she was Acting Director there from 1995-1996. Some years earlier, Dr Beausang played a leading role in researching the history of that institution for the publication From Municipal School to Dublin Institute of Technology: A Musical Journey, 1890-1993, authored by Jim Cooke.
As noted by Elaine Kelly in the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, Ita followed her UCC mentor Aloys Fleischmann ‘in viewing teaching and research as two sides of the same coin’. This became evident in her lifelong dedication to the progress of music and music studies in Ireland. She was one of the first Irish musicologists – alongside Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin – to contribute to publications that addressed specialist and non-specialist audiences alike, including many pieces in New Music News, Journal of Music in Ireland, The Jarvey, and Education Magazine. She was an Advisory Editor for the afore-mentioned Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, to which she also contributed as an author. Ita was also a leading contributor to many volumes on aspects of music history in Ireland, including her chapters in Irish Musical Studies, volumes 5, 9 and 12; Aloys Fleischmann: A Life for Music in Ireland; My Gentle Harp. Moore's Irish Melodies; Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied; Invisible Art. A Century of Music in Ireland; Music Preferred. Essays in Honour of Harry White; and Creative Impulses, Cultural Accents: Brian Boydell’s music, advocacy, painting and legacy.
Her three book publications include the sole-authored monograph (as Ita Hogan) Anglo-Irish Music, 1780-1830, Cork University Press (CUP), 1966; the co-authored monograph (with Seamus de Barra) Ina Boyle (1889-1967): A Composer’s Life, CUP, 2018; and the co-edited volume (with Jennifer O’Connor-Madsen and Laura Watson) Women and Music in Ireland, Boydell and Brewer, 2022. (The significant impact of these three major publications is discussed at some length in the full citation from the 2022 IRC-Harrison Award. See here)
A revised entry on Ita Beausang for the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland might not only mention the original influence of Aloys Fleischmann on her scholarship from those early UCC days but also emphasise her exceptional mentorship of subsequent generations of musicologists, music educators and other scholars, as many SMI members can attest. Beyond mentorship, Ita was widely regarded as an ideal colleague – wise, inspiring, humorous, caring and always generous of her time and expertise. This was not limited to those in the College of Music (now TU Dublin Conservatoire), the institution to which much of her career was dedicated but extended also to many involved in various facets of music scholarship, education and performance across Ireland.
Many of us were fortunate to have basked in the leading light that Ita represented, especially as she remained active well into her eighties. Even at that point, she became one of the first musicologists in Ireland to become involved in publicly sourcing funds. This was for a major recording of Ina Boyle’s works recorded by the BBC Orchestra in 2017. Ita was also active in representing Irish musicology through public outputs (CMC interviews, RTÉ’s 1916 commemorative events ‘Composing the Island’, and many RTÉ Lyric fm features).
Although Dr Ita Beausang’s IRC-Harrison Medal lecture was subtitled ‘Twenty Years a-Growing’ in recognition of the work of the SMI following its establishment two decades earlier, the seeds of Irish musicology go back much further, including Ita’s groundbreaking individual scholarship from the mid-1960s through to the wide range of research outputs detailed above. Many of these were enriched by her expertise in historical and contextual studies, with others critically concerned with contemporary developments of music in Ireland. All the while, Ita was a passionate advocate for music education at all levels and across different sectors of provision. During later stages of her academic career, she made significant accomplishments in collaborative book projects and public musicology. Beyond this outstanding record, she will be remembered for her musical-academic leadership that was inextricably linked to her exemplary personhood.
