Toner Quinn, Musician and Founder of The Journal of Music will present the Francis Roche Memorial Lecture 2014, entitled ‘The Thin Green Line: On Writing About Irish Traditional Music’. The lecture is part of the Blas International Summer School of Traditional Music and Song, which runs from 23 June to 4 July.

Toner Quinn is a fiddle-player, music writer, publisher of The Journal of Music and lecturer in NUI Galway. He began fiddle tuition with Tom Glackin and later studied music at Waterford IT (where he continued his fiddle studies with Noelle O’Connor). He subsequently studied publishing at the University of Stirling, Scotland.

In 2000, he founded JMI: The Journal of Music in Ireland (laterThe Journal of Music), a magazine publishing new writing on traditional, classical, jazz and contemporary music. In 2010, the Journal won the Utne Independent Press Award for Arts Coverage in Washington DC.

Toner is a regular writer for The Journal of Music, in particular on traditional and contemporary music. He has also worked as an editor for a variety of publishers and now lectures in publishing at NUI Galway. Toner was Project Officer for the Arts Council’s Special Committee on the Traditional Arts, which produced the report Towards a Policy for the Traditional Arts.

In 2013, Toner released a fiddle duet album with Malachy Bourke, Live at the Steeple Sessions, which was selected as one of the Irish Times traditional music albums of the year.

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