Harry White - Biography#

Harry White was educated at University College Dublin (1976-81), the University of Toronto (1981-4) and Trinity College Dublin (1984-6), where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the oratorios of Johann Joseph Fux (1986). He was the first recipient of the D.Mus. degree for publications in musicology from the National University of Ireland (2007).

While a graduate student at Toronto, he was elected a Junior Fellow of Massey College (1983) and he won the University of Toronto’s gold medal for poetry (1984). After a long absence from creative writing, he published his first collection of poems, Polite Forms, in 2012.

He has been Professor of Music at University College Dublin since 1993; he has also held visiting professorships of musicology at the Universities of Western Ontario (1996), Munich (1999), King's College, Cambridge (2005) and Zagreb (2006).

In 1990 White established the series 'Irish Musical Studies' (of which he is joint general editor with Professor Gerard Gillen), a series of volumes devoted to musicology in Ireland. In 1992, he instituted the first taught master's programme in musicology at an Irish university, and in 1995 he was joint organizer (with Dr Patrick F. Devine) of the first international musicological conference in the history of the state. He was appointed inaugural President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland in 2003. In 2004 he was nominated as joint general editor (with Professor Barra Boydell) of the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (EMIR), published in 2013 by UCD Press.