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556 quadrille. A form of social dance developed in France in the later 1700s, it was introduced to popular dancing in Ireland c.1816, and today is the key element of set dancing. See under dance: social dance; lancers. QUB. Queen’s University of Belfast’s School of Music and Sonic Arts offers two undergraduate degrees,the BMus with emphasis on performance, composition and musicology,and the BSc in music technology and sonic arts. With the appointment of Martin Dowling as lecturer in Irish traditional music in 2006, the curriculum for both degrees expanded to include modules for performance, history and analysis of Irish traditional music. At postgraduate level, historical study is a key feature, capitalising on the university’s significant holdings of manuscripts and printed material relating to Edward Bunting and Thomas Moore.The university also has strong scholarly programmes in music technology, ethnomusicology and Irish studies, offering opportunities for interdisciplinary study. Queen’s/King’s shilling. A metaphor for the earliest wage paid for working in the army or navy of the British monarch.A common term in British and Irish ballads of conscription, soldiering and betrayal, ‘Taking the Queen’s shilling’ may have been considered a desperate measure for survival, and necessary in times of poverty, but in Ireland the term was also a judgement on one’s Irishness. Quinn,Hugh. (1885–1956).Song collector.Born in Co.Tyrone and moved to Belfast,his society was the mill and factory workers of the linen industry who had recently swarmed to Belfast from the shores of Lough Neagh. Quinn became a schoolmaster , working as an ‘infant teacher monitor’ at the Milford Street School in the Lower Falls Road in the 1890s. He collected ‘old’ Belfast songs and children’s singing games, and wrote about these in The Bell magazine (February 1941) and The Rann magazine (summer 1952). In 1955 at the age of seventy-one he contacted Peter Kennedy to come and record him, as he believed the songs were on ‘their final departure to the land of silence’. This recording, together with his writings, gives a vivid account of the singing tradition in Belfast,particularly those songs associated with female workers in the linen mills. A playwright, he drew his themes from his immediate world, producing works like Mrs McConaghy’s Money and The Quiet Twelfth. These were performed by the Group Theatre in Belfast and the Abbey in Dublin.David Hammond knew him well and recorded several of his songs on his 1959 lp I am the Wee Faloorie Man (Tradition). It was the first time that these Belfast songs had guitar accompaniment and it heralded the era of folk music and folk clubs in Ireland. Quinn’s songs were occupational – of weavers, doffers, tenters, watchmen – and the children’s anthology included One of a number of quadrille instruction books published in Ireland in the nineteenth century, from c. 1815 onwards [courtesy ITMA] Q Quinn, Toner 557 jokes, riddles, irreverent parodies and sectarian chants. Some of the verses collected were tender versions of narrative songs that were as old as time. Other people have drawn freely on his work, but he never published a collection of his own. The Linen Hall Library, Belfast and BBC Northern Ireland both have copies of his written articles and examples of his broadcasts of his own songwriting. [DAH, MAL] Quinn, Mick (Micil). (1926– ). Storyteller, singer. Born in the townland of Carrignagavna in the parish of Mullaghbawn, Co. Armagh, the eldest of ten,he was the son of John Quinn,a wellknown singer in the locality who recorded ‘You know I am a Stranger’for Outlet recordings at the age of eighty-two. The Quinns owned the biggest loft locally, and it was the venue for any gathering in the townland – American wakes,returned Yanks and, in particular, flax-pulling dances in August to celebrate the end of what was an arduous task. These events were the sources of many of Quinn’s songs, though subconsciously so, for, as he says: ‘You’d have little heed on the singers – sure we thought that the way to sing was what we heard on the gramophone records, John McCormack, Michael O’Duffy and the like.’He attended some of the first fleadhs in the 1950s but then ‘got married and with children being born … couldn’t get away’. He was one of the founders of the Ring of Gullion CCÉ in 1973, and later the Slieve Gullion Festival...

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