Music has been performed in oral tradition in Ireland now for some ten thousand years, but it was 1724 before the first notated collection of Irish music appeared. Consisting of forty-nine tunes and far older than any surviving manuscript collection, A Collection of the Most Celebrated Irish Tunes Proper for the Violin, German Flute or Hautboy was published that year in the yard of Christ Church Cathedral in central Dublin by the musical-instrument makers John and William Neal, a father and son of obscure origins who dominated the Dublin music trade in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Sold for the new and fashionable instruments of the violin, German flute and oboe, the collection proves on examination to consist almost entirely of traditional Irish harp music and the melodies of traditional Irish-language songs, many with titles in Irish.