a blind girl in the South of Ireland

“There is a blind girl in the South of Ireland who plays on the old wire-stringed Irish harp” says a newspaper from one hundred and twenty-six years ago, without giving us any more information at all. This post is for her, so that we can try to work out who she might have been, or to try and sketch the wider context that might give us a clue as to where she might have come from and what she might have been doing.

There is a blind girl in the South of Ireland who plays on the old wire-stringed Irish harp

Freeman’s Journal, Thur 5 May 1898 p6

This single sentence is the only thing we have to work with. It might not even be true – it is not unheard of for the newspapers to print half-remembered falsehoods. We don’t really know who is the source for this snippet of information. But we can talk about what was going on in Ireland in 1898, to see if we can pin her down at all.

The most important question I want to know, was, whether she was a traditional Irish harper, or a classical harpist. What I mean by that is whether she had learned to play the traditional wire-strung Irish harp in the inherited tradition, or whether she was a classically-trained musician who was picking up the wire-strung harp as an outsider to the inherited tradition.

The Classical and Irish Traditions

One of my big problems with this work is how to define and explain things. I started talking about “Irish” music and “classical” music after reading Llio Rhydderch and Huw Roberts’s book, where they contrast “the Welsh way” and “the Classical way” of playing the harp. However these terms are not really very satisfactory, since Classical music has a kind of elastic definition depending on context, and Welsh (and indeed Irish) are national labels not musical ones; there are Welsh and Irish musicians and composers who are entirely working in the Classical tradition.

What I am really meaning when I contrast “classical” and “traditional Irish” music is the structural underpinnings, the harmonic systems, because traditional Irish music has a deep structural underpinning and harmonic system that is not the same as the deep structural underpinnings and harmonic system of classical music. There are other higher level differences of form and social context that perhaps flow from these underlying structural differences. The lack of awareness about these fundamental structural differences leads to a kind of musical-colonialism, whereby traditional Irish music can be seen as a kind of flavour or subset of the universal (Classical) musical world, and then further that Irish traditional music can be improved or modernised by Classical musicians.

The Irish tradition

My work in my Long 19th Century project has been to try and track down the traditional Irish harpers who were working in the inherited tradition – the harpers who learned to play the traditional wire-strung Irish harp from teachers who themselves had learned from teachers in lineages that stretch back through the 18th century and earlier in Ireland. These traditional harpers played on full-sized floor-standing wire-strung harps; they played in the traditional Irish way, with the left hand in the treble and the right hand in the bass, using the traditional Irish fingering techniques and system and method of playing, as handed down to them in the inherited tradition.

The Classical tradition

Classical pedal harp teachers had been active in Ireland since 1790, and by the early 1800s the pedal harp was being marketed as if it were the harp of Ireland. Classical harpists in Ireland, as in England and on the Continent, played on gut-strung mechanised harps, played with (almost always) the right hand in the treble and left hand in the bass, using classical playing techniques and classical principles of harmonisation and accompaniment, and they traced their teaching back through classical lineages, back to the 18th and early 19th century French, English and Continental pedal harp teachers.

On and off through the 19th century, classical harpists had marketed themselves as playing Irish music. John Egan made “Irish” classical harps in the first quarter of the 19th century, both full sized pedal harps, and small mechanised “portable” classical gut-strung harps. The Portables were only used as novelties or domestically, and classical harpists, whether performing the standard classical repertory or arrangements of Irish tunes, played on full sized pedal harps right through the 19th century and into the 20th century. Clare McCague discusses the pedal harp scene in Ireland in her 2021 PhD thesis; she gets quite irritated by the way that, during the 19th century, classical pedal harps were consistently described “erroneously” as the “national instrument”; she suggests that “the misrepresentation of the pedal harp as an Irish instrument was a fallacy proliferated by the Irish press” (p118). however, I think we could take a more distanced and nuanced look at this interesting phenomena and see this as a deliberate attempt by classical harpists and the wider Irish classical music scene to position the classical pedal harp as a central part of Irish musical life, as part of an on-going strategy of music-colonialism which continues (in different forms) to the present day. I think it only seems odd to commentators nowadays because, since 1897, the lever harp has taken on that role which was formerly occupied by the pedal harp.

The “ancient music” tradition

An interesting subset of the classical tradition is the attempt to revive or recreate “ancient music”. We see this way back in the 1790s when the classical pianist Edward Bunting took tunes from the Irish harp and song repertory away from traditional harpers and singers, and arranged them for classical piano. We can see John Egan’s invention of the mechanised gut-strung “portable” harp in the early 19th century as part of this antiquarian strand within classical music. It is an interesting research question to try and find references to classical harpists getting hold of wire-strung harps and trying to play them. It is very interesting to note that this never involved going to the living tradition-bearers to learn the traditional way of playing; it usually involved getting a reproduction of the medieval Brian Boru harp, or a similar small harp modelled on the medieval examplars, and trying to play it using classical fingering techniques and using an understanding of music based on the classical structural underpinnings.

I am not sure who the first classical musician to try and play on a wire-strung harp was. It is possible it may have been Thomas Aptommas in the 1860s (Dublin Daily Express Sat 18 Feb 1865 p3). As ideas of “early music” within the broad classical tradition became more sophisticated through the 19th century, the idea of a good reproduction of the Brian Boru harp with wire strings became a little more defined – though because classical harp playing techniques don’t work very well on wire strings, this was only ever a rare novelty act. Classical harpists who gave occasional demonstrations on wire-strung replicas of the medieval Brian Boru harp, usually in the context of public lectures on the history of Irish music, include Mary Jane Mackey (née Glover) in the 1870s (Cork Constitution Tue 28 Jan 1873 p4, Freemans Journal Tue 28 Jan 1873, The Irishman Sat 8 Mar 1873), and John Cheshire in the 1890s (Northern Whig Tue 7 Apr 1896 p6).

Either way, it is clear that in Irish musical life in the 1890s, the pedal harp was by far the best known and most common type of harp being played in Ireland. The “small variety, which many people believe to be the purely Irish type” was much rarer (Evening Herald, Sat 13 April 1895 p2). Most of this “small variety” would have been antique Egan portables; I think only one or two wire-strung medieval replicas existed at that time.

Could our girl be one of these classical harpists, who occasionally demonstrated replica medieval wire-strung harp as part of lecture-demonstrations or novelty acts? Mary Jane Mackay died on 7 June 1883 so it can’t be her. Her sister Emilie Glover lived until 1917, but she had moved to London by 1898 so it isn’t her. Mary Jane’s daughter, Miss Mary Glover, was performing as a “solo harpist and operatic vocalist” in the 1890s, though I have no references to her demonstrating a Brian Boru replica. But there were plenty of other amateur women pedal harp players around in the 1890s, any one of whom could possibly have got hold of a wire-strung medieval harp replica and occasionally demonstrated it as a novelty act. This is pure speculation because I have no records of this from that time.

None of these classical harpists had any idea that there were still traditional Irish harpists around in the 1890s.

Traditional Irish harpers in 1898

There’s no doubt that the inherited tradition of playing the traditional wire-strung Irish harp was at a low point by 1898. The last school where young harpers could have learned was, as far as I know, in Belfast in the early 1850s, when Patrick Murney apparently taught three young boys to play. Prior to that, there had been a school in Drogheda in the 1840s, taught by Hugh Fraser, and a schoool in Belfast taught by Alex Jackson in the late 1830s, following on from Valentine Rennie who had died young in 1837. These schools had all trained young people full-time to become professional Irish harpers in the inherited tradition.

I know of four traditional Irish harpers still alive in 1898, who had learned at these schools. None of these four survivors had taught, and so these four were all that was left; there were no younger pupils from subsequent generations learning.

Peter Dowdall was living in Drogheda in 1898; he had learned the traditional wire-strung Irish harp from Hugh Fraser in the 1840s. Dowdall was known in Drogheda as a player of the traditional Irish harp, though he never worked as a professional harper as far as I know; he worked as a clerk. Peter Dowdall died on 28th April 1902, aged 73.

Paul Smith was living in Dublin in 1898. We don’t know where he learned the traditional wire-strung Irish harp; I am guessing he probably learned from Alex Jackson in Belfast in the late 1830s. He had worked as a professional blind harper, playing the traditional wire-strung Irish harp. Paul Smith died on 14th August 1904, aged 80.

George Jackson was living in Belfast in 1898; he had learned the traditional wire-strung Irish harp probably in the 1850s from Patrick Murney. Jackson could play the harp well, according to someone who heard him, but he wasn’t a professional harper. He worked as a clockmaker. George Jackson died on 21st Jul 1909, aged about 75.

I don’t know the name of the fourth; he had learned to play the traditional wire-strung Irish harp from Hugh Fraser in Drogheda in the 1840s, and he was still alive in 1906 when Grattan Flood was trying to extract information from him. I don’t know when he died or anything else about him at the moment.

Could our “blind girl in the South of Ireland” be a fifth traditional Irish harper, still alive in 1898? Could she have learned at one of these schools in the 1830s, 40s or 50s?

If we check my timeline of traditional harpers, we can see that out of 71 traditional Irish harpers active between 1792 and 1909, there are six or seven women, about 10% of the total. This means about 90% of the traditional harpers were men through this period. We can check all of those seven women to see if any might be our “blind girl”.

Sally Moore was perhaps the youngest of them; I don’t have proper information about her and when she died. She was associated with Belfast, and I am suggesting that she may have died on 18th November 1872, aged 40, though I am not certain this refers to her. I suppose it is possible that I have the wrong death record, that she moved from Belfast after the 1870s and settled somewhere in the South. But it seems unlikely. I am very dubious that she is our girl.

Miss Flinn was apparently one of Hugh Fraser’s students in Drogheda in the 1840s. She would have been aged in her 60s or 70s by 1898. But the Drogheda harpers seem to have stayed associated with Drogheda, so I don’t think this is her. I haven’t studied Miss Flinn yet.

Mary Kerr née Doran had a harp, but I don’t know if it was wire-strung or not, and I don’t know if she learned from traditional Irish harpers or not. Anyway she died in 1878 and so it can’t be her.

Jane McArthur learned to play the traditional wire-strung Irish harp under Edward McBride and Valentine Rennie in Belfast in the early 1820s. She was working as a professional blind harper in 1826, but I have no record of her after that. If she was still alive in 1898 she would have been aged about 94. I suppose it is possible she is our girl but it seems unlikely.

The other three women on my list, Bridget O’Reilly, Rose Mooney and Kate Martin, were all born earlier in the 18th century and so cannot be our girl in 1898.

I think I am missing a number of names of traditional harpers. I think I may be missing as many as 10 traditional harpers who learned at the Belfast school under Valentine Rennie and Alex Jackson in the 1830s, and another eight or so who learned from Hugh Fraser in Drogheda in the 1840s. Our girl may be one of these missing harpers.

On the other hand we can question the Freeman’s Journal in 1898 calling her a “girl”. If she had learned at the schools from the tradition-bearers she would have been over 60 years old. Would “girl” really have been used by the newspaper to refer to a woman of that age?

The start of the lever harp tradition

By 1898, there was a sudden new thriving scene of playing lever harps in Ireland, taught by classical pedal harp teachers, with no connection to the inherited tradition. I wonder if our girl is one of these new lever harp players, using their classical lever harp technique and aesthetic and structural system to dabble with a medieval-style wire-strung harp?

I am struggling to understand the development of the lever harp and the development of ideas of what the Irish harp was, is and could be at that time. It all seems to have happened very fast over the course of a few years, and I have not gone into it as deeply as I should, because I am trying to stay focussed on the tradition-bearers and not the classical substitutes.

I think that the scene of playing on small gut-strung lever harps using classical pedal harp playing techniques and arranging styles and harmonisation principles, had begun in Scotland in 1893 (Eydmann, In good hands 2017 p8). I have not seen any indication of lever harps in Ireland before then. But, perhaps as a response to the building and playing of small medievalesque gut-strung lever harps in Scotland from 1893, people started paying more attention to the small Irish harp. On 20 Nov 1894, Bernard Smythe sent a photograph of a c.1820s Egan gut-strung mechanised “portable” harp to the newspaper, describing it as an “Irish bardic harp” and saying “there have been few available since penal times, when Government forbade their use… I have not heard a trained person play one, but from the efforts of a novice it would seem as sweet as the larger instrument” (i.e. the pedal harp). He recommends that this small gut-strung harp be introduced at the forthcoming Feis (Dublin Evening Telegraph, Sat 1 Dec 1894 p8). I have references from two years later that “according to Music the instrument which is to be in vogue this winter is the Irish harp, which many ladies of high rank are already industriously practising… a beautiful instrument some thirty inches in length and about the weight of a banjo…” I have news clippings from English, Welsh and Irish papers which reprint the story from the beginning of November 1896. I don’t know what periodical or journal Music is, or where this story started; I don’t know who was making these harps or anything more about this. We need more information to fit this into the wider story.

There was still no lever harp presence in May 1897, at the first Feis Ceoil in Dublin. The public concerts featured Owen Lloyd playing ancient Irish tunes on classical pedal harp, and the competitions of archaeological interest (closed to the public) featured a competition “for the best performance on an Irish wire-strung harp of any size”; I have already written this up on my post about Paul Smith. There were no entries, either from the traditional harpers still living, or from classical harpists who might have been dabbling with novelty medieval-style wire-strung harps.

After the failure of this 1897 Feis competition to attract any traditional players of the wire-strung Irish harp, the Feis organisers wrote “after diligent enquiry, the Committee were forced to come to the conclusion that there was not a performer living” (RBA 1904 p.53). Instead of continuing to search for the still-living tradition-bearers, they and their colleagues in the Dublin musical scene turned their attention to creating a substitute, by promoting the lever harp. Classes in Dublin were being planned in September 1897 (Evening Herald, 22 Sep 1897 p2). The classes were organised by Conradh na Gaeilge and taught by the classical pedal harpist and Irish language activist Owen Lloyd, using a new gut-strung lever harp donated by Morley (See Nancy Hurrell, The Egan Irish harps, pp. 237-8). The start of the classes was advertised three weeks later (Flag of Ireland, Sat 16 Oct 1897 p2) and the first meeting of the new class was on 28th October (Evening Herald, Fri 29 Oct 1897 p3).

Seven months after these classes had started, the 1898 Feis Ceoil was held in Belfast. A review describes the different harp activities that happened at the Belfast Feis; this article is the source of our line about the “blind girl in the south of Ireland”.

…it is curious that in a country which has the harp for its national emblem the promoters should have met with no response to the substantial prize offered for a harp solo composition. On the other hand, no prize was offered for a performance on the harp, though every city has now its harpists, and the Feis band of harpers in Belfast numbers seven. The playing of Miss Mary MacDonald on the Highland harp referred to yesterday attracted much attention. The instrument was gut-strung. There is a blind girl in the South of Ireland who plays on the old wire-stringed Irish harp – probably the only instance of its survival in the country. The Scottish harp is exactly in form with it, except for the strings. The wire-strung harp produces a greater volume of sound, but the tone is soft and pleasing like that which was so much admired last night. Miss MacDonald has a thorough mastery of the instrument, which, however, is not nearly so difficult to play on as the wire-strung harp of Ireland. Recently the Gaelic League in Dublin got a consignment of Irish harps, which were purchased by members, but it is of course too early to look for any satisfactory results yet, though it leaves us not without hope that the next Feis may witness the playing of a band of Irish harpers on the Irish harp.

Freeman’s Journal, Thur 5 May 1898 p6

This review seems a bit muddled. I think that they have got Miss MacDonald’s name wrong; she is (probably correctly) named as Emily MacDonald the previous day (Freeman’s Journal, Wed 4th May 1898 p6). Emily MacDonald sang in Scottish Gaelic and played a small medieval-outline gut-strung lever harp The only other harpist who is named is Miss E Davis (Emily Davis of Belfast) who played pedal harp including to accompany visiting Welsh penillion singers. I think that the “Feis band of harpers” were likely all playing pedal harp.

In Dublin, the Oireachtas was held a few weeks later:

To-day the Oireachtas will be held in the Rotunda. The competitions commence at 11am, and will be continued during the day. At night, the distribution of prizes will take place, and will be accompanied by Irish vocal and instrumental music…
…Mr. T. Rowsome will give an exhibition on the Irish pipes. Mr. Owen Lloyd will play on the Irish harp, and Miss Emily M‘Donald will sing a Scotch-Gaelic song, accompanied on the Highland harp, and a band of five Irish harpers will perform under Mr. Owen Lloyd.

Freeman’s Journal, Tue 24 May 1898, p4-5

When it says “Mr. Owen Lloyd will play on the Irish harp” I think we can understand this as being pure Nationalistic and Cultural marketing: Owen Lloyd usually performed on pedal harp, but as Clare McCague’s thesis shows, by this stage there was a 100 year precedent for considering the pedal harp as the national harp of Ireland and I think it is very possible that Owen Lloyd the Irish harper, playing Irish tunes on pedal harp, could have been billed as “on the Irish harp”. I don’t know if Owen Lloyd and his “band of five Irish harpers” would have been at Belfast or not; I don’t know if the five Irish harpers were pedal harpists, or could have been members of his class, playing on the new Morley gut-strung lever harps.

Fitting the blind girl into this cultural context

This description in Freeman’s Journal Thur 5 May 1898 contrasts the wire-strung Irish harp played by our girl, with Emily MacDonald’s medievalesque gut-strung Scottish lever harp. It says that “The Scottish harp is exactly in form with [the wire-stringed Irish harp], except for the strings”. The description continues by saying that “The wire-strung harp produces a greater volume of sound” than the gut-strung lever harp, but that the Scottish lever harp has a “soft and pleasing” tone “which was so much admired last night” when Emily MacDonald played. The article also comments that the Scottish gut-strung lever harp “is not nearly so difficult to play on as the wire-strung harp of Ireland”.

Was our girl in Belfast for the Feis? These comments sound to me like the writer has actually seen and heard our girl playing; either that, or the writer has a vivid imagination. If this is actually a description and comparison of Emily MacDonald with our girl, then the description of our girl’s wire-strung Irish harp “exactly in form with” Emily MacDonald’s medievalesque harp strongly implies that our girl is not playing a floor-standing Egan-style traditional wire-strung Irish harp like like those used by the tradition-bearers; it sounds like our girl was playing a reproduction medieval-style wire-strung harp modelled after the Brian Boru harp, like the one played by Mary Jane Mackay back in the 1870s. If so, this would put her very much into the classical camp, and would make it extremely unlikely that she was in the inherited tradition.

Could our girl have been one of Owen Lloyd’s lever harpists? Is it possible that a lever harpist learning under the classical pedal harpist Owen Lloyd have got hold of a wire-strung harp this early? Could she have been a classical pedal harpist like Mary Jane Mackay, swept up in the enthusiasm of the Conradh na Gaeilge revival to get hold of a reproduction medieval wire-strung harp?

Or is this a misreading of the Freeman’s article? Is the article author contrasting Emily MacDonald’s gut-strung lever harp, which he had seen and heard the previous day, with what he has read in books about the medieval Irish wire-strung harp?

There is one last possibility which I think sounds unlikely but needs to be considered. Before the gut-strung medievalesque lever harps were made in Scotland in 1893, there had been an abortive attempt to use wire-strung medieval harp reconstructions at the first Mòd in 1892. This photo shows Miss Kate MacDonald with one of the reproduction medieval wire-strung “clàrsach” harps made by Glen for the 1892 Mòd. (I assume she has wire strings on it!) You can see that she is a classically trained harpist, from her pose and orientation and hand position; it has always been my understanding that the Mòd organisers instantly realised how classical harpists could not really transfer their techniques and method of playing and system and aesthetic onto wire-strung medieval harps, and that this was the reason for the immediate switch to using gut-strung lever harps the following year (1893). But is it possible that one of these Scottish girls had moved to the South of Ireland, and taken her Glen wire-strung medieval harp reconstruction with her?

Conclusion

At the moment I don’t think we can come to any conclusion. It is certainly still possible that our “blind girl in the south of Ireland” was a genuine tradition-bearer, an otherwise unattested survivor of the Belfast or Drogheda schools from the 1830s 40s and 50s, playing on a full-size floor-standing traditional wire-strung Irish harp.

But that seems unlikely to me at this stage. It seems perhaps much more likely that our blind girl may have been a middle-class classical revivalist, with a small wire-strung harp based on the medieval Brian Boru harp.

At the moment I don’t think we can say either way. We would really need more references to collate against what we have here.