This is a project to try and find out about Irish harpers who were continuing to play in the inherited tradition from 1790 through to about 1910.
These people (mostly men) learned from teachers who themselves had learned from teachers and so on in a lineage of tradition back through the 18th century harpers. They played on floor-standing wire-strung traditional Irish harps, using the traditional Irish harp playing techniques and style.
Brian Bowman was a harper during the mid 19th century. So far I have only one reference to him, and it is not very satisfactory. This post is to discuss the reference, and the context, and to see what we can usefully say about Brian Bowman.
header photo © Anthere CC-BY
Continue reading Brian BowmanOne of the columns in my timeline of traditional Irish harpers through the long 19th century is for whether a harper did or did not have the Irish language. This post is to expand on that, to discuss which of the old harpers had Irish, which of them didn’t, and how we can understand the decline and suppression of the wire-strung Irish harp tradition alongside the decline and revival of the Irish language.
Continue reading Na gcláirseoirí agus an Ghaeilge / The harpers and the Irish languageHalpin was apparently a traditional Irish harper in Drogheda in the 1840s. This post is a somewhat desperate attempt to say something useful about him.
Continue reading HalpinThomas Branagan was a traditional Irish harper in the mid to late 19th century, who played at events in County Louth. This post is to discuss the references to him, and to start thinking about who he was and what we can say about him.
Header photo: the ruins of Stephenstown House, © Mike Searle CC-BY-SA
Continue reading Thomas BranaganPeter Dowdall was a traditional Irish harper, who lived into the early years of the 20th century. This post is to try and track down some information about him, to start to tell his life story.
Continue reading Peter DowdallThe piper and scholar Jimmy O’Brein Moran told me about a mention of a harper in a piping manuscript in the National Library in Dublin. I went and looked at the manuscript. This post is to discuss what (if anything) we can usefully say about the harper.
Continue reading O’Connor from County Tyroneheader image adapted from SNPG PGP HA 460 (used under license CC-BY-NC).
This post continues with the laborious process of trying to follow Patrick Byrne’s touring itinerary. This post covers 1852, when he went to Edinburgh and Fife, and then returned to Dublin and Monaghan.
Continue reading Patrick Byrne part 12: Scotland and Ireland, 1852Header photo: Calotype E (detail). Heritage Collections, University of Edinburgh, Coll-1073, CC-BY
This post follows the traditional Irish harper Patrick Byrne on his travels over the course of 1851. Patrick Byrne was in Warwickshire and Staffordshire for the first three months of the year; then he returned to Ireland, where he spent May and June around County Cavan; he spent the summer working in the fashionable seaside resorts of south County Down, and then he spent the autumn back in County Monaghan working for aristocratic patrons at their enormous country houses. We will work through the sources to try and reconstruct his itinerary and see the places that he was visiting.
Continue reading Patrick Byrne part 11: England and Ulster in 1851And so we continue to try and work through all of the documents for the life of the traditional Irish harper, Patrick Byrne (1790s – 1863).
You can catch up with his life and work up to this point, in my previous posts about him:
Part 1 covers Patrick Byrne’s early years and education, down to his discharge from harp school in 1822.
Part 2, looks at his early career, working for patrons in Ireland and England from 1822 to 1837.
Part 3 covers his first visit to Scotland over the winter of 1837-8, and his tour of Ireland in 1839-40.
Part 4 looks at him playing for Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle, and then touring mostly in Ireland and a bit in England in 1841-4.
Part 5 covers just six months, from when he went to Scotland at the beginning of 1845 until he headed back to Belfast on 25th June, including the Waverley Ball and having his photographs taken.
Part 6 covers the rest of 1845, and the whole of 1846, touring in the north of Ireland and the English midlands.
Part 7 covers Scotland in the first half of 1847, Ireland for the second part of 1847; England in the first part of 1848, and back in Ireland in Autumn 1848.
Part 8 covers Byrne’s trip to the south of England over Christmas 1848, where he played events in Hampshire and Wiltshire; and then the first half of 1849, when he went to Staffordshire and then came back to Ireland and met the antiquarian John Bell in Dungannon.
Part 9 covers his pursuit of Queen Victoria from Dublin to Balmoral in the summer of 1849.
This post (part 10) follows him from the end of 1849 through to the end of 1850, in the Scottish borders and touring Ulster.
James Duncan was a traditional Irish harper in the 18th century. But since he was still alive in 1792, he was active during my Long 19th Century study period (1792 – 1909) and so I should try to say something useful about what he was doing from 1792 onwards.
Continue reading James Duncan
