Patrick McCloskey (or McClusky) was a blind Irish harper who died very young.
Continue reading Patrick McCloskeyCategory: long 19th century
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.
Hugh Frazer
Hugh Fraser (or Frazer) is an Irish harper whose name appears quite often, because he taught the harp in Drogheda in the 1840s. This post is to draw together other references to him, to try and build more of a picture of him and his life.
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Bridget O’Reilly
I don’t know very much about Bridget O’Reilly, but I thought it might be useful to start gathering references to her. There are also a few references to un-named female harpers which might possibly be her. Hopefully in time we will find more detailed references which will allow us to tell more of her story.
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Hugh O’Hagan
Hugh O’Hagan has been known as a harper from the Oriel region for a long time, but there has been very little information about him. I have done some digging over the past few months and this post draws together what I know now.
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19th century Irish harp tune lists
When I was doing my newspaper research a month or two back, I found quite a lot of mentions of tunes played by individual named harpers. I realised that I could usefully try to collate all these different references, to get some kind of overview of what were the most commonly mentioned tunes in the inherited Irish harp tradition through the 19th century.
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Two letters to Edward Bunting
In 1839, the elderly Edward Bunting was living in Dublin and was preparing the piano arrangements and text for his final publication.
Two Belfast gentlemen wrote two different letters to him, about the then-still-living Irish harp tradition.
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