I was in Edinburgh on 28th April 2018, to see the Lord Lyon King of Arms and one of his Unicorn Pursuviants presenting Dr. Robert Currie with his commission as Commander of the Name and Arms of Currie. Continue reading Failte Mhic Mhuirich
news
Ceòl mór at Verdant Works
Yesterday I was at Verdant Works in Dundee to play the lunchtime concert in their delightful “Music in the Mill” series. I played two big pibroch tunes, and I videoed one of them for you:
Talk and workshop at Galway Early Music Festival
Brenda Malloy sent along some photos of the talk and taster workshop last weekend. Thanks to Brenda for permission to put this one here!
Continue reading Talk and workshop at Galway Early Music Festival
Early Irish harp and modern Irish harp traditions
When I was preparing my talk for Galway Early Music Festival, I came up with a new handout which I gave to the participants and which we discussed in the talk and workshop session.
Continue reading Early Irish harp and modern Irish harp traditions
ursnaidhm ceangal – The pin or jack that fastens the wire of the harp
The word ursnaidhm (and variants) appears in Bunting’s 1840 book, where it is also translated “The wooden pegs to which the strings are fastened”. Today I was restringing my Student Downhill harp with only four gauges of wire, and I thought I would experiment with the toggle windings, following the historical evidence.
Continue reading ursnaidhm ceangal – The pin or jack that fastens the wire of the harp
Otway harp string holes
While working on something else I came across this from last year which I had meant to write up.
Understanding the tuning and stringing of an old harp requires knowledge of string lengths and angles. This basically means measuring between the tuning pin and the little hole in the soundboard where the string goes in. But Ann Heymann pointed out to me years ago that on the Castle Otway harp, you can’t see a lot of those holes, because the metal strap down the middle does not line up with the string holes in the wood.
Madame Scotia, Madam Scrap
I went to Glasgow to hear Helene Witcher talking about her book at the Aye Write literary festival. The book is a biography of Helene’s aunt, the Scottish harpist Heloise Russell-Fergusson.
Harpe bardique
I have been discussing stringing possibilities of a harp made by a French harp maker, supposedly as a copy of one of the old Gaelic harps. Analysing its string lengths I noted that its scaling was suspiciously slow.
(Scaling is the technical word used to describe the ratio of string lengths across the range of a harp or other stringed instrument; a slow scaling means the strings increase in length more gradually as you move from treble to bass.)
Then I remembered that I had come across this slow, even scaling before, on harps modelled after the “Bardic harp” of Gildas Jaffrennou.
Discovery days
Here’s the video that was made the other week at the HHSI Discovery Day, in conjunction with Galway Early Music.
“Traditional Music in Ireland”
I remember Ben Bagby taking a text describing African mbira players, and using it to get an inspiring description of what medieval harp music might be like. (‘Imagining the early medieval harp’, in A Performer’s guide to medieval music, ed. Ross Duffin, Indiana University Press, 2000, p.340-3)
So today I done the same with this text from Tomás Ó Canainn, Traditional music in Ireland, Routlege and Kegan Paul, London, 1978, p.87-90
The square brackets are where I have removed all the pipe-specific words and terms. In our minds we can insert harp references, so that we can try to read this as a guide to how to play Irish harp. Continue reading “Traditional Music in Ireland”