header 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, 1852As part of my Old Irish Harp Tunes Transcriptions Project, I have been looking at where and when Bunting collected tunes. My interactive map shows the dates and places he tells us he was collecting.
Continue reading Bunting’s collecting tripsI was reviewing my interview with Mícheál Ó Catháin for forthcoming inclusion on his State of the Art interview series, and a comment on my upbringing in the English change-ringing tradition started me thinking about the potential soundscape of change-ringing in the ears of the old Irish harp tradition bearers.
I was passing through the village of St Tugen, and so I stopped and looked into his church. It is a beautiful building, full of painted wooden sculpture. There was an information sheet that gave his life story, and there was a glass case with his relics.
After 12½ years in St Andrews I have moved to Armagh – from the ancient ecclesiastical centre of Scotland, to the ancient ecclesiastical centre of Ireland.
Here’s the video that was made the other week at the HHSI Discovery Day, in conjunction with Galway Early Music.
Last week was Scoil na gCláirseach in Kilkenny.
I found a shellac 78 disc of Irish harp played by Treasa Ní Chormaic. I don’t know the date of this disc.
Update Jan 2018: Bill Dean-Myatt says it was recorded circa September 1930
I have transferred both sides onto mp3 for you, using a modern turntable.
Today I was working on tunes collected by Edward Bunting from the 18th century Irish harper, Arthur Ó Néill, for my concert in St Andrews on 3rd August.
As I played through some of his settings of Carolan and other baroque Irish harp music, using a copy of an 18th century Irish harp, I started thinking about the whole issue of playing the harp with long fingernails.
On Thursday I was at the National Museum of Scotland store in Granton, a suburb north of Edinburgh. I went there with Karen Loomis, to look at the plaster-cast of the Trinity College harp which is kept in the store. We had a very productive hour, inspecting, measuring and photographing the cast, and discussing aspects of the cast and how it related to the real thing in the Long Room at Trinity College, and to later illustrations and depictions of the harp.
