Tag: 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. You can check my timeline showing all of the harpers.

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, playing on floor-standing wire-strung traditional Irish harps, using the traditional Irish harp playing techniques.

P. Fitzpatrick

P. Fitzpatrick was a traditional Irish harper in the mid 19th century. I only have a couple of references to him but they contain some hints that can help us start to describe his life and work. Hopefully in time more references to him will be found.

John McCotter

John McCotter was a student at the Belfast harp school in 1820. However he seems to have dropped out and I have not seen any trace of him after that.

This post is just to get his name down so that we can tick him off the list and move on.

Harp Society House, Cromac Street, Belfast

The Irish Harp Society in Belfast was based at a few different addresses from the beginning of the first Harp School in 1808 until the finish of the second Harp School in 1840. I have references to the Harp Society House being in three different Belfast streets at different dates: Pottinger’s Entry, Cromac Street, and Talbot Street.

This post is to collate as many references as I can, to try and work out where the house in Cromac Street was.

Mr. Rennie

We have a few references to a harper called Rennie in the 1840s. He is obviously a different person from the famous Valentine Rennie who died in 1837.

I don’t know anything about Mr. Rennie apart from these newspaper reports of him performing in the South-East with Mr. O’Connor. I am putting him here so that we can keep an eye on him, and so that we can add any new information that turns up.

Valentine Rennie

Valentine Rennie was a traditional Irish harper and tradition-bearer in the first half of the 19th century. He taught the harp in Belfast for fifteen years, passing on the inherited tradition to perhaps twenty or more young harpers in the next generation. We have loads of information about him including two different portraits (header image courtesy of National Museums NI)

In this post I am going to try and cover everything so it will be very long. We will start by going through his life in order, and then after that we will look at things like his harps and his portaits.

William Gorman

William Gorman was a traditional Irish harper at the beginning of the 19th century. He learned the harp from Arthur O’Neil, at the Belfast harp school, but he was expelled before he had completed his eduction. This post is to try and say something useful about him.

Hamilton Gillespie

Hamilton Gillespie was a traditional Irish harper in the first half of the 19th century. This post draws together information about his life.

Jane McArthur

There are quite a few traditional Irish harpers in the first half of the 19th century, whose names appear in the lists of harp students, but who disappear from the record after they finish their education and become professional harpers. However I think I still want to do a post about each of them. That way we have a place to add any further references that we might find. And it also helps us to start to get to know them as individuals.

Tom Hardy

Tom Hardy was a traditional Irish harper in Belfast in the second half of the 19th century. We don’t have a lot of information about him; we have only a few scattered sources. This means that any attempt to tell his life story will have more speculation and guesswork than hard facts. But I think there is enough to try. We can always come back later to add new information or to correct wrong guesses.

John MacLoughlin

John MacLoughlin was a traditional Irish harper in the first half of the 19th century. He had an interesting working life in Dublin, playing before the King, working in taverns and ending up in poverty. This post is to gather together the different scattered references to him, to build a picture of his life and work.