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.

Miss Flinn

Miss Flinn was a young woman who played the traditional wire-strung Irish harp in Drogheda in the 1840s. This post is to try and find out more information about her.

Eugene McEntegart

There was apparently a player of the traditional wire-strung Irish harp in Drogheda in the 1840s named Mr. McEntegart. I have only two references so far to Mr McEntegart playing the harp, and neither is entirely unambiguous or satisfactory. I have also found a number of other references to Mr. McEntegart from Drogheda performing concerts on piano, guitar, and singing. I suspect these may all be the same person. This post is to line up all of these references, and to try and work out what is going on, and to make some speculative suggestions about his life and music.

Brian Bowman

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

Na gcláirseoirí agus an Ghaeilge / The harpers and the Irish language

One 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.

Halpin

Halpin was apparently a traditional Irish harper in Drogheda in the 1840s. This post is a somewhat desperate attempt to say something useful about him.

Thomas Branagan

Thomas 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

Peter Dowdall

Peter 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.

O’Connor from County Tyrone

The 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.

Patrick Byrne part 12: Scotland and Ireland, 1852

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.

Patrick Byrne part 11: England and Ulster in 1851

Header 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.