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.

Roger Begley

Roger Begley was a blind traditional Irish harper from Belfast. He married a Dublin girl and they went to live in England.

I had not heard of Roger Begley until a few years ago. His name doesn’t appear in any of the books or articles about the Irish harp tradition. This post summarises what I have found from digging in the archives, to try and give us a picture of his life.

Patrick McCloskey

Patrick McCloskey (or McClusky) was a blind Irish harper who died very young.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“…George Jackson when he was stringing my Harp…”

In the early 1900s, the Belfast carpenter William Savage and his younger brother Robert made a very decorative copy of the medieval Brian Boru (Trinity College) harp. When the harp was finished, brass wire strings were fitted by George Jackson.

George Jackson had learned harp from Patrick Murney, in a lineage going back to the 18th century Irish harpers. I recently started to wonder if some of Jackson’s strings might still be on the harp.