2 – Fundamentals of playing the early Irish harp

In this first session we will work on a lovely, easy jig said to have been composed by Turlough Carolan (1670–1738), the most famous early Irish harper. We will work from an edition by the 19th-century music collector, George Petrie—a friend and colleague of Edward Bunting, the seminal Irish music collector—which Petrie made from an older manuscript setting now preserved in The Royal Irish Academy. This piece will allow us to begin to incorporate into our playing an idiom characteristic of Carolan—dividing phrases of the melody between the hands—that makes the tune even easier to play!

We will recap. the work we did in the first session. If we have time we will now work on fleshing out the melody by adding a simple, historically plausible 'lower hand’ in additional places in the tune.

This beautiful lament by Turlough Carolan survives in the mid-19th-century Forde manuscript collection, reproduced by Petrie, with the additional title 'Parting from a companion’. Carolan composed it as a result of a joke that his good friend, Charles Mac Cabe, played on the blind harper, pretending that he was dead! By working on this piece we will learn how to 'reverse engineer' from a historical printed source to get back to a more plausible harp setting, both in terms of the actual notes to be played, and also in the likely phrasing of the original, before it was 'nailed down' in music notation.

We will recap. on the work we did in the first session. Now, we may also work on fleshing out the melody by adding a simple, historically plausible 'lower hand'.

One of the most famous melodies said to be composed by the harper, Turlough Carolan (1670–1738), Sídh beag agus sídh mór is likely not his original composition but a reworking of a graceful song called The Bonny Cuckoo. We will compare historical printed, and manuscript Irish sources, aiming to arrive at a plausible harp version. 

We will recap. the work we did in the first session. We will now also start to understand how Edward Bunting’s piano arrangements generally do not channel the Irish-harper performances that he heard, live, in the 1790s; why that is, and how we might now go about reconstructing a more plausible ‘lower hand’ for our harp setting.