Reconstructing Carolan: Play transcriptions of his music made from 18th-century Irish harpers

The field transcription of this well-known Carolan tune was notated in the 1790s by the young Edward Bunting – the first Irish music collector – directly from a harper. His transcription has lovely twists and turns, and melodic alternatives that we don't normally hear in modern performances. This source also has indications of the fuller texture that the harper played, which will help us get to a complete, performable setting on our harps.

In this session, you will have an opportunity to play sections of the composition individually (no problem if you would rather listen instead), and to get real-time feedback on this, to help you to play more effortlessly, fluently, and musically.

This most elegant, and Italianate, of Carolan's compositions survives in a direct harp transcription from the end of the 18th century. It incorporates quintessential features of Carolan's distinctive style that made his music so prized in his own time but which are no longer transmitted in modern editions or performance. This fascinating transcription teaches us how Carolan fleshed out his melodies into complete textures in an 'Irish baroque' way; without European bass lines or chords. We will get both our hands playing in the manner in which he himself did, to get closer to how this air might have sounded originally.

In this session, you will have an opportunity to play sections of the composition individually (no problem if you would rather listen instead), and to get real-time feedback on this, to help you to play more effortlessly, fluently, and musically. 

Carolan followed his Miss Dillon air with a lively jig in which both hands are involved in producing the melody, in different registers, which again spreads the work around helpfully! In this session we will explore the source page to discover vital aspects of how Carolan played this jig, and how this can help us understand how to approach it similarly more than three hundred years later so that it sits well under the fingers.

In this session, you will have an opportunity to play sections of the composition individually (no problem if you would rather listen instead), and to get real-time feedback on this, to help you to play more effortlessly, fluently, and musically. If there is time, we will also revise the rest of the music we have worked on in this course.

Many of us are familiar with Carolan's melodies. But what if I told you that he might not recognise many of the melodies now attributed to him? And that the complicated style in which they are now usually performed — with tricky bass lines and full chords — are not at all how he is likely to have played them? The most reliable written sources - transcriptions made from live performance by old Irish harpers in the 1790s — which would get us closer to the real Carolan, have generally been ignored. Modern editions and recordings usually take much later, reworked versions of the tunes, transcribed from fiddles and flutes, or even Victorian piano arrangements, as their starting point. In this illustrated videoed talk, I outline these long-standing problems; I introduce you to the most significant — but neglected — Carolan sources from the 1700s, and I outline my recent discoveries about Carolan's likely performance idiom, including my new hypothesis about what his lower hand played.