By the end of the eighteenth century, harping in Ireland was at a very low ebb and the ancient tradition on the brink of collapse. Edward Bunting (1773–1843) – music collector, publisher, editor, organist – is credited with saving the music of the Irish harp for posterity at a time when it was in danger of permanent loss. An Armagh born organist who was employed to notate the music played at the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival. There he lived with the McCracken family and associated with many of the members of the United Irish Society who had initiated the event. Bunting was so taken by the group of ageing harpers at the festival that he subsequently chose to devote a large proportion of his time to the collection and publication of Irish music. He toured Mayo in 1792 with Richard Kirwan, founder of the Royal Irish Academy, collecting a number of airs. In the same year he also gathered material in the counties Derry and Tyrone, visiting the harper Denis Hempson at his home in Magilligan. Bunting met Arthur O’Neill in Newry late in 1792 and visited Denis Hempson and Dónal Black in 1795 or 1796. His first publication appeared in 1796 with sixty-six tunes. ‘fieldwork’.

Bunting was the first Irish collector that we know of to gather music from musicians ‘in the field’. He also had some impressive ideas about publication – planning to print Irish texts with accompanying tunes and English translations. To that end Patrick Lynch, an Irish scholar, accompanied him on his 1802 tour of Connacht. Bunting later employed James Cody to collect both music and texts in Ulster. Bunting’s plans to include the Gaelic texts were not successful, however, as the 1809 publication contained seventy-seven airs, twenty of which were accompanied by English texts. arrangement Also, in making piano arrangements of tunes for publication Bunting provided versions of the tunes that lacked authenticity in relation to their original repertoire. He was aiming his publications at a particular market – the amateur musicians among the middle and upper classes. Certainly the printed music would have been of little use to the musically non-literate traditional musicians and harpers who were his sources.

After 1809 Bunting does not appear to have undertaken any major tour or collection. Most of his time was now devoted to arranging tunes he had already collected or that he received from correspondents. His final collection was published in 1840 and contained 151 tunes plus an elaborate introduction. Bunting wished to revise and re-edit his two earlier volumes, but, due to ill health, did not manage to do so. He is buried in Mount St Jerome Cemetery in Dublin.

Source: Dictionary of Irish Biography  https://www.dib.ie/