A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music, Containing a Variety of Admired Airs Never Before Published, and also the Compositions of Conolan and Carolan; Collected from the Harpers &c. in the Different Provinces of Ireland, and Adapted for the Piano-Forte, with a Prefatory Introduction by Edward Bunting. Vol. 1. Price 10s.6d. Printed & Sold by Preston & Son at their Wholesale Warehouses 97 Strand. [London: 1797]

As is well known, Edward Bunting’s A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music of 1797 had its origins in a commission given to a young Armagh-born classical organist and pianist Edward Bunting (1773–1843), by the organisers of the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, to notate and preserve the music of the last of the professional Irish harpers. Bunting made this task his lifework and published two further similar volumes in 1809 and 1840.

The 66 interactive music scores presented here are from the original undated edition of the Collection produced in London in 1797 (and later) by the firm of Preston and Son. A facsimile of this edition, with contextual notes, is also available below.

Nicholas Carolan, BB, Treasa Harkin & Jackie Small, 13 October 2015

Postscript

The generally accepted date of publication for this undated volume has long been 1796, although there have been some indications that it may have been published in 1797. The former is the date that Bunting himself retrospectively assigned to it in his manuscripts and in his final publication, The Ancient Music of Ireland Arranged for the Piano Forte (Dublin: 1840). It has therefore been the date hitherto accepted by ITMA. However, recently published research by Dr Peter Downey, former head of music at St Mary’s University College, Belfast, has conclusively shown that 1797 was the year in which the volume as known was actually first published.>

The detailed primary evidence for this conclusion is contained in Dr Downey’s book Edward Bunting and the Ancient Irish Music: The Publication History of A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music… Adapted for the Piano-Forte (London: Preston & Son) (Lisburn: 2017; ISBN 978 0 9955858 2 9; 71 pp.) which builds both on newly uncovered and well-known information sources. The book also traces the publication history of Bunting’s second volume, A General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland, Arranged for the Piano-Forte…, first published in London in 1809.

Briefly, the confusion between the two dates of 1796 and 1797 has been shown to have arisen from the actions of Bunting himself. In May 1796 he registered with Stationers’ Hall in London 28 engraved tunes of an unpublished draft version of what finally became the 66 published tunes of A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music… He registered the published volume in Stationers’ Hall in October 1797, but subsequently referred to it himself as having been published in 1796.

A copy of Edward Bunting and the Ancient Irish Music: The Publication History of A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music… Adapted for the Piano-Forte (London: Preston & Son), kindly donated by Dr Downey, is now available for consultation in ITMA.

Nicholas Carolan, 30 November 2017

John Clark / John O’Connell manuscript, 1793

Forty Eight Original Irish Dances Never Before Printed with Basses for the Piano-Forte & with Proper Figures for Dancing Book 1 & 2, 34 College Green, Dublin: Hime’s Musical Circulating Library, n.d.

Morris (later Maurice) Hime, a music seller, music publisher and lottery-office keeper, was active in Dublin from the 1790s to the 1810s. Of Jewish ancestry, he had first set up in the music trade about 1785 with his brother Humphrey in Liverpool. About 1791–2 he came to Dublin, and over the next three decades published sheet music and slim collections of songs, instrumental music and dance instructions from various addresses in the city centre: College Green and later Dame St, Westmoreland St and Eustace St. His speciality was the publishing of annual country-dance collections. Taking advantage of the fact that British copyright law did not at the time apply to Ireland, Hime is said to have supplied pirated copies of British publications to his brother for sale in England, and to have become wealthy as a result. He was married to Sophia Rhames, daughter of another Dublin music seller and publisher, and later lived in Roebuck in south County Dublin where he was a Church of Ireland vestry member and churchwarden in Taney. He died in early 1828.

Hime’s publications are generally of popular British and Continental music, but his collection of country dances Forty Eight Original Irish Dances Never Before Printed claims to be Irish. Some of its melodies undoubtedly are, but others – such as ‘Bobbing Joan’ and ‘Berwick Lasses’ – had been appearing in English country-dance collections from early in the 18th century. They would however have been long naturalised in Ireland and would have formed part of the Irish repertory at the time of their publication here. While the collection is undated, it seems to have appeared about 1795–1800, earlier than dated country-dance collections Hime published in the opening decades of the 19th century. Two editions of the collection now in the National Library of Ireland have different title-pages. Although the contents and numbering of both are the same, the first is entitled Twenty Four Original Irish Dances Never Before Printed while the second, in a larger paper format, is entitled Forty Eight etc. Probably the first version of the Irish collection did contain 24 dances, but, when it proved popular, Hime produced a second volume of 24 which recycled the original title-page until a more comprehensive one could be created.

A pdf of this book is available from the Bibliothèque National de France.

With thanks to Lisa & Michael Shields, & to Eoin C. Bairéad.

Nicholas Carolan, Maeve Gebruers, Treasa Harkin & Jackie Small, 17 June 2014

Laoise Kelly from Westport, now living on Achill Island, Co. Mayo, is one of Ireland’s leading traditional harpers. She has pioneered a new style of driving instrument harp playing, combining the techniques of fingerpads in the bass, and fingernails in the melody, on a thirty-four gut strung Paddy Cafferky harp.

Laoise has performed and recorded nationally and internationally with the foremost artists in Irish music from The Chieftains to Kate Bush, and has recorded three critically acclaimed solo albums.

She is Director of the Achill International Harp Festival, and in 2020 was awarded the TG4 Gradam Ceoil Musician of the year.

Úna Ní Fhlannagáin is an award-winning harper-composer and singer from Co. Galway, Ireland. An instrumentalist of verve and imagination, she is rooted in diverse musical influences such as the dance music tradition of North Clare, the sean-nós singing style of Maigh Seola, the American post-minimalists and free jazz. She has performed her wildly energetic jigs and reels, delicate hornpipes and emotive slow airs throughout Ireland, Europe, North America and the Middle East, winning multiple prizes at the All-Ireland Fleadh, Keadue International Harp Festival, Oireachtas, O’Carolan Harp Festival, and Granard Harp Festival along the way. While studying for a first-class honours university degree, she branched into jazz and contemporary music, studying and performing with Anthony Braxton, the legendary free jazz musician and composer. Since then she’s won a commission from the World Harp Congress, had one of her pieces published by Cairde na Cruite, and performed her own compositions in Ireland, Croatia, Canada and the U.S., and performed with Grammy Award winner Bobby McFerrin. Úna strives to mine the richness of her native tradition, explore the potential of her instrument, and respectfully engage with other genres… in short, to play music which makes you feel good.

Dianne Marshall was born in Portlaoise, Co Laois, in 1978. She spent many years at the Royal Irish Academy of music, studying both Harp and Piano. Dianne then won a music scholarship at Oakham School in Rutland, England where she studied for a number of years before being accepted into the London Royal Academy of Music, which she entered as a student under the tutorship of Professor Daphne Boden.

Since returning to Ireland Dianne has worked as a freelance musician playing both Irish Harp and Concert Harp. Dianne regularly works with the Ulster Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra and RTÉ. Concert Orchestra. As well as the three main professional Orchestras in Ireland Dianne has also worked with many other companies including the Wexford Opera festival and European Opera Company for a number of years.
Dianne has also given solo recitals as well as playing duets and Chamber music with a range of different musicians throughout Ireland.

Born in Portlaoise, Triona Marshall began her studies of the harp in the Royal Irish Academy of Dublin. She continued her studies in the Konninglijk Conservatorium in Den Haag with Edward Witsenburg for 4 years followed by 2 years in The Royal College of Music in London with Daphne Boden.

After her studies Triona became principal harpist with the RTE Concert Orchestra in Dublin, a position she held for 5 years before changing musical direction and embarking on a career exclusively on the Irish harp.
She joined the Chieftains in 2002 and has toured with them and other artists worldwide for 18 years.

Claire is one of Ireland’s foremost musicians, playing both Classical Concert and Irish Traditional Harp. With an early passion for harp, she began to learn at the age of eight in The Royal Irish Academy of music Dublin and later in the Conservatoire National De Music Reims, France. She was the youngest performer at the Ninth World Harp Congress in Dublin in 2005 and was appointed principle harpist with The National Youth Orchestra in 2007.

Mary Louise O’Donnell is a harpist and musicologist who has performed extensively throughout Ireland, Europe, Africa and Asia as a soloist and with various ensembles. She was awarded a doctorate by the University of Limerick in 2009 and, since then, has published widely on topics relating to Irish cultural history, semiotics and performance studies. Her first book, Ireland’s Harp: The Shaping of Irish Identity c. 1770-1880, was published in 2014 by UCD Press. Mary Louise has received many awards and grants to further her research, including an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, Fulbright Scholarship, and Centre Culturel Irlandais Fellowship. Her current research focuses on the diverse ways in which the Irish harp was used to construct identity among Irish emigrants to North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 2019, Mary Louise was appointed Musician-in-Residence with Fingal County Council and, in 2020, she and her sister Teresa released an album entitled Heavenly Harps, Heavenly Cloths: Contemporary Music for the Irish Harp by Brian Boydell.

Teresa O’Donnell has worked as a freelance pedal and Irish harpist throughout Ireland, Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. She began her harp studies with the late Sr. Eugene McCabe at Mount Sackville School, Dublin.

Teresa lectured in music at St. Patrick’s College, DCU and was awarded a Foras Feasa fellowship to research a PhD which she completed in 2021. She has performed with the Irish Chamber Orchestra and has been a musician in residence with Fingal County Council since 2019. Teresa has appeared on several TV networks including, RTÉ, TG4, BBC, CNN and NHK (Japan). In collaboration with her sister, Mary Louise, they have released an album of music for the Irish harp by Brian Boydell, entitled, Heavenly Harps, Heavenly Cloths.

Leading lever harpist of her generation, Dr Anne-Marie O’Farrell from Dublin has performed all over the world as a solo artist, accompanist and in ensembles, and is regularly featured in broadcasts.

On lever harp, she is particularly recognized for her expansion of repertoire and levering techniques, as a result of which the world’s leading harpmakers Salvi Harps redesigned their lever harps to become concert instruments.
She has performed with numerous orchestras, including the Irish Baroque Orchestra, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the Irish Memory Orchestra, and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra with whom she premiered Ryan Molloy’s Concerto for lever harp, Gealán.

A prolific recording artist, she has released several CDs, including Just So Bach, Harping Bach to Carolan, The Jig’s Up, My Lagan Love, and Embrace. New Directions for Irish Harp; Double Strung and Duopoly with Cormac De Barra; and Harp to Harp with harmonica player Brendan Power. She is frequently invited to give recitals, workshops and masterclasses at international conferences and festivals around the world, in addition to performance at several World Harp Congresses.

Dedicated to the development of the Irish harp, she has published critical editions of Bach’s cello, keyboard and lute repertoire. She has recently completed several large-scale commissions showcasinging the harp, including an Irish harp concerto, and a five-movement work for large harp ensemble.

Máire is “the doyenne of Irish harp players” (Scotland on Sunday) and 2001 recipient of Irish music’s most prestigious Award, Gradam Ceoil TG4 – Traditional Musician of the Year – “for the excellence and pioneering force of her music, the remarkable growth she has brought to the music of the harp in Ireland and for the positive influence she has had on the young generation of harpers.” A multiple All-Ireland and Pan-Celtic winner, she developed profoundly influential techniques for harp performance of traditional Irish music, heard on her pioneering New-Strung Harp (1985), her recent trio album with The Casey Sisters and seven duo and two quartet recordings with guitarist Chris Newman – with whom she tours worldwide. A TV programme in TG4’s ‘Sé mo Laoch series about Máire and her sister Nollaig was recently broadcast.

Irish traditional dance music, in the forms that we know it today, evolved mainly in the course of the 18th century, although some of its forms were older and most of its melodies were composed later, in the 19th and 20th centuries. The same seems to be true of Irish traditional dance and its figures.

It is clear that this 18th-century evolution of both music and dance was influenced, to a degree not yet understood, by ‘country-dance’ printed collections, which combined notated music and instructions for dancing. The earliest such Irish printed collections date from the 1720s, and Irish music publishers continued to produce them for the rest of the century. While they include Irish melodies, they mostly reprint pieces from British-published collections which themselves belong to a printed country-dance tradition going back to the mid-1600s. Versions of some of the native Irish melodies and figures they present are still to be found in the tradition. Some melodies and figures now naturalised in Ireland were imports brought in through these publications.

The prosperity of the last decades of the 18th century in Dublin – when Scottish reels and the jigs of the Limerick composer and uilleann piper Walker Jackson were particular favourites – gave rise to a burst of publishing country-dance collections there. The four sample collections given below (one also containing ‘new dances’) were all published by Bartlett Cooke, a musician, music seller and publisher, and an arranger specialising in Irish melodies, in collaboration with professional dancing masters such as the named ‘Mr Fontaine’ and ‘Tracy’. Cooke was an oboeist during these decades in the Dublin theatre orchestras of Smock Alley and Crow St; he also had a music shop on Sackville St (now O’Connell St) from c. 1794 to 1798.

The first three collections come from an undated bound collection of c. 1800 Dublin-published sheet music which once belonged to a Miss Barnewall, and later to Breandán Breathnach. The fourth item, an ITMA purchase, presents a bibliographical puzzle as the tunes on its title-page do not form a numerical sequence with those on the following pages. But possibly Cooke had a title-page engraved for an already existing sequence of engraved plates, and used it to form the publication. All the pages seem to have come from the hand of the same engraver and are held together with what seems contemporary binding.

With thanks to book donors the Breathnach Family.

ITMA would welcome the donation of other materials of this kind which are not yet in its collections (check our catalogues here), or of their loan for copying.

Nicholas Carolan & Maeve Gebruers, 1 October 2009

A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music, Containing a Variety of Admired Airs Never Before Published, and also the Compositions of Conolan and Carolan; Collected from the Harpers &c. in the Different Provinces of Ireland, and Adapted for the Piano-Forte, with a Prefatory Introduction by Edward Bunting. Vol. 1. Price 10s. 6d. London, Printed & Sold by Preston & Son, at their Wholesale Warehouses 97 Strand. [n.d.]

Edward Bunting’s A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music of 1797 has occupied a highly influential position in the history of Irish traditional music. Although it is by no means the earliest such collection, its focus on the then disappearing centuries-old music of the Irish professional harpers resonated with the romantic sensibilities of its time, and in the years since its publication it has been extensively mined by arrangers, publishers and performers. Its influence continues in print, on sound recordings and on the Internet.

As is well known, the collection had its origins in a commission given to a young Armagh-born classical organist and pianist Edward Bunting (1773–1843), by the organisers of the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, to notate and preserve the instrumental and vocal music of the Irish harpers. Bunting made this task his lifework and published two further similar volumes: A General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland (1809) and The Ancient Music of Ireland (1840). More of the music and song that he gathered remains unpublished in his surviving manuscripts.

The volume presented here (along with its 66 related interactive music scores) is the original undated edition of the Collection, edited by Bunting when he was in his early twenties, and produced in London in 1797 (and later) by the firm of Preston and Son. The motivation and finances for its publication came from the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge (forerunner of the present Linen Hall Library, Belfast), which included many of the Harp Festival organisers and would nowadays be regarded as its publisher. Bunting’s preface lays stress on the antiquity of the music of the harpers and the importance of rescuing the music and its lore from oblivion. The music was drawn by engraver surnamed Neele. In spite of the ‘Vol. 1’ inscription on the title page, no second volume appeared under this title. Reference found elsewhere to music published by Bunting about 1790 can be disregarded. At the time of his death Bunting was working on a revised edition of the volume, but this was never completed.

The profits from the original publication were allocated to Bunting by the Society, but as early as 1797 there were rumours of a pirated edition being prepared in Dublin. In the event several such editions, undated, appeared in the following years from the Dublin firms of Hime, Gough, and W. Power, and from the London firm of W. Power & J. Power. An undated ‘new edition’ was issued in Dublin by J. Willis. Legitimate reprints were published in 1969, 1981 and 2002 by Walton’s Piano and Musical Instrument Galleries in Dublin, in 1996 by the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, and in 2011 by ECCO Print Editions in Michigan. An extensively annotated edition of the music of the volume utilising Bunting’s surviving music manuscripts, with song texts etc., was made by Donal O’Sullivan and A. Martin Freeman and published as vols XXII–XXV of the Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society (1927–30). The edition was reprinted in 1967 by the London firm of Wm. Dawson & Sons.

Crucial in spreading the melodies published by Edward Bunting worldwide over the last two centuries has been their early adaptation by the Dublin poet Thomas Moore for the song lyrics of his highly successful Irish Melodies series (1808–1834). In all Moore took 21 airs from the 66 of this first Bunting collection.

With thanks to Brigitte Bark for the initial setting of the interactive music scores. The facsimile copy of the book presented here is of an original edition carrying Bunting’s autograph which was donated to ITMA by Leslie Shepard.

Nicholas Carolan, Maeve Gebruers, Treasa Harkin & Jackie Small, 13 October 2015

Postscript

Research by Dr Peter Downey, published in 2017, has established that 1797 was the date of publication of this volume, and not 1796, as has been generally thought. See here for details.

Nicholas Carolan, 30 November 2017

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/