The Irish Traditional Music Archive documents contemporary Irish traditional music activity as keenly as it acquires historical material, and every year since 1993 its staff has carried out field-recording at various festivals throughout the country, as well as on other occasions. Recordings are made in audio and video formats, and are made available to the general public for reference access and study within the Archive.

In the last year or so ITMA Field-Recordings Officer Danny Diamond has been supplementing the audio and video field-recordings made by himself and other staff by also photographing singers, musicians and dancers, in his own time. A selection of these photographs, taken during recording trips in the first half of 2010, is presented here. They come from the Frankie Kennedy Winter School in Gweedore, Co Donegal, in January; the Inishowen Folk Song and Ballad Seminar, Co Donegal, in March; Sean-Nós Cois Life, Dublin, in April; and the Willie Clancy Summer School, Co Clare, in July.

For further examples of Danny Diamond’s photography, see his website www.dannydiamond.ie.

With thanks to Danny Diamond and to the traditional performers here who are the subjects of his photographs.

Nichols Carolan & Danny Diamond, 1 August 2010

In the early 1960s, when long-playing records of Irish traditional dance music were still comparatively rare and each new issue accordingly had an impact on audiences that recordings no longer have, an influential LP was recorded by Stapleton Studios in Merrion Row in Dublin under the direction of its founder-owner Bill Stapleton: Music of Ireland. Sean Maguire with the Four Star Quartet, presented above from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

The Quartet was led by the star exhibition fiddle player Sean Maguire (1927–2005) of Belfast, who had been recording on 78s from the 1950s and was well known as a solo player throughout Ireland, and in Irish centres in Britain and the United States. The three other members, all noted radio performers of ceili music on Radio Éireann in the 1950s and 1960s, were his piano accompanist Eileen Lane (daughter of Cavan accordion player Terry Lane, see here) who was married to Bill Stapleton; bass player Sean Cotter; and All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil banjo-mandolin champion William/Bill  Power of Wexford, who also recorded with the Mayglass Ceili Band of Wexford and with the Abbey Tavern musicians of Howth, Co Dublin.
Although recorded in Dublin, the Four Star LP was published in New York by the Irish-American Avoca company of Westbury, New York, in 1962.

With thanks to Helen Ledwidge and the Stapleton family for various help;  to Ciaran Power for information; and to LP donors Michael Ward, John Loesberg, Dermot McLaughlin and Helen Ledwidge.

Nicholas Carolan & Danny Diamond, 1 February 2014

As usual, 2013 was a busy year for the recording staff of the Irish Traditional Music Archive who were at work at festivals and concerts, recitals and lectures throughout the country. Hundreds of hours of music, song and dance were captured on audio and video, and have been transferred to user-friendly formats, and catalogued, for access by present-day visitors to ITMA and for posterity.

The selection of audio recordings presented here from just some of the ITMA 2013 recording trips are a sampler of what is available to visitors. The recordings were made variously at the Inishowen Singers International Folk Song and Ballad Seminar in Donegal in March, at the Cruinniú na bhFliúit gathering in west Cork in April, at the Willie Clancy Summer School in west Clare in July, at the Frank Harte Festival in Dublin in September, at the William Kennedy Piping Festival in Armagh in November, and at the first-ever ITMA concert the same month in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

With thanks to the artists for permission to reproduce their performances, and to the organisers of the various events for their cooperation in facilitating ITMA’s recording activity.

Nicholas Carolan & Danny Diamond, 1 December 2013

The Northern Ireland actor, broadcaster, film maker, concert singer, travel writer and dialect collector Richard Hayward (1892–1964) was also a popular singer. He had a successful career recording traditional and popular Ulster songs on 78s from the 1930s into the 1950s, and later on vinyl discs. His recordings spanned the different English-language song traditions of the North, with a leaning towards the humorous, as well as comic sketches and recitations, but he was the leading singer in his time of Orange lyrics and ballads. These described and celebrated the activities of the Orange Order, a Protestant organisation founded in Co Armagh in 1795. A selection from Hayward’s more than 30 recorded Orange songs are presented here.

Hayward, born in Lancashire, was brought to Ireland at the age of two and was reared in Larne and Belfast. He took an early interest in Irish traditional songs and published a book of song texts Ulster Songs and Ballads of the Town and the Country in London in 1925, following this with two undated songbooks with music published in Glasgow: Ireland Calling and Orange Standard. He was also a player of the Irish harp and published The Story of the Irish Harp in Dublin in 1954.

On his recordings, Hayward was careful to negotiate the Orange and Green divide and to soften the more extreme songs, as can be seen from his very first 78, recorded in London for the Columbia Company in January 1929. This featured on one side a comic favourite ‘The Ould Orange Flute’ and on the other ‘The Bonny Bunch of Roses’, a Napoleonic ballad associated with Irish nationalism. As well as the playlist of Orange songs and his first 78 reproduced here from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive, there is also a copy of Hayward’s famous comic political sketch ‘Hands across the Border’, made in 1934 with the Dublin comedians Harry O’Donovan and Jimmy O’Dea.

With thanks to Paul Clements (author of Romancing Ireland: Richard Hayward 1892–1964, Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2014) and Bill Dean Myatt (author of The Scottish Vernacular Discography 1888−1960, Hailsham: City of London Phonograph & Gramophone Society, 2013).

Nicholas Carolan & Danny Diamond, 1 December 2014

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.

Four Irish EPs of music of oral tradition are reproduced below from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

EP discs – ‘extended play’ microgroove recordings playing at 45 rpm – were introduced in the early 1950s by the American company RCA Victor to compete with the earlier LPs of the rival Columbia Records. The discs typically had two tracks on each side and ran for some 12–15 minutes. Material from previously issued 78s were issued on EPs, and also new recordings. Because of the relative costs involved, LPs were sometimes issued in installments on EPS. The discs were also used to break new performers who might not justify for a record company the expense of an LP. These considerations obtained also in Ireland.

Four Irish EPs of music of oral tradition are reproduced below from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive. The singer, actor and writer Richard Hayward (1898–1964) of Belfast had recorded Ulster songs, many of the Orange tradition, on 78s from the 1930s, and was still well known in the microgroove era. Eileen Donaghy (1930–2008) of Coalisland, Co Tyrone, on the other hand only came to fame in the late 1950s. She was a popular singer who mixed occasional traditional songs into her repertory, but all of her best-known songs, whatever their classification, have entered oral tradition. Ceili bands, ensembles formed first in the late 1920s, were in their heyday in the 1950s. The Tulla Ceili Band, which began life in rural Co Clare in the mid-1940s, made its first 78s some ten years later. Fred Hanna’s Ceili Band of Portadown, Co Armagh, had an urban strict-tempo style and was influenced by similar Scottish ceili bands of the period.

With thanks to record donors Vincent Duffe, Mrs Walter Maguire,& John Paul McKenna.

Nicholas Carolan & Danny Diamond, 1 October 2012

Born on the Falls Road, Belfast, in 1948 and reared in an Irish-speaking family, Ciaran was a prolific and highly regarded poet, prose writer and translator. He was the first director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Queen’s University Belfast, 2004–2016, a member of Aosdána and a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. His literary legacy includes fourteen volumes of poetry, beginning with The New Estate in 1976; a variety of highly original prose works, including The Star Factory (1997) and Shamrock Tea (2001), which centred on his Belfast experiences and imaginings; and prize-winning translations from Irish, Italian and other languages which included An Táin and Dante’s Inferno. In recent years he has become increasingly the subject of international academic studies. A further volume of his poetry was published in 2019.

Irish traditional music also played a central part in Ciaran’s life and work. Enamoured of the music since the revival of the 1960s and a player of the flute and tin whistle, he joined with musician friends in Belfast folk clubs and country sessions, especially with his wife, the fiddle player Deirdre Shannon (‘the ideal space for traditional music is a small back room… where practitioners and listeners can see each others faces’). From 1975 to 1998 he was officer for the traditional arts with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. There he was responsible for such initiatives as an annual ‘Festival of Traditional Singing’ held in towns from Downpatrick to Portrush, a ‘You and Yours’ series of province-wide tours by groups of traditional singers and musicians, and a 1980s Ulster programme of archival field-recording. Arts Council publications produced on his watch included the traditional music ‘broadsheet’ Slow Air (1976–77) and sound recordings edited by Seán Corcoran: Here is a Health: Songs, Music and Stories of an Ulster Community (1986, collected by Corcoran), Harvest Home 1; Songs and Crack from West Tyrone (1991, collected by James Foley) and Harvest Home 2: It’s of My Rambles (1993, collected by Len Graham). With his professional approval the Irish Traditional Music Archive received its first financial grant from the Council in 1989, a funding relationship which has continued annually since. Traditional music was a frequent theme and source of inspiration in Ciaran’s poetry, and his reviews and articles on traditional music appeared over the decades in the Honest Ulsterman, Ulster Folk News, The Belfast Review and other periodicals; most recent are a series of reflections on Irish traditional music in The Journal of Music. But his most enduring traditional music publications are two unique books: the often-reprinted Pocket Guide to Irish Traditional Music (Belfast, 1986; Japanese edition, Tokyo, 1998), and Last Night’s Fun, (London, 1996 & 1997; New York, 1997; variously subtitled), his hallucinatory prose and poetry memoir of ecstatic contact with the music and musicians. He also served on the Board of ITMA.

WRITTEN BY Nicholas Carolan, 11 October 2019

John Nicholson of Belfast, last of the substantial ballad-sheet printers of the city, flourished from the late 1880s to the late 1910s. During these decades, he occupied the Cheapside Song House, premises at 24 or 26 Church Lane in the city, from which he also sold songbooks, some of them of his own printing.

Nicholson’s product was sold across Ulster, and especially in counties Down and Antrim. His core market was loyalist and orange but, as will be seen from the sheets reproduced below, he also to a degree catered for nationalist and green sentiment and published songs of general interest.

The Irish Traditional Music Archive has recently been able to purchase an unusual sheet of four uncut nationalist-sentiment Nicholson ballads, and this is presented here as the second of two uncut Nicholson ballad sheets in the ITMA collections. The first, also a purchase, is a sixteen-ballad sheet of loyalist sentiment. The songs on both uncut and undated sheets are also copied as individual items. The final four Nicholson ballad sheets here were donated to ITMA by the late Leslie Shepard. All items are also presented in PDF format for ease of enlargement and printing.

With thanks to Leslie Shepard, Jill Shepard Glenstrup, & Dr John Moulden, who has donated to ITMA a copy of his 2006 Ph.D. thesis The Printed Ballad in Ireland: A Guide to the Popular Printing of Songs in Ireland, 1760–1920.

Nicholas Carolan & Maeve Gebruers, 1 August 2013

A General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland, Arranged for the Piano Forte; Some of the Most Admired Melodies are Adapted for the Voice, to Poetry Chiefly Translated from the Original Irish Songs, by Thomas Campbell Esq. and Other Eminent Poets: to Which is Prefixed a Historical & Critical Dissertation on the Egyptian, British and Irish Harp, by Edward Bunting. Vol. 1st. Price £1.6.0. London, Printed & Sold for the Editor by Clementi & Compy. No. 26 Cheapside, and All Other Music Sellers in the United Kingdom.

In 1809, some twelve years after his first published volume of ‘ancient’ Irish music appeared, Edward Bunting, now in his mid-thirties and still living in Belfast, published a second similar volume harmonised for the piano, again in London. Most of its melodies had also been collected by him from the vanishing race of professional harpers, some of whom he had sought out across the north of Ireland in the years following the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792. Other melodies he had notated from Irish-language singers. Of the 77 melodies in this second collection, 13 are repeated from the 1797 collection.

A new departure in this volume is the inclusion of English-language verses, by a variety of writers, set to 20 of the melodies. Most are based on prose translations from the Irish. This innovation was an attempt by Bunting to emulate the recent 1808 successes of Thomas Moore in setting his original verses to traditional airs in his Irish Melodies series (Moore would go on to use a further 17 Bunting melodies from this 1809 collection). Not being an Irish speaker, Bunting employed agents to collect the Irish words of the songs with a view to publishing them, but in the event, for a variety of reasons, he did not do so. The brief historical notes on the Irish harp in his first volume are greatly expanded in this, with the inclusion of harp descriptions and of technical terms used by the harpers. Plates of illustrations are added, and the Irish harp is put into an international context of British harps and harps of ancient civilisations. The music was engraved by an R.T. Skarratt, and the volume was printed by a T. Davison, Whitefriars, London. In spite of the ‘Vol. 1’ inscription on the title page, no second volume appeared under this title. At the time of his death Bunting was working on a revised edition of the volume, but this was never completed.

This second Bunting publication was musically well received and has been influential, but it was not commercially successful. It is said that Bunting sold on the copyright to the firm of Clementi which had produced it, and which republished it in London in 1811 (and possibly in 1819). An 1836 reprint by the London firm of Willis & Co. has also been recorded. Later reprints were published in 1969, 1981 and 2002 by Walton’s Piano and Musical Instrument Galleries in Dublin, and in 2012 by the Linen Hall Library in Belfast. 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 XXVI–XXIX of the Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society (1932–39). The edition was reprinted in 1967 by the London firm of Wm. Dawson & Sons.

The Irish Traditional Music Archive facsimile copy presented here (along with its 77 related interactive music scores) is of a first edition once owned by the Scottish musician and composer, and editor of Irish music, Alfred Moffat (1863–1950). The caption on the harp frontispiece is unclear in this copy; it reads ‘Ancient Irish Harp, in the possession of Noah Dalway Esq./ Bellahill, near Carrickfergus./ London. Published Nov. 1809 by E. Bunting’.

Nicholas Carolan, Maeve Gebruers, Seán Caverly, Treasa Harkin & Jackie Small, 12 November 2015

[Amended December 2017]

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

Andy was born in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, but with his father’s employment, the family moved to different towns in England, before relocating to Belfast in 1957. In his junior years at school his ability in music had already been recognised with a school report recording at the age of 7, “Music – Good, a lovely voice”. A Christmas present of a mouth organ had relations commenting on his ability to play it, for as Andy himself said “There wasn’t a note of music in my family”. On to ‘big school’ and Andy, like many other teenagers, was influenced by the local music scene. He taught himself to play guitar and formed a band with several of his school friends. To quote Bill Morrison from his book Big Hand for the Band, “Dickson, A M, played a mighty impressive Flamenco tune on a Spanish guitar” and “an Echo Chamber that made his guitar-picking sound like Hank Marvin”.

After studying at Queen’s University, Belfast for a couple of years, Andy decided to take a gap year and headed to London. It wasn’t long before he was working as a session musician in various studios and busking the cinema queues. He also got involved in the London folk scene. The gap year became several years, and after travelling to Spain to learn more about Spanish music and culture he returned to London and took a job scheduling airline crews. It was during this time that he sustained a hand injury which severely curtailed his ability to play the guitar as he wished. He decided to return to Belfast to complete his degree.Before he returned, he got into conversation with a gentleman at a quay side, who remarked on his guitar case, and said that he had something that might interest him, went away and came back carrying what turned out to be a fiddle case. He handed it to Andy, said a few words and off he went. Andy had his first fiddle.

Now the 1970s, and back in Belfast, Andy was completing his degree in Social Anthropology at Queen’s and at the same time teaching himself to play the fiddle. His sources for tunes were many. He would spend hours in the university library pouring through old manuscripts, travelling the country to Fleadhanna and festivals, as well as attending local Belfast sessions in Pat’s Bar in Sailortown, the Old House in Albert Street off the Falls Road, and also sessions slightly further afield in Bangor. He quickly found a central place in Belfast’s growing folk and traditional music scene, which provided a cross-community haven for the open-minded, eccentric and creative in the divided city. During the 1970s traditional music in Belfast grew in popularity and the session scene expanded out to new venues including Tom Kelly’s in the Short Strand, The Rossa Club in West Belfast, and the Rotterdam Bar also in Sailortown, amongst others. This was the time that Andy began writing down the tunes that he had sourced and soon had several manuscript books filled. He didn’t have a tape recorder at that time and preferred to carry his ‘little black book’ and a pencil in his fiddle case. If there was a tune, or version of a tune that caught his attention, out would come the book and the tune would be notated, to be transferred later to the manuscript books.

Through the 1970s and into the 1980s Andy and many other Belfast musicians were going to sessions nearly every night of the week. Word of mouth soon had many visiting musicians coming to the sessions, from all parts of Ireland and further afield. Andy’s manuscript books were expanding rapidly. Traditional music was now being brought to a wider audience by way of concerts, festivals and folk clubs. During poet and musician Ciarán Carson’s tenure as Traditional Arts Officer with The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Andy was often employed as a driver on Arts Council musical tours. Through these travels as well as his own musical adventures, Andy developed deep connections with musical communities in Counties Fermanagh, Leitrim, Sligo, and Clare, which would come to be major influences on his music, and, in time, on his compositions.

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/