DICTIONARY OF MUSIC - El Atril

508 IRISH MUSIC IRISH MUSIC
struggling at this time against the English
power. When tlie wars of Elizabeth, Cromwell,
and William III. ceased, the distracted country
had peace for a while. Soon afterwards the
Hanoverian Succession was settled, and foreign
musicians visited Ireland, and remaining there,
inti'oduced the music of other countries ; the
nobility and gentry too, abandoning their clannish
customs, began to conform to the English
model ; and the Irish melodies went out of
fashion for a time.
Some of the celebrated harpers of the 16th
and 17th centuries were Rory Dall O'Cahan
(whom Sir W. Scott makes the teacher of Aunot
Lyle) ; John and Harry Scott ; Miles O'Reilly
(born 1635) ; Thomas and William O'Conellon
(1640) ; Cornelius Lyons ; O'Carolan (1670) ;
Denis Hempison (1695), who in 1745, %vhen
fifty years old, went to Scotland and played
before Charles Edward ; Charles Byrne (1712)
Dominic Mongan (1715) ; Daniel Black (1715)
Echlin Kane (1720), a pupil of Lyons, before
named— Kane, who travelled abroad, also played
for the Pretender, and was much caressed by
the expatriated Irish in Spain and France ;
Thaddeus Elliot (1725) ; Owen Keenan (1725);
Arthur 0'Neill(1734) ; Charles Fanning(1736)
and James Duncan, who having adopted the
profession of a harper in order to obtain funds
to carry on a law-suit in defence of his patrimony,
was successful, and died in 1800, in the
enjoyment of a handsome competence.
Among efforts to arrest the decay of the
Irish Harp School may be mentioned the ' Contentions
of Bards ' held at Brnree, co. Limerick,
1730-50, under the presidency of the Rev.
Charles Bunworth, himself a performer of merit
a meeting of harpers at Granard, oo. Longford,
organised by an Irish gentleman, James Dungan
of Copenhagen, in 1781, and carried on till
1786 ; and the assemblage of harpers at Belfast,
July 11-13, 1792, when the promoters engaged
the subsequently well-known collector, Edw.
Bunting, to write down the music as performed.
From this arose Bunting's three volumes of
accurate
drawings, biographical notices, and some
hundred airs have been left on record by Bunting,
to whom indeed the subject owes whatever
elucidation it has received. Ten performers
from different parts of Ireland attended the
meeting of 1792, and their instruments, tuning,
and use of a copious Irish musical vocabulary,
agreed in a remarkable manner. The compass
of the hai-ps was from C to d!" . Their scale was
sometimes C, but mostly that of G, Each string,
each grace, each feature had a name peculiar to
it. It was proved that the old harpers had
played with their nails, not the fleshy ti]! of
the lingers. They used other scales besides those
above, but agreed that G major was the most
Irish music, dated 1796, 1809, and 1840 :
ancient: in this lies ' The
vin.) :—
' Coolin (temp. Henry
One of the most striking of the Irish airs is
that called 'Colleen dims,' etc., to which
Moore's lines, 'The valley lay smiling,' are
adapted ; it lies on a scale from A to A, but
with semitones between 2-3 and 6-7 (i.e. the
ecclesia-stical Dorian mode) as follo\\'s :
It was of course to be expected that singers,
pipers, whistlers, or violinists, would not always
adhere to the fixed semitones of a harp scale :
hence this air is sometimes corrup>ted, and its
pathetic beauty impaired by tlie introduction
of GS.
An example of the jEolian mode, as scale
P
E to E, semitones between 2-3 and 5-6, is found
in the fine Irish air, ' Remember the glories of
'
Brian the Brave 1
Here again, in careless performance, Dj may
have been useil instead of D:, once or t'wice.
Very plaintive airs are found in the fourth
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