Gatherings of Harpers

...Their distinctive art was in "modulation not slow and solemn, as in the instruments of Britain to which we are accustomed, but the sounds are rapid and precipitate, yet at the same time sweet and pleasing...

...And to show me this he plays Una Ban on the little organ, singing the words in Irish...

...And I remember that there is a musician in Belfast who could make what is in these manuscripts living for me...

...It is a song out of a world in which a man could be lonely and proud to the last desperate degree...

...Like the harpers of the eighteenth century he has only a vestige of sight...

...So I start off to visit Gilbert Hardebeck...

...he collected other airs...

...Not even in Dublin had I seen such strings of small shops—shops selling cabbages, selling newspapers, selling sugar-sticks, selling sausages, selling cabbages with carrots added to them, selling cabbages with potatoes, selling newspapers with marbles and tops, selling stationery with pins and needles—shops in which one paid for purchases with coppers—and never had I seen before such a monotony of them...

...Here was the democratic state, late product of the European mind, being welcomed, and here was an art in which the national culture had shown itself most appealingly, being honored by people who were very conscious of its decline...

...out of the whole of Ireland only ten harpers could be got together for this festival, and the professors who were really accomplished amongst them were very old men...

...It is wonderful how in such precipitate rapidity of the fingers, the musical proportions are preserved, and, by their art, faultless throughout...

...I left that learned musician in his little rooms and went out into the street...

...His sword is in his sheath...

...There were bands and speeches at this gathering...

...The most distinctive of Samuel Ferguson's poems were written to go with some of these melodies—The Coolin, Paisteen Finn, Cean Duv Deelish, and Cashel of Munster...

...He played with long crooked nails and in his performance the tickling of the small wires under the deep tones of the bass was peculiarly thrilling...

...It loses this essential too when words in any other language except Irish are set to it...

...One was to rejoice over the fall of the Bastile and to congratulate the French people on the Declaration of the Rights of Man...

...There were eight men and one woman all either blind or lame," says a spritely letter of the day, "and all old but two men...

...Figure to yourself this group, indifferently dressed, sitting on a stage erected for them in one end of the Exchange Ball Room, and the ladies and gentlemen of the first fashion in Belfast and its vicinity looking on and listening attentively, and you will have some idea of how they looked...

...These words I had once heard sung to one of the noble and spirited laments that the musician had played for me...

...harp-playing had come to its decline...

...Michael MacDonnell...

...He spoke of the harpers of the eighteenth century as if he had gone with Arthur O'Neill from one great house to another, or had talked with Denis Hempson in his cottage, the harper lying in bed with his harp under the bedclothes...

...They waited to tune their harps...

...yet they always begin in the soft mood and end in the same, that all may be perfected in sweetness of delicious sounds...

...How should I know anything of what these melodies meant if I had not witnessed the passion of this man, his indignation at the public indifference to this music, and the misconceptions about it that are held by those who are not indifferent to it...

...The music that had been made for the harp was falling into disuse then...

...At last I came to a little shop in which there were cages and birds for sale...

...But how can a music that was made to be played upon harps and to go with "Celtic syllables like the rattling of warchariots" be brought back into the world...

...See where it lies, beside his laurel wreath...

...A man of great bulk, his eyes were covered by dark blue glasses...

...And I found him...

...Only those expanding words can accompany it...

...The Bastile had fallen, the Rights of Man had been proclaimed, and in a few years a young man who attended both demonstrations, Theobald Wolfe Tone, would sail for France to organize a Franco-Irish army that might help in the creation of an Irish Republic based on the rights that had just been proclaimed...

...I look over the collection of Bunting's manuscripts in the Queen's University, the manuscripts that belonged to Bunting's grandchildren, and which have been presented to the University by Mrs...

...He was the only one who played the very old, the aboriginal music of the country, and this he did in a style of such finished excellence as persuaded the editor that the praises of the old Irish harp in Cambrensis, Fuller and others, instead of being . . . ill-considered and indiscriminate, were in reality no more than a just tribute to that admirable instrument and its then professors...

...They enter on, and again leave their modulations with so much subtlety, and the twinklings of the small strings sport with so much freedom under the deep notes of the bass, delight with so much delicacy and soothe so softly that the excellency of their art seems to lie in concealing it...

...But the instrument he used to illustrate what he said about Irish music was the German organ that was in the room...

...There was a sign there that said "Linnets are cheap today" and somehow I felt that I had come near to where the musician lived...

...He wrote down the airs the harpers possessed...

...Meanwhile Denis Hempson, "who realized the antique picture drawn by Cambrensis," had begun to play...

...A song came to my mind: "Where is he now...

...Out of the sixteen airs that Thomas Moore wrote words for in his first collection of Irish melodies, eleven are from the collection that Edward Bunting had made...

...Arranged for the piano or even for the violin Irish music loses what is essential in it...

...A harp hung on the wall of the room in which he received his pupils...

...For, by one of those coincidences that history sometimes provides, the secular and unsecular elements in Irish nationality were manifesting themselves in the same place and at the same time...

...I had the privilege of being entertained by this scholarly musician in rooms over one of these shops...

...Geraldus Cambrensis in the thirteenth century wrote of the predecessors of these harpers as having "skill beyond comparison superior to that of any nation I have seen...

...The new Irish poetry was to have its mold in the music that Bunting obtained from the harpers who came to this festival in Belfast...

...And so this gathering of the harpers in Belfast is at the beginning of Irish poetry in English...

...With the passing of the art of the harper Irish music became slow, losing that precipitancy that in earlier centuries was its most noted characteristic...

...In the Municipal Art Collection there is the bust of the man who initiated this gathering of harpers, Dr...

...Those in the other gathering waited for the bands and speeches to reach their close...

...But the man who made the gathering of service to the generations that followed was Edward Bunting...

...The year of these meetings was 1792...

...Irish music was made for the harp and cannot be rendered on any other instrument—only when you have heard it on the harp have you heard an Irish melody, he says, speaking not like one who is making an abstract statement, but like one who has passionate understanding of this unique music...

...Gilbert Hardebeck shows me the effects of the slow-down of the music—the loss of buoyancy...

...I had written that Belfast is a city of workmen, but as I go in search of the street in which the musician lives I am made willing to believe that Belfast is a city of small shopkeepers...

...Helmet and plume hang idle on the wall, Hushed is his harp, and desolate his hall...

...Milligan Fox...

...And although he did not take the harp in his hands he made me understand how incomparable was the art these men possessed...

...he devoted his long life to the publication of the music that he went to such labor to discover and record...

...The best performers got ten guineas and the worst two and the rest accordingly...

...the definite English words make the music chop and change...

...A phonograph was reiterating something that had once been a tune, and a card in a window showed an announcement of a radio concert that evening...

...In the midst of their complicated modulations and most intricate arrangement of notes, by a rapidity so sweet, a regularity so irregular, a concord so discordant, the melody is rendered harmonious and perfect whether the chords of the diatessaron (the fourth) or diapente (the fifth) are struck together...