Historical Harp Society of Ireland - Festival of Early Irish Harp

Festival of Early Irish Harp 15-21 August 2018

We received a circular about a summer festival that our harp players might enjoy:-

The Historical Harp Society of Ireland says that they are, "delighted to announce this year’s Scoil na gClairseach—Festival of Early Irish Harp: the world’s premier festival dedicated to the early harp of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands and Islands. It takes place 15–21 August 2018 at Coláiste Pobail Osraí in Kilkenny, Ireland. We have a juicy line-up of concerts, workshops, lectures and masterclasses, which will shortly be available to see at www.irishharp.org"

Happy St Patrick's Day from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland!

The Whittaker Library has a micro, table-top exhibition (it's a small table) of Irish materials that might interest our readers on St Patrick's Day.

In particular, we have a copy of Thomas Moore's Irish melodies, which has already interested one of our opera students, who explained that the famous song, "The Minstrel Boy", is mentioned in the opera that the opera students are currently working on.  Many of Moore's songs were highly political at the time - don't be deceived into thinking that they're all just cute Georgian/Victorian parlour songs!
 
There's Irish drama to look at too.  The exhibition is only on this week, so don't miss it!  Also, visit our Facebook page for more pictures.

And the leprechaun?  Why, that's Lafferty the Library Leprechaun, to be sure!  (He's exhausted after his busy day ...)

National Identity in Irish Traditional Music - a Paper by Daithi Kearney

This might interest our students of Scottish traditional music.  Another Celtic nation, but similar threads will quite possibly come through!

"Seeing sounds of the past: Monuments to musicians in the Irish landscape"

by Daithi Kearney

A paper delivered at the IASPM Conference, Montreal, Canada

. 
Dr Kearney lectures at the School of Music and Theatre, University College Cork, Ireland.

Una Hunt Plays - The Wild Irish Girl and her Harp, Friday 25 July 2014

We've heard about an intriguing radio recital from Ireland.  It takes place this Friday evening, 25th July.

THE WILD IRISH GIRL AND HER HARP

… a portrait of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan

 

on The Lyric Feature

 

25 July 2014               RTÉ Lyric fm            7-8pm             96-99fm

 

A portrait of the extraordinary celebrity cult figure - Sydney Owenson, later Lady Morgan, who penned the once-famous novel - The Wild Irish Girl (1806). In addition to her writing, she also enjoyed a flourishing career as a drawing-room singer and performer on the Royal Portable Irish harp built by John Egan. Sydney Owenson styled herself on Glorvina, the harp-playing princess from her novel, thereby initiating a fashion for her own brand of pseudo-Celtic dress, and she also composed some quite influential songs, a fact that is no longer recognised.

 

Music on the programme includes specially recorded world-premiere recordings of Owenson’s Hibernian Melodies performed by Laura Murphy, mezzo soprano and Una Hunt, piano, along with harp airs played by Boston-based Nancy Hurrell on John Egan’s harps. Contributors include Nancy Hurrell, Claire Connolly (Professor of Modern English, University College Cork) and Julie Donovan (George Washington University, Washington D.C.). Engineering by Ben Rawlins.

 

Presented and produced by Una Hunt.

 

A Heritage Music Production for RTÉ Lyric fm. This programme is made with the support of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland's Sound and Vision Funding Scheme.

 

LISTEN BACK

The Wild Irish Girl can be heard live on the internet through the RTÉ lyric fm website and can be accessed at any time for a week after broadcast.  Just go to http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/features/ and click the 'LISTEN BACK' icon to hear the current feature. Thereafter, the programme is available on the Lyric fm Archive."

Old Irish Music - Edward Bunting's volumes at the British Library

We came across an article by Karen Loomis about Edward Bunting's own volumes of Irish music, annotated by him, and now in the British Library. Worth a look - here is the link to the article by Karen Loomis:-

• Edward Bunting’s Annotated Volumes of Irish Music: An Overlooked Treasure at the British Library / Karen Loomis 15 April, 2010
• British Library shelfmark - BL Add.41508 (Bunting's annotated copy of his first two volumes of Irish harp music)

Irish Music Collections Online (We're all Celts together)

This Irish piping link might be of interest to our Scottish music degree students.  The tunes are not restricted to pipe music, and you  never know when there might be overlap in repertoires!

http://www.pipers.ie/IMCO/

And the homepage  of Na Píobairí Uilleann - http://www.pipers.ie/

Irish Traditional Music Archive Advent Calendar

The other day, Whittaker left you a link to a Swedish archival music advent calendar.  Who says you can't have more than one, though?

Here's an Irish one from ITMA, the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

http://www.itma.ie/digitallibrary/score/christmas-collection

Whittaker Shares Useful Links for Performers

You can tell what our priorities are here!  We keep a Diigo note of useful links that we encounter in our work, and it's no suprise that the Scottish Music Centre and Irish Traditional Music Archive come top of the list this time.

Bibliographies are always a hot topic here, too. If you're a researcher, you'll already know how important it is to keep track of your resources.  Warwick University Library runs a Library Research Exchange, where we found this great page about annotated bibliographies, which we simply had to share with you.  (In a nutshell - a bibliography is essential.  Annotations bring untold added value - it's for your own benefit.)

Another research link that may be useful is the Biennial Music in Nineteenth Century Britain Conference.  It was in Cardiff this year, but watch this space for details of the 2015 Conference!

Music manuscripts from Ireland (pre-20th century) - RISM listing

Kilcormack Missal,Trinity College Dublin

'Whittaker' gladly shares with you this excellent news of improved bibliographic access to Irish music manuscripts.  Here's the communication from Dr Catherine Ferris:-

"First Phase of the RISM Ireland Database Launched

http://www.rism-ie.org

RISM Ireland is delighted to announce the launch of a new Irish-focused free-to-access database of pre-twentieth century musical materials held in repositories throughout the island of Ireland. This new resource highlights the contents of Ireland’s collections in a national context. In addition, records from the RISM Ireland catalogue are shared with the RISM Zentralredaktion in Frankfurt, which publishes the collective work of RISM groups in thirty-five countries throughout the world, thereby placing the Irish sources in a worldwide context.

The work of RISM Ireland is project-based, focusing on diverse areas of Irish musical life and individual institutional holdings. This launch highlights the first major research project to be published in the database: The Mercer’s Hospital Music Collection. This project, undertaken in collaboration with RISM Ireland and RISM UK, resulted from a DIT Conservatory of Music & Drama research scholarship. The scholarship to carry out doctoral research on the collection was awarded to Tríona O’Hanlon and supervised by Dr Kerry Houston.

For further information, see the IAML (UK & Irl) February 2013 Newsletter or contact Dr Catherine Ferris."

British and Irish trad music online (the Peter Kennedy collection)

 British Library Sounds

Read about some of the unique, historic recordings collected by song-collector Peter Kennedy - they're now accessible online through the British Library.

Music in the British Library Blog - blogpost on the Peter Kennedy collection.

"28 January 2013

British and Irish traditional music online

150 hours of audio and almost 100 photographs from the Peter Kennedy Collection have been made available this week via the British Library Sounds website..."

Celebrating our Irish Connections

Tomorrow, Tuesday 22nd January, the Whittaker Library is hosting an event by Dr Margaret Bennett and Kath Hardie, with extra input by two of our Honours Year Scottish Music students, Robyn Stapelton and Ainsley Hamilton.

It's at 5 pm in the Whittaker Library, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  Come along!

• More on Margaret's website.
• Royal Conservatoire of Scotland website

All Celts Together

We've been looking at Ireland's The Gathering website.  If you have Irish ancestry or connections, you can check an interactive map to see where events are taking place.

Why not try it out for yourself?  (Then get out the bodran, fiddle, flute or harp, and head for the Emerald Isle during 2013 ...)

• http://www.thegatheringireland.com/
• Twitter @GatheringIRL

Guide to playing the Irish flute

This link has just been tweeted to Whittaker, and we had to share it with you.  It's on TradConnect, and it's a Guide to Irish Flute.  Enjoy!  (We Celts have to stick together.)

TradConnect is a website 'connecting traditional Irish musicians across the world'.   You might find it interesting, so here's the homepage - http://tradconnect.com/

The Irish Composers' Collective, Ireland, Ireland

The Irish Composers' Coll

Visit their Soundcloud page!

How to join a traditional Irish Music Session (by Felicity)

A blogpost by a professional Irish writer who lives in Bermondsey ... read Felicity's blog here.

Mary Paul's music book - Irish music-making in 1802

A music-lover called Mary Paul

We know very little about Mary Paul, but we do have her bound collection of music.  Engraved simply, Mary Paul, 1802, it's possible that this was Mary's maiden name, for there is a pencilled 'Mary A. Hogg' on the endpaper inside.

All we know - Mary's name and a date

Mary wrote an index for her book - it's at the front.  There's an assortment of vocal pieces, popular pieces from contemporary operas, and piano music; Mary numbered every page - all 447 of them.  The music seems mostly to have been published in contemporary Dublin, by the likes of Hime, Rhames, William Power, McDonnell's, Edmund Lee, John Lee, and Gough.

One of Mary's collection

There are Scottish pieces, too.  Like, 'My Ain Kind Dearie: a favorite Scotch Air, with Variations composed by D. Corri. (Domenico Corri was a famous singer and Scottish music arranger at the time.)  Or 'Lewie Gordon: a celebrated new rondo for the forte piano or harpsichord' - published in Dublin by Anne Lee.  No composer for that one.

And an intriguing item is a piano sonata, probably by Frantisek Kotzwara, called 'The Battle of Prague', complete with 'The Bugle call for the cavalry', and 'Flying bullets'.  (It was a popular piece with Jane Austen, apparently - see Penelope Cave's recent recital at St Andrews, of Very Pretty Tunes: Repertoire from the Austen Family Collection.)

Irish Classical Music Pioneers

Irish Classical Music Pioneers

(http://basilwalsh.wordpress.com/)

This Wordpress blog by author Basil Walsh is jam-packed full of useful information about Irish classical music history - including John Stevenson, who was Thomas Moore's arranger. (Whatever Moore achieved with his evocative lyrics, he would not have got the same widespread acclaim without Stevenson's settings.)


Info about Walsh himself:-

About: Basil Walsh
http://www.britishandirishworld.com/
Published Author--19th century opera biographies of Irish born classical musicians and performers. Contributor to The Opera Quarterly, OPERA magazine, Dictionary of Irish Biography, Encyclopedia of Ireland and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History, History Ireland Magazine, Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland, GROVE music publications etc.