Bunting's Favourite Harper: Music of Dennis O'Hampsay

In this session we will begin exploring the first half of ‘Madame Keil’ by Turlough Carolan, the famous Irish harper whose life (1670–1738) overlapped with O’Hampsay’s. We will work from Bunting’s first draft of O’Hampsay’s performance of this song air, which incorporates fascinating evidence of how both the old harpers’ hands functioned, thereby likely also giving us insight into Carolan’s elusive performance idiom. This piece is the ‘lost’ version of Eleanor Plunkett, the famous Carolan melody that lacks its second half in modern settings. We will get as close as we now can to Carolan, through O’Hampsay, learning the first half of this evocative song air, fleshing it out into a more complete, plausibly historical setting.

[Siobhán Armstrong]

PART 1:  Each harpist can perform parts (don’t be shy, post-beginner harpists; I welcome any amount of participation!) or all of  the first half of ‘Madam Keil’, giving us a chance to listen to each other, and to learn from each other’s technical or musical issues and difficulties. We will continue to discuss fingerings, string dampings, ornaments, musical phrasing and anything else that helps you to become more confident in your playing of the composition.

PART 2:  It is often assumed that Irish harpers’ performance idiom was lost when the tradition collapsed in the early 19th century – that only the melodies of their compositions survive but, happily, this is not the case. In an illustrated presentation, I will share with you my discoveries about O’Hampsay’s melodic accompaniment idiom made during my PhD research into the playing style of the old Irish harpers, pre 1800. It turned out not to be the continuous bass lines / added chords / harmonies familiar to us now: these are of European art-music origin. Bunting’s O’Hampsay transcriptions from the 1790s point the way to a ‘new’ (actually very old!) way of fleshing out Irish harp music that is totally accessible, easy-to-reproduce, and much more user-friendly than you might be used to.

[Siobhán Armstrong]

In this session we will begin to explore, and learn to play, the second half of ‘Madame Keil’.

[Siobhán Armstrong]

PART 1:  Each harpist can perform parts or all of  the second half of ‘Madam Keil’, giving us a chance to listen to each other, and to learn from each other’s technical or musical issues and difficulties. We will continue to discuss fingerings, string dampings, ornaments, musical phrasing and anything else that helps you to become more confident in your playing of the composition.

PART 2:  Dr Karen Loomis will help us to situate the music being explored in this course, with a look at Dennis O’Hampsay’s life – including her intriguing recent work to establish the plausibility (or otherwise) that he lived in three centuries – and a look at his surviving instrument, the ‘Downhill’ harp.

[Siobhán Armstrong, Karen Loomis]

Taking  ‘Codladh an Óigfhir’ (The Young Man’s Dream) as our starting point, we will explore this beautiful song air transcribed by Edward Bunting from the playing of O’Hampsay. We will compare Bunting’s manuscript first draft with his published settings in his 1796/7 and 1840 publications, and discover related forms of the melody preserved by Petrie, Fraser and others, including variants associated with such iconic songs as ‘The Derry Air / Danny Boy’ and, more distantly, Thomas Moore’s ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’

We will also look at Irish-language lyrics transcribed by Bunting’s song-lyric collector, Patrick Lynch, that can be sung to the melody, considering the aisling tradition to which the song belongs. Through singing, listening and playing, we will explore what gives the melody its particularly Irish character: its mode, shape, contour and form, together with the ornaments Bunting recorded from the playing of the harper.

[James Ruff]

Returning to ‘Codladh an Óigfhir,’ we will begin by finding comfortable fingerings and explore ways of learning the melody by ear, gradually incorporating its characteristic ornamentation.

We will then experiment with ways of realising the tune on the wire-strung cláirseach that are both musically convincing and appropriate to each player’s technical level. If you play a different kind of harp we can also work on fingerings (and dampings?) more suitable for your harp. Drawing upon features found in other O’Hampsey repertory, we will explore melodic accompaniment possibilities including slow-moving single-, two-, three-note and bigger shapes; octave mirroring of descending melodic shapes, and other textures. Rather than seeking a single ‘correct’ setting, we will use historical clues to create individual settings that respond to the haunting character of both the melody and its text.
Players at an early stage are warmly welcome: the emphasis will be on discovering how much expressive, historically informed music can be made from relatively simple materials.

[James Ruff]