DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

Played by Mark Harmer on Celtic harp.

He says:

Turlough O’Carolan was an Irish harpist who lived in the mid-1600s and wrote pieces for the people he met and stayed with - playing music in exchange for hospitality. Tradition has it that the harp was played last thing at night, before people went to bed.

The building I’m playing it in was a bakery built around 1790, serving the local houses. The bread oven is in the stone wall behind me, and the building has a new floor and triple-glazing on the windows. It’s a great mixture of old and new and a great place to play this music.

Appropriately, I recorded this piece very late one night, and just went with the first take so the playing has the odd rough bits. I like to think that’s authentic - apparently Carolan never played the same way twice. Bet he never had as much trouble as I did finding DivX codecs, either!

Only the melodies survive, so I’ve done this arrangement myself and I’m playing it here on a Pilgrim gut-strung harp. The arrangement and video is my copyright. You are welcome to learn and play the arrangement if you like it - but please credit me if you play it in public.

Turlough O’Carolan [Toirdhealbhach O’Cearbhallain] (1670 - March 25, 1738) was a blind, itinerant Irish harper and composer whose great fame is due to his gifts for composition and verse. He is considered by many to be Ireland’s national composer and the last of the Irish bards. However, harpers in the old Irish tradition were still living as late as 1792, as one, Dennis Hempson, showed up at the Belfast Harp Festival, and O’Carolan’s own compositions already showed influence from the style of continental classical music.

O’Carolan was born near Nobber, County Meath, and moved with his family to Ballyfarnan, County Roscommon, at the age of fourteen, where his father took a job with the MacDermot Roe family. Mrs. MacDermot gave him an education, and he showed talent in poetry. Blinded by smallpox at eighteen, O’Carolan was taught the harp for three years. Then, being given a horse and a guide, he set out to travel Ireland and compose songs for patrons. For almost fifty years, O’Carolan journeyed from one end of the country to the other, composing and performing his tunes.

O’Carolan is buried in the village of Keadue, County Roscommon, where the annual O’Carolan Harp Festival and Summer School commemorates his life and work.