Irish Melodies

“ Indeed, if Ireland had not her beautiful melodies, to suggest the weaving of lyric verse, and to give it some promise of immortality, we should not probably have had so much Irish reminiscence from Moore. It is, in fact, by a sort of poetic licence, that he allows himself, in some of his songs, to sing with an air of heroism or pathos, of those ancient men and things, in which he himself, as may be gathered from the pages of his History of Ireland, and from other places, had a very slender historical faith. But, after all, the Melodies are beautiful things, and deserve the fame they have won. ”

“ The poems combined with the pictorial designs to conjure up for me a dream picture of the Ireland of old. I had not then actually heard the original tunes, but had sung these Irish Melodies to myself to the accompaniment of the harps in the pictures. I longed to hear the real tunes, to learn them, and sing them to Akshay Babu. Some longings unfortunately do get fulfilled in this life,193 and die in the process. When I went to England I did hear some of the Irish Melodies sung, and learnt them too, but that put an end to my keenness to learn more. ”

“ The minstrelsy of the Irish harper has held sway and been cherished through all the ages by the Irish people, whose temperament may have been affected, or else has been most touchingly expressed, by its strange and mystic cadences. The sweet pathos of these ancient melodies has given tone and inspiration to most of the Irish songs, markedly to those of the sweet singer Moore, whose music has installed in affectionate memory,
"The harp that once through Tara's halls The soul of music shed." ”

“ Bunting, an excellent authority, thought the emphatic presence of the submediant, or sixth of the scale, a never-failing test of an Irish air; but this note is emphatic in the Scottish air 'Auld lang syne,' and in many others which might be cited. An anonymous writer in a Dublin periodical, 'The Examiner,' Aug. 1816, seems to have remarked an interesting point of agreement in the structure of Irish melodies: 'They are formed,' says the writer, 'of 4 strains of equal length: the first soft, pathetic, and subdued; the second ascending in the scale, becomes more bold, energetic, and impassioned ”

“ Nor is there a single simile in the beautiful little song which, in spite of its brevity, has for Ireland all the significance of a national epic—the simple song of the lovely young girl who, though adorned with precious jewels and with a beauty still more alluring, went without fear from one end of Ireland to the other, knowing that Erin's sons, "though they love woman and golden store," love honour and virtue more. ("Rich and rare were the gems she wore.") Of the man who wrote such a song Byron might safely assert: "Moore's Irish Melodies will go down to posterity with their music ”

“ In the middle of the seventh century Gertrude (daughter of Pepin, Mayor of the Palace) when abbess of Niville in Belgium engaged Foillan and Ultan brothers of St. Fursey to instruct her nuns in Psalmody. [427] It has been asserted that Gregorian chant coloured much of the music of Ireland from the fifth to the eighth century, but Gregorian chant dates only from 593 A.D. and, as Flood pointed out, both the psalmody and the hymnody of the Irish were distinctly Celtic in the first half of the seventh century and were mainly adaptations of the old pre-Christian melodies. ”

“ The tune may be older, though this is not at all certain: it is at all events a very beautiful and characteristic Irish melody. We give it in both its forms, as it is a good example of the way in which Moore, with all his taste, often destroyed the peculiar character of the melodies he adapted. ”

“ Special airs and songs were used during working time by smiths, by weavers, and by boatmen. There were, besides, hymn-tunes; and young people had simple airs for all sorts of games and sports. In most cases words suitable to the several occasions were sung with lullabies, laments, and occupation-tunes. Examples of all the preceding classes of melodies will be found in the collections of Irish airs by Bunting, Petrie, and Joyce. ”

“ Ireland, whose head is ever turned over her shoulder, looking to the past, has, in her folk song, at least, reason and justification for her preoccupation with what has been in her music, rather than with what is, or is to come. It is difficult to reconcile the eternal beauty of traditional Irish melody with the lack of musical interest and feeling that distinguishes the mass of modern Irish life. ”

“ The harp strings quiver for the harp-player alone, and he who can utter his passion through the violin is silent before an unfamiliar instrument. That is why the Irish have rarely been deeply stirred by English literature, though it is one of the great literatures of the world. Our history was different and the evolutionary product was a peculiarity of character, and the strings of our being vibrate most in ecstasy when the music evokes ancestral moods or embodies emotions akin to these. I am not going to argue the comparative worth of the Gaelic and English tradition. ”

“ They sing themselves, as all true songs should do. And so while many bulky volumes of verse, which have cost their authors years of toil, have gone down into the land of forgetfulness, these ballads, by virtue of their simplicity and truth, have lived and will continue to live for generations yet unborn. For "song passeth not away." Such ballads go straight to the heart, not only of the Irish people, but of humanity at large. There are no high-flown metaphors, they tell of homely joys and sorrows, "simple annals of the poor." ”

“ A thousand times the dream of short slumbers gives her to my arms as I last beheld her. A thousand times I am awakened from a heavy unrefreshing sleep by the fancied sound of her harp and voice. There was one old Irish air she used to sing like an angel, and in the idiom of her national music sighed out certain passages with a heart-breaking thrill, that used to rend my very soul! Well, this song I cannot send from my memory; it breathes around me, it dies upon my ear, and in the weakness of emotion I weep—weep like a child. ”

“ This is to my mind perhaps the sweetest creation of all Irish literature, the real glory of the modern Irish nation, and of the Scottish Highlands, this is the truest note of the enchanting Celtic siren, and he who has once heard it and remains deaf to its charm can have little heart for song or soul for music. The Gaelic poetry of the last two centuries both in Ireland and in the Highlands is probably the most sensuous attempt to convey music in words, ever made by man. ”

“ It is no wonder, then, that the domestic feelings of the Irish should be so singularly affectionate and strong, when we consider that they have been, in spite of every obstruction, kept under the softening influence of music and poetry. This music and poetry, too, essentially their own—and whether streaming of a summer through their still glens, or poured forth at the winter hearth, still, by its soft and melancholy spirit, stirring up a thousand tender associations that must necessarily touch and improve the heart. ”

“ Music and dancing being in fact as dependent the one on the other as cause and effect, it requires little argument to prove that the Irish, who are so sensitively alive to the one, should in a very high degree excel at the other; and accordingly it is so.
Nobody, unless one who has seen and also felt it, can conceive the incredible, nay, the inexplicable exhilaration of the heart, which a dance communicates to the peasantry of Ireland. ”

“ This gift of singing with such sweetness and power the old sacred songs and airs of Ireland, was not the only one for which she was remarkable. Perhaps there never lived a human being capable of giving the Irish cry, or Keene, with such exquisite effect, or of pouring into its wild notes a spirit of such irresistible pathos and sorrow. ”

“ This is probably due in great measure to the fact that most of the immigrant Irish brought with them the rich, rare brogue of their fatherland, and the others the cultivated voice of the educated Irishman, both full of music and “sweet as the dying note of a broken harp string”—a music, whose soft, pervasive tones have added an indescribable charm to the spoken word that the stern hills of New England rarely knew, but which in time they have felt the touch of. ”

“ Yet Banim, and Griffin, and Furlong, Lover and Ferguson, Drennan and Callanan, have written ballads and songs as true to Ireland as ever MacNeill's or Conyngham's were to Scotland; and firmly do we hope to see with every second lad in Ireland a volume of honest, noble, Irish ballads, as well thumbed as a Lowland Burns or a French Beranger, and sweetly shall yet come to us from every milking-field and harvest-home songs not too proudly joined to the sweetest music in the world. ”

“ It is absolutely impossible to convey the lusciousness of sound, richness of rhythm, and perfection of harmony, in another language. Scores upon scores of new and brilliant metres made their appearance, and the common Irish of the four provinces deprived of almost everything else, clung all the closer to the Muse. ”

“ The little tarn at the foot of the lowest crags was black and still, waiting for the first star-glimpse, and from its marge came the wild notes of a harp fitfully swelling and waning; and then arose the still wilder and more melancholy tones of a man's voice chanting what seemed like a weird dirge to the fading twilight, and the language was the Irish Celtic—that language every song of which sounds like a dirge sung over its own death:—
Why art thou gone from us, White Dove of the Irish
woods?
Why art thou gone who made all the leaves tremulous with
the low voice of love? ”

“ And the language brought with it old ideas, old values, old traditions. There is in the very sound of Irish music a quality which wipes out at once the whole of the nineteenth century and brings one face to face with the days when Ireland had an individuality and a proud civilisation: the roots of the language are away back in the very golden age of Irish civilisation; [Pg 11] and the enthusiast who began with the language has been irresistibly impelled to a quest which embraces many things besides, industries, games, government—everything which concerns a Nation. ”

“ During these early years of the century, my sister and I, with a solid backing from our various relations, instituted a choral class in the village of Castle Townshend. It flourished for several years; we discovered no phenomenal genius, but we did undoubtedly find a great deal of genuine musical feeling. It is worth mentioning that, in our experience, the gift of untrained Irish singers is rhythm. ”

“ They were the first to employ harmony and counterpoint; they had quite an array of bards and poets; they employed blank verse, elegiac rhymes, consonant, assonant, inverse, burthen, dissyllabic, trisyllabic, and quadrisyllabic rhymes, not to say anything of the caoines, laments, elegies, metrical romances, etc.; they had a world-famed school of harpers, and finally they diffused musical knowledge over Europe.”
ART:
A lengthy discussion of the subject of Irish art lies outside the scope of our present study. ”

“ The lyrics, as lyrics should, reflect no other spirit than the poet's own. The lays are somewhat strict in form: they are in a brisk narrative style, with a swinging rhythm and plenty of vigour. The songs, depending on varying sense impressions and fluctuating emotion, are more irregular as to form and, at the same time, stronger in their appeal to human sympathy. It is in them [Pg 174] that the poet is able to express the passionate love of country which, superimposed on a deep sense of Ireland's melancholy history and an intense longing for freedom, is the birthright of so many Irish poets. ”

“ We, in England, have little enough to point to in this way; in a sense there is nothing peculiarly individual in our music as a whole. But with the old melodies of Ireland, that ever seem to tremble between a tear and a smile, and in the quaint pathos of Scotland's airs, and the well-defined beauty of typical Welsh songs, we recognise the true speech of the heart and the outpouring of the natural man. ”

“ We were much pleased with the manner in which the Irish airs are introduced, the simple but beautiful melody of which has lost nothing by being transplanted into a foreign soil; a commendation which we have not at all times had it in our power to bestow upon some other foreign composers, under whose hands the originality of national song has been sacrificed by too studied and artificial accompaniments. ”

“ Music constituted an important element in Irish culture both in pagan and in Christian times. Hectateus, the great geographer quoted by Diodorus, is the first who mentions the name Celt and he describes the Celts of Ireland as singing songs in praise of Apollo and playing melodiously on the harp (c. 500 B.C.) . [415] Native Irish literature abounds in reference to music and musicians who were always spoken of in terms of the highest respect. Everywhere through these ancient records we find evidence that the Irish people both high and low were passionately fond of music. ”

“ It is through them alone that the voice of the Irish people of their day can be heard. All other forms of the expression of the oppressed race have perished. In the music and poetry of Ireland is made manifest, so that the dullest ear cannot mistake it, the sorrow of a nation in bondage, tinging all mirth, all hope, and all love with an indefinable cadence of melancholy as plainly as in the real outbursts of lamentation and despairing cries of woe. ”