Irish music

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ancient institution of story-telling held its ground both in Ireland and Scotland down to a period within living memory.
CHAPTER XI. HOW THE ANCIENT IRISH EXCELLED IN MUSIC.
From the very earliest ages Irish musicians were celebrated for their skill, not only in their own country but all over Europe. Our native literature, whether referring to pagan or Christian [Pg 83] times, is full of references to music and to skilful musicians, who are always spoken of in terms of the utmost respect. ”

“ The people of Ireland have a remarkable fondness for music, and Moore was a musician by nature. Of music he knew nothing as a science, but he felt its soul. The heavy harmonies of Germany—in which the chief object is to show the toil of the performer and the patience of his auditory, to press discords into the service, and to crush the very sense of pleasure—would not have been endured by the Irish, who, like all lovers of the genuine art, prefer songs to musical problems, and to be bewitched rather than be bewildered. ”

“ A slight inequality in a village field in Meath still after a hundred and fifty years recalls to Irish peasants the site of the house where he was born, and at his death English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic, gathered in an encampment of tents to do honour to his name. The magic of Irish music seems even to have stirred in the landlords' parliament some dim sense of a national boast. An English nobleman coming to the parliament with a Welsh harper claimed that in all Ireland no such music could be heard. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In very early times Irish professors of music were as eagerly sought after on the Continent as those of literature and general learning, so that they were sometimes placed at the head of great music-schools. At a later time it was quite common among the Welsh bards to come over to Ireland to receive instruction from the Irish harpers. In the eleventh century one of the Welsh kings, Griffith ap Conan, brought over to Wales a number of skilled Irish musicians, who, in conference with the native Welsh bards, carried out some great improvements in Welsh music. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And now, reader, if these kaleidoscope glimpses we have given you have made you doubt between a summer in Ireland and one abroad, give your country "the benefit of the doubt," as the lawyers say, and boat on our lake or dive into our glens and ruins, wonder at the basalt coast of Antrim, and soften your heart between the banks of the Blackwater.
IRISH MUSIC AND POETRY.
No enemy speaks slightingly of Irish Music, and no friend need fear to boast of it. It is without a rival. ”

“ Of the passionate attachment of the Irish for music, little need be said, as this is one of the national characteristics which has been at all times most strongly marked, and is still most widely appreciated, the harp being universally held as a national emblem of Ireland. Even in the prechristian period that we are here reviewing, music was an institution and a power in Erin. ”

“ The Irish Melodies, too—exquisite as is their word-music—fanciful as is their conception—delightful as is their playfulness, and touching as is their pathos—even the Irish Melodies, we believe are declining in popular estimation. The reasons are obvious. In the first place, the Irish Melodies are not particularly Irish; they have grace, sparkling fancy, delicious feeling; but they are too fine-spun to do the work-a-day duty of popular songs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In our oldest manuscript books, music is continually mentioned: and musicians are spoken of with respect and admiration.
[Pg 209]
The two chief instruments used in Ireland were the harp and the bagpipe. The harp was the favourite with the higher classes, many of whom played it as an accomplishment, as people now play the piano. The professional Irish harpers were more skilful, and could play better, than those of any other country: so that for hundreds of years it was the custom for the musicians of Great Britain to visit Ireland in order to finish their musical education ”

“ It is a work which assuredly will never die. To its venerable Editor, Ireland owes a deep feeling of gratitude, as the zealous and enthusiastic collector and preserver of her music in all its characteristic beauty ”

“ If we wished a set of Irish quadrilles, how many good and suitable airs had we not ready at our hands? Is not our national music proverbially rich, and in the very character of music that would suit us? ”

“ Mount Music House was large, intensely solid, practical, sensible, of that special type of old Irish country-house that is entirely remote from the character of the men that originated it, and can only be explained as the expiring cry of the English blood. How many Anglo-Irish great-great-grandfathers have not raised these monuments to their English forbears, and then, recognising their obligations to their Irish mothers' ancestry, have filled them, gloriously, with horses and hounds, and butts of claret, and hungry poor relations unto the fourth and fifth generations? ”

“ 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." ”

“ We owe a debt of gratitude to the Irish-American inventors and entrepreneurs who helped define America as the land of opportunity. Irish-American writers pollinated America’s literary landscape with their love of language and storytelling, while Irish lyricism has brought poetry, art, music, and dance to nourish our hearts and souls. ”

“ But we have not yet done with Irish women humorists. Miss Eleanor Alexander, the daughter of the Poet Archbishop of Armagh and his poet wife has given us in her “Lady Anne’s Walk,” a volume of a genre as hard to define as it has been easy to welcome, at times delicately allusive, now daringly funny—an interblending of tender reminiscences and lively fancy, reminding us perhaps most of old Irish music itself with its sweet, strange and sudden changes of mood. Humorous contrasts of the kind will be found in the chapter entitled “Old Tummus and the Battle of Scarva,” printed in these pages. ”

“ Before the year is out we hope to see A Society for The Preservation of Irish Music established in Dublin, under the joint patronage of the leading men of all politics, with branches in the provincial towns for the collection and diffusion of Irish airs. ”

“ Irish Folk Songs No people in the world have more fancy and imagination, a keener sense of humor, are more fun-loving and more superstitious than the Irish. All these qualities come out in their vast treasure of folk music, which is considered the most beautiful and the most varied of all the music that has come from peasant folk. ”

“ Some of it is old Irish music made when all songs were but heightened speech, and some of it composed by modern musicians is none the less to be associated with words that must never lose the intonation of passionate speech. ”

“ The shortest way of stating the truth is to say that poetry plays the part of music. It is in every sense of the phrase a social function. A poetical evening is as natural as a musical evening; and being as natural it becomes what is called artificial. As in some circles "Do you play?" is rather "Don't you play?" these Irish circles would be surprised because a man did not recite rather than because he did. A hostile critic, especially an Irish critic, might possibly say that the Irish are poetical because they are not sufficiently musical. ”

“ As long as the nation retained its autonomy, the harp was a universal instrument among the inhabitants of Erin. It was found in every house; it was heard wherever you met a few people gathered together. Studied so universally, so completely and perfectly, it gave Irish music in the middle ages a superiority over that of all other nations. It is Cambrensis who remarks that "the attention of these people to musical instruments is worthy of praise, in which their skill is, beyond comparison, superior to any other people ”

“ Bear with me for this straying into the paths of biography, for Victor Herbert’s personality, his training, and his Irish birthright should be known to every son of Ireland in America, not merely as a matter of race pride but of race inspiration. We pride ourselves 132on our love of music. The echoes of the olden Celtic harps must be in our souls, but we have done little enough as a people to deserve the exquisite heritage. ”

“ Numerous current stories of her adventures are unsupported by records. An old tune, known to all Irish fiddlers and pipers, is called after her, and is printed in Bunting's 'Ancient Music of Ireland.' In the south of Ireland it was regarded as a tune proper to the catholic interest, as is shown in Gerald Griffin's [q. v.] ”

“ Many of these Keenes abound with touches of a wild and simple pathos. The following is not a translated one, but only in imitation of their peculiar style, which seems to bear much analogy to the characteristics of Irish music. ”

“ In the religious tales music is always one of the delights of heaven; and a chief function of the angels who attend on God is to chant music of ineffable sweetness to Him, which they generally do in the shape of beautiful white birds. A good example of the people’s intense fondness for music is found in an old Irish religious poem, in which the hard lot of Adam and Eve for a whole year after their expulsion from Paradise is described, when they were—as the poem expresses it—“without proper food, fire, house, music, or raiment.” ”