St. Patrick’s Day is coming up, so how about a little Irish harp history? This is tailored to complement the Irish Harper Word Search in the St. Patrick’s Day bundle in the Fischarper Teachers Pay Teachers Store, but you can use it with your students (or for your own learning!) whether or not you use those activities.
In researching for the worksheet and this post, I’ve learned some cool stuff. This get-together seems to be a pretty important event in Irish harp history, even though it was on a much smaller scale than many of today’s festivals/conferences…there were only about 10 harpers present. Here are 2 reasons for its importance: it was the last time a group of traditional (although I find that term a bit relative, as there was one harper present who was more “traditional” in that he played with his fingernails) Irish harpers congregated, and many of the tunes they played were notated by Edward Bunting.
You can use the wordsearch in the St. Patrick’s Day bundle to introduce your students to that festival and the harpers present. 10 Irish harpers present at the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival are to be found in the shamrock-shaped word search. They’re listed below, with links (some are Wikipedia) to more information on some. Not a lot of information is known about many of them.
- Denis Hempson
- Charles Byrne
- Daniel Black
- Rose Mooney
- Arthur O’Neill
- Patrick Quin
- Charles Fanning
- James Duncan
- Hugh Higgins
- William Carr
Here are a few other online sources on the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival:
- This information from the BBC
- I haven’t read The Irish Manuscripts of Edward Bunting (1773-1843), but the blurb about it is informative. It could be an interesting book to look into reading, especially if you would like to get more acquainted with Irish harp history.
- A section of this essay is linked above with Arthur O’Neill, but Robert Young’s “The Irish Harpers in Belfast in 1792” from and 1895 volume of The Ulster Journal of Archaeology provides more reading on this topic.
If you’d like to look more into this topic, here are three books that could offer further reading on Irish harpers:
- Annals of the Irish Harpers (Charlotte Milligan Fox)
- The Story of the Harp (William Henry Grattan Flood)
- The Harp: Its History, Technique and Repertoire (Roslyn Rensch)
What’s your best resource for teaching and learning about the Irish harp and its music?
-Barbara
*clover picture originally from Pixabay
Barbara Fischer runs Fischarper, LLC and loves her job as a harpist and private music educator. She enjoys blogging about various aspects of the music field on fischarper.com/blog. For more music resources, check out the Fischarper store. Find out where you can find Barbara on the interwebs here. And you can sign up to receive Fischarper updates by joining the email list.