Faigh an Gléas: Or 'Find the Key'. Edward Bunting, the great collector of ancient Irish harp music, noted this tune at the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival. His source was Dennis Hempson (1695-1807!), a blind harper, and the only harper, out of the ten competing, who played in the old style - wire strings plucked with the fingernails and dampened with the finger pads. This is how I play; using methods developed from Bunting's notes, which ultimately derived from Hempson himself. Concerning this tune, Bunting wrote: 'It was with great reluctance that the old harper was prevailed on to play even the fragment of it here preserved,...He would rather, he asserted, have played any other air, as this awakened recollections of the days of his youth, of friends whom he had outlived, and of times long past, when the harpers were accustomed to play the ancient caoinans or lamentations, with their corresponding preludes. When pressed to play, notwithstanding, his peevish answer uniformly was, "What's the use of doing so? No-one can understand it now - not even any of the harpers now living"'. And this from a man who was then 97 years old!

Lady Iveagh: This might have been written by Thomas Connallon (1640-1720) or his brother, William (1645-1700). Or it might have been written by somebody else. The subject is either Sarah, the first Lady Iveagh (d.1644), or Margaret, the last Lady Iveagh (d.1744). Or any other Lady Iveagh in-between. Oh, the beauties of the oral tradition.

The Faerie Queen: This tune is credited to Ireland's most famous harper/composer, Turlough O'Carolan (1640-1738). However Bunting has an older tune called Ciste nó stór (Treasures or wealth) which he says seems to have been the original tune, to which O'Carolan added parts. Other versions of the tune exist entitled 'Save me from death' and 'Hide me from death'. I think this sounds fitting for the Faerie Queen considering how she behaves in some stories!

Mythic Tales | Magic Tunes

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