One of the most well-known emblems of Ireland is the Harp. The Celtic harp, which is depicted on Irish currency and used in Guinness advertisements, was first played in the 10th century. Harpists were once highly revered and were given a prominent place among the most important retainers of the old Gaelic order of lords and chieftains, along with poets and scribes. Turlough Ó Carolan, an 18th-century Blind Harper who is frequently referred to as the unofficial national composer of Ireland, is perhaps the best-known practitioner of this heritage of harping today. Traditional Irish harping was an aristocratic art form with its own canon, regulations for compositional structure and standards for organization. It was only distantly related to folkloric music of the common people, the forerunner of modern Irish traditional music. The Italian Baroque art music of composers like Vivaldi, which could be heard in theatres and concert venues of Dublin, had an impression on some of the later practitioners of the harping heritage, including O Carolan. The local Gaelic royalty that fostered the harping culture did not persist very long. The Irish harp and its melody were essentially extinct by the early 19th century. Melodies without any harmony that had been adopted by the folkloric legacy or that were kept as notated in compilations like that of Edward Bunting, managed to remain of the harping tradition. The new generations of the 20th-century revivalists tried to take Irish native dance tunes and song airs along with any old harp tunes they could get their hands-on and played the gut-bounded neo-Celtic harp. However, the old brass-strung harp plucked with long fingernails where now replaced with the pads on their fingers. They introduced to them orchestral harp techniques as well as rhythmic, melodic and harmonic ideas that frequently had more in common with popular classical music than with both the ancient harping legacy and the current Irish music heritage. [Information and Image Credit: Irish_traditional_music, Wikipedia] [Image: 1. Photograph of Patrick Byrne, harper, by Hill & Adamson (1845), calotype print, 203 × 164 mm, Scottish National Gallery ; 2. A Medieval Clarsach in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh] [Images Availed Under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported and Faithful Photographic Reproduction of a Two-Dimensional, Public Domain Work of Art. (Please Relate to Individual Image URL for More Usage Property)] [License-Link : https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en ] [Original Source Image URL : 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:David_Octavius_Hill_and_Robert_Adamson_-_Patrick_Byrne,_about_1794_-_1863._Irish_Harpist_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Celtic_harp_dsc05425.jpg ]
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Rituals and Customs
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