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Turlough Carolan

1670–1738

 

Traditional Irish music, as performed by the Chieftans or the Riverdance Company, has swept the world in recent decades.  But these high-profile performers owe much more than they may realize to the lonely talent of the last of the old Irish harpers, Turlough Carolan, 'the last of the Irish bards'.

      Also known as O'Carolan and the descendant of an ancient family, he was born about 1670 at Nobber, in County Meath.  Sometime about 1684 the family moved to Ballyfernon, in Roscommon.  There they were patronized by the MacDermott family, who owned the local iron foundry.  Turlough was reared and educated with the children of the house.  At the age of fourteen he lost his sight due to smallpox.  Mrs MacDermott then took charge of his future.  She apprenticed him to a harper, and he was trained to play be ear.  In 1691, when he came of age, she provided him with a horse, a man to hold it, a small sum of money, and off he went on his travels about Ireland as a harper.  It was his custom to call on persons of rank and high station in big houses and play for them for either money or his supper.  His talents were equally popular among the poor of the cottages.  Carolan was not just a harper; he was also a composer, and would dedicate the tunes he composed on the road to the person who gave him food and lodging at the end of the day.  Though he found his way into most counties of Ireland, much of his time was passed in northern Connaught or southern Ulster.  He was welcomed not only by the old Gaelic families, but also by the newer, largely Protestant, gentry.

      The historian Charles O'Conor of Belangare said that Carolan was moral and religious, but convivial and 'seldom surprised by intoxication'.  He also wrote poems, addressed in a personal way to the ladies of the houses where he lodged.  Some two hundred of these are known.

      Carolan married Mary Maguire from Fermanagh, and they had seven children before she passed away in 1733.  He himself became ill at Tempo in Fermanagh in 1738, and returned to the only place he could then call home, the house of the MacDermotts at Adleford, in Roscommon.  He died there on 25th March.  In a manuscript diary, Charles O'Conor, his patron, recorded: 'Saturday the XXV day of March, 1738, Toirrdealbach O Cerbhallain died today, in the sixty-eighth year of his age.  The mercy of God may his soul find, for he was a moral and pious man.'  Carolan was buried at Kilronan, at Lough Meelagh, and it was said that his well-attended wake lasted four days.

      Donald O'Sullivan, who gathered all that could be learned of Carolan fifty years ago collected some two hundred tunes which had survived.  Some had been reprinted in his lifetime, others after his death by his son.  These surprisingly are lost.  Some fifty of his tunes were collected by Edward Bunting, the pioneer collector of Irish music.  Carolan worked in the very ancient tradition of Gaelic music, but he was also open to other European influences, notably the Italian music then fashionable in Dublin.  His harp is preserved in Clonalis, the home of the O'Conor Dons, in Roscommon.  James Handiman collected some twenty of his poems, and Dr Douglas Hyde another twelve.  An edition of some of his songs was published in Dublin by John and William Neale about 1720.  This is the earliest surviving example of music printing in Ireland.  Thomas Moore, in the settings of his poems, utilized some of Carolan's airs.  Others were introduced into the ballad operas popular in the eighteenth century.

      It is to Carolan, in one way or another, that the tradition of Irish music returns.  Much of what is played today is in fact eighteenth-century dance music, but his original compositions from the late seventeenth century are redolent of the thousands of years of Irish culture which lie behind them.  The harpers that followed him were not composers but merely players, who dwindled in number.  The harp itself, which had been well adapted to earlier forms of music, could not play the music of the eighteenth century well.  So it was displaced by the harpsichord, the violin, and then the piano.

      To preserve some of this heritage, harp festivals were held at Granard, in Longford, in 1781 to 1785, and in Belfast in 1792.  This last was organized by Edward Bunting, and it is to his notations of the tunes as eventually published some years later, that we owe much of what is known about this ancient music of Ireland.  The use of Carolan's music by Moore kept later generations in some way in touch with Ireland's music.  Now, three hundred years after his birth, a later generation is able to still enjoy the vital heritage of Carolan's genius.