One man had a huge influence on Irish traditional music, writes Siobhán Long.
At a time when traditional music is enjoying unprecedented success, it's difficult to imagine it ever struggled to survive. But just as the path of Irish history has been as rocky as it has been unpredictable, so the music has suffered in times of hardship and political upheaval.
Tunes abound whose roots can be traced back to the 18th century and before, melodies whose DNA carries within it traces of the coloniser as well as the colonised. But they didn't simply hover in the ether by dint of good looks. Dogged scholarship and bold passion ensured folk music's passage across the centuries, so our musical reference points now have the luxury of stretching long beyond the reach of contemporary fads.
Seamus Ennis and Ciarán MacMathúna are rightly revered for their meticulous archival activities in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Stories abound of the hiccups, hazards and high jinks when they were on the road, gathering music for future generations. Short battery life, for example, meant MacMathúna sometimes had to resort to putting rocks on the accelerator of the ramshackle Radio Éireann van, to keep the engine running so the accursed batteries for his tape machine could be plamásed into action. Recordings made then are the fuel that fire many a modern session and CD collection.
But what of the 17th and 18th centuries, when reel-to-reel recorders had yet to make an appearance and tunes could hardly be shared beyond the next parish unless some sympathetic patron leant his horses and carriage to the effort? Mercifully, circumstances conspired to launch one Edward Bunting into action in 1792, when the Belfast Harp Festival engaged the young Armagh-born, classically trained musician to embark on a task of tune collection that fired a lifelong obsession with the gathering, arrangement and publication of traditional music. Aided and informed by no less than 85 fellow scribes, Bunting's three published volumes of airs, which appeared in 1796, 1809 and 1840, were much admired, but they represented only a quarter of his life's work.
Today, at Queen's University Belfast, President McAleese is launching a catalogue of Bunting's collected tunes, compiled by Dr Colette Moloney for her PhD thesis, at the University of Limerick. For musicologists and music lovers, the catalogue represents a leap forward in our store of knowledge of the music - and the music minders who saw to its survival. As Bunting's three publications represent only a quarter of his work, Dr Moloney's unravelling of the remaining archive is of considerable archival and reference value.
Bunting was a prodigious talent. A teacher of music from the age of 11, he was a 19-year-old church organist when the organisers of the harp festival approached him to act as music scribe, in 1792. As Dr Moloney notes, "he was so taken by the music of the aging harpers he met there that he continued to collect and publish Irish traditional music, and especially harp music, throughout his life, either personally or through agents and correspondents".
Bunting might not have been the Louis Walsh of his generation, but he nonetheless oversaw the movement of the music from rarefied setting to home and hearth, where it has thrived ever since. Just as the Smithsonian Institution in the US afforded credibility and status to black and Native American music, so Bunting ensured folk music would ultimately be perceived to be as important as classical or "art" music.
Bunting's music-collecting activities coincided with a period of radical political upheaval. Having been orphaned at the age of nine, he lived in Belfast with the family of one John McCracken, a prosperous merchant and ship owner. The family was heavily involved in the 1798 rebellion but, in tandem with its political beliefs, fostered a passionate interest in folk music. Henry Joy McCracken was one of the key organisers of the harp festival, undertaken in an effort to preserve the instrument and its music from extinction. Not content merely to cosset the music, the festival was slated for July 11th-13th, to coincide with celebrations commemorating the storming of the Bastille, in Paris, in 1789, and with the presence in the city of Theobald Wolfe Tone and other members of the United Irishmen.
Bunting's first published collection, A General Collection Of The Ancient Irish Music, from 1796, contained 66 airs and was a milestone in the dissemination of Irish music, according to Dr Moloney. "Bunting was the first individual that we explicitly know of who collected and published Irish music obtained from traditional musicians at first hand, in the field, as it were," she notes.
Alas, then as ever, the prophet was not always recognised by his own. Following Bunting's death in 1843, and his burial in Mount Jerome Cemetery, in Dublin, his wife made an application for a civil pension, on the grounds of her husband's contribution to music. She was refused.
