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from Dearbhail Finnegan
Despite a very busy schedule, Dearhbail Finnegan of County Meath, Ireland, sat down with me between shows at Silver Dollar City's WorldFest to share her knowledge of the history of the Irish harp. Be sure to check out Dearbhail's website linked from this article.
Well. to begin with, the harp is the national emblem of Ireland and I think it's interesting, because Ireland is the only country in the entire world to have a musical instrument as it's national emblem. So that gives you an idea of how important this is, historically, culturally.
In the old traditional style of playing, there's three different styles: Suantri, Gentrai and Goltrai And Suantri means lullaby music, soft gentle music. Gentrai means happy, delightful kind of music that you get up and you dance to, the reels, the jigs and that. And Goltrai is like laments, the sad songs — Gol is Irish Gaelic meaning to cry. So they had the sad pieces of music — the laments of maybe famine times or laments of somebody parting or those moments where the piece of music reflected sadness rather than a joyous occasion.
So there's three different styles of music and traditionally in the harping world, you had to be proficient in all three styles of music to be a rounded musician. And today they still do that to some extent. Most musicians would like to be able to play all three styles proficiently — because otherwise you are not really playing traditional Irish music completely. If you pick just one style, I suppose, you're not looking at all the different types of music.
So those are the three different styles and dating back to the harp players, who were the first musicians of Ireland along with the uillean pipers. The original harpers played a lot of the Goltrai and Gentrai as well as the Suantri, the lullaby music, because they were the only musicians who were playing for the high kings and they were the court musicians, so they had to go into the courts. And just as they would hire a storyteller, they would also hire a harpist. So the news would be referred through the harp and the voice.
The harpers had to represent those three different styles — because it could be a sad occasion, it could be a happy occasion, or they could just want to relax so they had to be able to cover all options. So that's where the three different styles come from and that's just talking about the old music.
And then the music changed quite a lot —for the harp players I'm referring to completely now — because the instruments started to change.
Years ago, the harp players played with their nails and they played on wire-strung harps which were small instruments that would either sit on your knee or you would sit down on the ground to them. They would be only three-and-a-half foot [tall] or something like that with lesser strings.
And then as time went on, the development of the harp, and also the movement of people in and out of Ireland — at this point, if you move up even into the 14th and 15th century, the harp started to change. And then definitely by the time it got the 16th and 17th century, of the likes of Turlough O'Carolan and lots of the different harp players of Ireland, they introduced a new style of playing, the harps got much bigger, bigger than my harp now, and they started the style of cutting down your nails and playing with the sides of your fingers which is now the concert harp style of playing — the European style of playing.
So the music changed so that the sound drastically changed. How you played a march in those days was very simple in your accompaniement levels. Nowadays it's just a very different style and there are some harp players in Ireland that are really developing the dance style side of it so that there are some really, really excellent players playing the dance music, just as good as a fiddle or an accordion or anyone else playing with complicated finger patterns.
The harp has positively been a part of Irish culture since the seventh or eighth century. But there have been images of harps on the old high crosses, which were before that, but they don't have any evidence of the music they would have played or a physical harp to show.
Really, the earliest documentation on the Irish harp comes from European musicians that came over and commented on how wild the Irish people were as in that they — they actually called them an "ignorant race with incredible ability to play the harp." So that was the only thing that came out of the travelers that came out of mainland Europe into Ireland! But that was after the seventh century.
From a personal experience, my grandfather was a fiddle player. So we grew up right beside my grandfather and he played all the old kind of music, like "Shoe The Donkey" and simple little tunes like that. And he taught us all how to play fiddle. And actually, to tell you a funny story, my brother wanted a guitar and my grandfather said that if a guitar was brought into our neighborhood, then he'd stop teaching us all. That's how alien a guitar was and wouldn't be seen played by any one of us. And so that was how strict he was that we were going to learn traditional Irish music and nothing else. But that's not how it has stayed. But I suppose I'd be grateful for him that he did that because at least we had some grounding in traditional music.
May 9, 2006
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