In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

731 Waddell Media. Run since 1988 by a UTV former programme director, this TV production company produced Fleadh Fever (1988), The Flute (1988) and The Year of the Harp (1990/3, BBC) which follows composer Shaun Davey through the year in which he composed his ‘Concerto for Two Harps’ for the 200th anniversary of the Belfast Harp Festival. [MAL] Wade, Jack. (1913–67). Uilleann piper, born in Dublin.The death of his father in the First World War led to moving to Gormanstown, Co. Meath where his stepfather taught him fiddle and sightreading , and the Greenanstown warpiper, uilleann piper, fiddler, piano, harp and dulcimer player Tom Matthews introduced him to uilleann pipes. Working in Customs and Excise on the border he had many opportunities to meet musicians and pipers and notated the tunes he learned in his youth in Co. Dublin; these were contributed to Breandán Breathnach for his collections. A committed worker in music revival from the 1950s, he was instrumental in setting up Roslea CCÉ. WalderstownUilleannPipers’Club. Formed near Athlone, Co. Westmeath by Willie Reynolds in 1943 in an effort to revive the playing of the pipes. It fused with the first local CCÉ branch in 1952. Among its more notable members were Tommy and John Healion, Pat Keegan, Michael Doyle, Seán McCormack,Tommie and Bonnie Green. Wales. Next to Scotland,Wales is Ireland’s closest direct neighbour. The country’s greater distance from Irish shores, however, and the absence of the major human connections such as Gaelic ancestry and plantation settlement which apply for Scotland, have a visible, proportional effect in the scarcity of obvious music linkages today. Music revival in the second half of the twentieth century did not result in any vivid links (such as those generated by rugby football) and while Irish artistes continue to take part in Welsh folk festivals and clubs,the reverse is not often the case. Many features of Welsh music traditions are similar to the Irish, but there are major differences, particularly in song and harp, and the way in which traditional music persists in ‘Singing to the harp and dancing’, from Peter Roberts’ The Cambrian Popular Antiquities (London, 1815), in Robin Huw Bowen’s Tro Llaw: A Collection of 200 Welsh Hornpipes from the National Library of Wales (1987) W Wales 732 Ireland. Wales’s umbilical proximity to England and its role in the British crown have of course much to do with this.Yet Wales retains the higher number of speakers of its own language, and has a distinctive choral tradition. Ireland and Wales remain linked mainly through harp music, but there are other instrumental overlaps too. [EDI] Welsh harp (telyn). Wales is the only Celtic country to retain an unbroken tradition of harping since the Middle Ages, but there has been much evolution and change over the years, and today almost all harpists learn classical technique on the orchestral pedal harp, a recent phenomenon . Historically, the harper occupied a special position in Welsh culture, both as accompanist to sung or declaimed poetry and as an instrumental performer in solo music or in ensemble with the crwth. References to the harp occur as early as c.950, and in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century. No instruments survive from the earliest period, but evidence shows that by the late Middle Ages there were several types of harp in use – including an older all-wooden harp with strings made from horse-hair, and a newer leather-covered,gut-strung instrument.The harper had a defined place within the bardic order, and there was a formal tablature for the instrument. A copy of this dating from the early seventeenth century provides a significant record of a sophisticated tradition, the music being quite unlike anything else in the extant traditions of notated western music. Many of the pieces are based upon the repetitions of a two-chord ostinato in the lower hand while the upper hand performs increasingly complex variations, employing nail technique with forward and backward strokes and repeated note figures.The instrument for this music would most likely have been a harp strung in gut, and different tunings were used. triple harp. By the eighteenth century,all recollection of the music of the bardic order had been lost, and the ascendancy of the instrument that came to be identified as specifically ‘Welsh’ rose in prominence – the seventeenth-century Italian chromatic triple harp with three rows...

Share