The lower hand: New perspectives on performance-practice evidence in Edward Bunting’s early-irish-harp field transcriptions of the 1790s

The early Irish harp was the aristocratic musical instrument of Ireland, and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, for 800+ years until c. 1800. Knowledge of the instrument is weak since it has been replaced by the modern Irish harp. Repertory survives in field transcriptions made by Edward Bunting, from 1792 to c. 1803. Some of these display evidence of the lower-register texture played by Dennis O’Hampsay, the most significant vernacular harper then alive. These transcriptions have largely been ignored, leading to incorrect hypotheses about historical Irish harp ‘basses’, no systematic analysis, and little use of these in reconstructions of the repertory. Performing editions and recorded performance in the area are also deficient.
My response is within a Practice-Research framework: to analyse solely the evidence in the field transcriptions, leading to performed reconstructions, and supplementary performing editions of significant O’Hampsay repertory. These use my new notation system to communicate the subtleties of early-Irish-harp technique more effectively than previous systems. I also propose new language to express vernacular Irish harping practices clearly and unambiguously as replacements for misleading terms such as ‘bass’ and ‘bass hand’.
This dissertation establishes my thesis that O’Hampsay’s performance idiom made no use of the continuous, independent bass lines of eighteenth-century European art music nor its concomitant, functional harmony. His lower-register texture was thinner and more sporadic, relying on the long-resonating, brass-wire strings to create melodic support, and harmonicity. His lower hand functioned as an ‘echoing’ hand, in moments of melodic inactivity, or sounded simultaneously with the treble as a ‘reinforcing’ hand, often in octaves. Occasionally, his hands reversed functions, the lower hand more prominently involving itself in melodic production, while the treble hand took a more subservient role. He also reproduced compser,Turlough Carolan’s, antiphonal idiom. Since O’Hampsay’s idiom is not contradicted by evidence captured by Bunting from other vernacular harpers, or by the idiom of Gaelic harp music captured in Scotland in the early 1600s, my microstudy has macro implications for a new understanding of wider, early-Irish-harp performance-practice idiom in the eighteenth century but also in previous centuries, possibly with threads leading back to the late Middle Ages.