This sensitive player strums the heart strings as deftly as those of the harp

Published on Tuesday 27 October 2009 17:57

INTRIGUING soundings and delvings continue to emerge from the harp revival on both sides of the Irish Sea.

In Scotland, Mary Macmaster, well known as an exponent of both metal strung Gaelic clarsach and the Camac electroharp in outfits such as the Poozies and Sileas, and who can be heard on Sting's imminent solo album If On a Winter's Night, has produced a highly engaging and sometimes hypnotic album with long-time collaborator, percussionist Donald Hay.

Love and Reason takes a decidedly contemporary approach, with harps sounding over Hay's drums and sampled beats. There's a compelling version of the walking song Rinn Mi Moch, but what I find gripping is its setting of one of the most eloquent of Highland pipe pibrochs, the Lament for the Children.

The pibroch is attributed to the 17th-century master piper Patrick Mr MacCrimmon, who lost seven of his eight children during a smallpox epidemic. Purists may raise an eyebrow, as the wire-strung harp sounds glittering variations over the drum pulse, punctuated by sampled fragments of an infant's blithesome crowing, but this remains as potent as it sounded when I first heard the duo play it at the Edinburgh Harp Festival last year.

It also raises in passing the ongoing debate as to the origins of pibroch from medieval bardic harping or from Gaelic song, or both. Hugh Cheape in his book A National Collection of a National Instrument, refers to the North Uist tradition that the first MacCrimmon was a harper.

He also cites a tradition that the MacCrimmons received early education in Ireland, at a time when Gaelic culture was very much a common one on both sides of the Irish Sea.

The passage of musicians across the Auld Sheuch was, of course, a two-way process. As the Galway-based harpist Kathleen Loughnane notes in the book she has written in conjunction with her beautifully recorded and presented new CD The Harpers Connellan: Irish Music of the Late 17th Century (Reiskmore Music): "It was common for the Highland gentry to hire bards, harpers etc from Ireland and the practice was not quite dead by 1689," adding that there are references to itinerant Irish harpers in Scotland as late as 1745.

I must come clean here and declare that Kathleen Loughnane is my sister-in-law. But before I'm deafened by shrieks of "vile nepotism", let me say that The Harpers Connellan, celebrating the music of two brothers, Thomas and William Connellan of County Sligo, whose lives spanned the tumultuous period of 1640-1720, has been enthusiastically received by the Irish press and needs no further endorsement from me. What makes it of particular interest to Scottish listeners, however, is that Thomas Connellan found his way to Edinburgh, where, according to council records, he was made a burgess of the city in 1717.

Loughnane, here with collaborators including Alec Finn on guitar, her son Cormac Cannon on uilleann pipes, cellist Adrian Mantu and Irish Gaelic singers Sen Garvey and amonn Brithe, includes tunes which followed the peregrinating harpist – Bonny Jean, for instance, attributed to Thomas Connellan but clearly Scottish in origin. And there's a wonderful sequence in which Garvey sings the song we know as Lochaber No More, using the words published by the Edinburgh poet and playwright Alan Ramsay in 1724. And he sings them with great heart and a voice that sounds as if it's been wrought from the earth, before Loughnane plays the tune's Irish version, the lovely Limerick's Lamentation.

Thus it was that a few weeks ago, following the album's launch in a church during the wonderful Clifden Arts Week in County Galway, I found myself wondering out into a churchyard redolent with dripping fuchsia, birds singing in the Connemara mist and an auld Scots sang echoing in my head.

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