Carolan's Dream - played on celtic harp


Turlough O'Carolan was an irish harpist who lived in the mid-1600s and wrote pieces for the people he met and stayed with - playing music in exchange for hospitality. Tradition has it that the harp was played last thing at night, before people went to bed.The building I'm playing it in was a bakery built around 1790, serving the local houses. The bread oven is in the stone wall behind me, and the building has a new floor and triple-glazing on the windows. It's a great mixture of old and new and a great place to play this music.

Appropriately, I recorded this piece very late one night, and just went with the first take so the playing has the odd rough bits. I like to think that's authentic - apparently Carolan never played the same way twice. Bet he never had as much trouble as I did finding DivX codecs, either!

Only the melodies survive, so I've done this arrangement myself and I'm playing it here on a Pilgrim gut-strung harp. The arrangement and video is my copyright. You are welcome to learn and play the arrangement (by ear - I haven't written it down!) if you like it - but please credit me if you play it in public. If you like it,I'll post more music.

To make the recording I used a Sony 3-CCD camera direct to hard disk, with one audio take, noise-reduced in Cool Edit Pro, with Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the visuals together. If you want a higher-quality file to download and keep on your computer, just send me a message.







Channel: Music
Uploaded: August 21, 2006 at 2:42 pm
Author: MarkHarmer

Length: 00:04:02
Rating: 4.87
Views: 202817

Tags: Harp Music Carolan O'Carolan Clarsach Celtic Irish

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Video Comments:
kyleChall (December 1, 2008 at 11:43 am)
How long does it take to tune it 0,o
everst (November 30, 2008 at 9:24 pm)
how long does it take to string that thing?
LibertangoVieenrose (November 30, 2008 at 4:42 pm)
To allow a greater number of strings, harps were later made from two pieces of wood attached at the ends: this type is known as the 'angle harp'.

The oldest depictions of harps without a forepillar are from 4000 BCE in Egypt[citation needed](see Music of Egypt) and 3000 BCE in Persia (see Music of Iran).
LibertangoVieenrose (November 30, 2008 at 4:40 pm)
Bravo !

extract from Wikipedia:

Origins
An ancient Egyptian harp on display in the British Museum.

Harps were most likely independently invented in many parts of the world in remote prehistory. It is often said that the harp's origins may lie in the sound of a plucked hunter's bow string; the converse is equally possible. A type of harp called a 'bow harp' is nothing more than a bow like a hunter's, with a resonating vessel such as a gourd fixed somewhere along its length.

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