Arthur Ó Néill (c.1737 - 1816)

In 1792, Edward Bunting met Arthur Ó Néill at the Belfast harpers’ meeting. In the years after that, Bunting took down a number of tunes direct from the playing of Arthur Ó Néill.

Unfortunately we seem to be missing the original field draft notations of a lot of these tunes. I presume Bunting used a notebook to take down the first drafts, which is now lost and not part of the Bunting manuscripts preserved in Queens University Belfast.

To understand the music of the old Irish harpers, it is always best to go straight to the draft field notation. If that is lost, then we have to rely on later piano arrangements, which is much more difficult, because the piano arrangement includes many changes from the original harp setting. However with care, and with familiarity with Bunting’s working methods, and by comparison with the tunes collected from other harpers which do survive in field draft, it is possible to start reconstructing Arthur Ó Néill’s music.

A few of the tunes appear also in ms29, Bunting’s first field draft, and these may represent live transcription from Arthur Ó Néill’s playing. Otherwise we have to look at piano arrangements. Generally, the ms33(1) and ms33(3) and (2) piano arrangements seem simpler and more harp-like than the ones in the published books, and the 1796 arrangements seem more harp-like than the 1809 and 1840 ones. I am sure that a good source-critical analysis of the different tune-settings in Bunting’s manuscripts could draw up connections between the different notations, allowing us to understand more of Arthur Ó Néill’s harp style. However this kind of work has not yet been done.

To understand his music on a practical level, we need to get a replica of a big 18th century Irish harp, strung with brass (and perhaps iron) strings, we need to play it in a left orietnation with left hand in the treble and right in the bass, and we need to use our fingertips to play. (In the old tradition, the early Irish harp was traditionally played with long fingernails. However, by the 18th century, the use of long nails was very old-fashioned and almost obsolete, and so Arthur Ó Néill played on the brass wire strings of his early Irish harp using the tips of his fingers.)

Here is a list of tunes said by Bunting to have been collected from Arthur Ó Néill:

In the Memoirs, Arthur Ó Néill mentions a number of other tunes by name, which he obviously knew, but here I have only listed tunes specifically said to have been played by him.