Sir, - Are Bunting and Moore merely dressed up? Had not the Irish harping tradition been more or less wiped out by the time Bunting came across his sources in 1792? What of the death sentence for harpers in the 16th century? If they were now on Death Row, they would certainly have time to. continue playing and perhaps even sort through some marriage proposals. But in a society that half-hung, disembowelled and quartered?
What of the removal of the harpers' patrons, their demotion to itinerant musician status and their instruments, as a consequence of all this, becoming cruder in craftsmanship and ornamentation? Bunting, an organist, attempted to write down/up their music. That these harpers, or their more prosperous predecessors, didn't write down their music is significant. They would doubtless have used a more appropriate method such as electromagnetic reproduction, if it had existed.
Bunting didn't belong to their tradition. He didn't even speak their language, but wrote down phonetically technical terms. Of the ten musicians he heard, only bone played in the old style with his fingernails. This one, Denis Hempson (aged 97), reportedly claimed that modern ears couldn't appreciate the nuances of the old music. What chance did Bunting stand with his ears? For all his painstaking work, he didn't describe in detail Hempson's technique, one of the last sources capable of throwing some light on the older tradition. Bunting transcribed what he heard for keyboard - his keyboard.
The value of such transcriptions might best be checked by the disdain with which many African-American jazz musicians and gipsy flamenco musicians regarded the "cataloguers" from outside their traditions. With this in mind, Bunting is as invaluable a source for distortion as for accuracy of an atrophied musical tradition. - Yours, etc
Highfield, Drogheda, Co Louth.