O'Rourke’s Noble Feast / Limerick's Lamentation. Played on the Irish harp by Simon Chadwick
Channel: Simon Chadwick
Date: 2022-06-16

I was inspired to try and play these two tunes as a set, after reading a traditional story in the Schools Collection.  According to the story, there was a harp competition in Dublin between the Drumshanbo harper Jerome Duigenan, and a Welsh harper. Duigenan played this set, and won the competition.

The story was written down by the schoolchild Sarah Mc Manus in the 1930s, using information told to her by her father, Michael McManus.
https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4605949/4605168/4677384

You can read my blog post on Duigenan and his places and the story here:
https://simonchadwick.net/2021/08/jeremy-duigenan-in-drumshanbo-and-murhaun.html

The harp I am playing is a copy of the NMI Carolan harp. The original harp which mine is copied from, is owned by the National Museum of Ireland (NMI DF:1945.122) and is traditionally said to have been owned and played by Carolan. My copy was made for me by Pedro Ferreira http://rumor.pt in 2019. It has 36 strings, of brass wire (except the highest 13 which are iron wire)

I'm trying to use the method of playing set out in Sylvia Crawford's book:
https://simonchadwick.net/publishing/crawford
using the traditional Irish harp fingering techniques that were published by Edward Bunting in 1840. I am not as good at this as Sylvia so check out her Youtube Channel if you want to see how it should be done!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvhZydRutx2VsFGjTWr4pOA

Many thanks to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland http://artscouncil-ni.org/ for helping to provide some of the equipment used in making this video.