Ireland's Harp: The Shaping of Irish Identity c.1770 to 1880 - Softcover

'Ireland's Harp is a valuable contribution to the ongoing critical debate regarding why the harp's symbolic significance eclipses its musical one ... [it] serves as a very useful purpose: to condense for the reader a significant amount of historical detail about the Irish Harp ... this text fills an important gap and will energise the burgeoning field of harp studies.'Emily Cullen, Ethnomusicology Ireland, 2016 'The result of this study is an engaging and lively account of the Irish harp during a little-studied period of its history, with a generous amount of illustrations, figures and colour plates ... The last pages of the book also include mention of the limited amount of scholarship on the Irish harp, something that the present study very ably addresses.' Denis Collins, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, 2016 '... this is a widely researched and thought-provoking study that synthesises a large amount of material and addresses significant gaps in existing scholarship on Irish music and cultural history.' Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 2015 'The achievement of this book in placing Irish music in context cannot be over-stated: in one single volume, the author manages to cover more than 150 years of the history of harps in Ireland, from musical, iconographic and symbolic points of view.' Etudes Irlandaises, 40-2 (2015) 'In northern Europe we take our national symbols lightly ... Many might assume that [our national symbol] is the shamrock, but it is the harp, whose background as icon and instrument is vividly charted by O'Donnell ... O'Donnell takes us deep into the symbolism and practice of the harp [and] takes us beyond the commonly accepted narratives of the male/female harper and the wire/gut-strung instrument into subtle, scholarly dissections of their roles and modes of depiction.' Books Ireland, May/June 2015'This is a revealing study not just for the musically inclined, but anyone concerned with Irish popular culture and its political and social dimensions.' The Irish Catholic, 17 September 2015 '[Ireland's Harp] is a valuable resource in an under-researched and under-published field and will help historical musicologists, and others, to think about, discuss, and perhaps reassess, the matters she brings to the fore. This book contains a wealth of information on matters organological, historical, social, cultural, religious and political. By weaving them together, Mary Louise O'Donnell provides the first full-length overview of many aspects of harp history in Ireland that highlight not only how Ireland's colonial rulers thought about the Irish and how the Irish viewed themselves over the last number of centuries, but how that changed the way they played music.'Siobhan Armstrong, The Journal of Music, March 2015 'Mary Louise O'Donnell is to the forefront of a new generation of Irish scholars whose focus is Irish musical tradition. Her ability to situate the music within a broad social and political canvas results in a wealth of fresh insights that will invigorate this rising aspect of Irish Studies across the world.' (Professor Micheal O Suilleabhain, Irish World Academy, University of Limerick) Mary Louise O'Donnell has written an authoritative and detailed study of the role played by the wire-strung Irish harp in the development of Irish cultural identity and nationalism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on her doctoral research and extensively illustrated, Ireland's Harp marks an important contribution to the literature on Irish music and cultural history. Following the decline of Gaelic society in the seventeenth century harpers adapted their instruments, repertoire and techniques to the changing demands and patronage of the new multicultural environment under Anglo-Irish rule, while the harp increasingly featured as an icon of Irish identity. Seven essays examine the Irish harp in the late eighteenth century as icon of and metaphor for revolution, and the politics of harping; the Irish harp in the creation of Irish literary nationalism through writers including Sydney Owenson and Thomas Moore; the early nineteenth-century patronage of harpers through the Belfast, Dublin and Drogheda Harp Societies; a positive reassessment of John Egan's adaptation of the Irish harp to contemporary conditions; the replacement of the 'winged-maiden' harp icon in the nineteenth century with the Brian Boru or Trinity College harp icon and its use by the Repeal and other national movements; and the final demise c.1880 of what O'Donnell clearly demonstrates had continued up to that time as an unbroken tradition of wire-strung harping. Ireland's Harp is a significant addition to Irish cultural studies. (Professor Barra Boydell was Professor in the Department of Music at NUI Maynooth and is co-editor of UCD Press publication Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (Dublin, 2013).

The image of the harp - symbolic of the political and cultural landscape of Ireland for centuries - evokes strong sentiments in the collective Irish imagination. This iconic instrument became the emblem on Irish coinage in the sixteenth century. Since then it has been symbolic of Irish culture, music, and politics - finally evolving into a significant marker of national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most important period in this evolution was between 1770 and 1880. In these years, the instrument became central to many utopian visions of an autonomous Irish nation and the harp's metaphoric significance eclipsed its musical one. Mary Louise O'Donnell uses these fascinating years of major social, political, and cultural change as the focus of her study on the Irish harp. From the revolutionary symbolism of the harp to the cultural curiosities that were the blind Irish harpers, the many permutations of Ireland's harp are thoroughly examined. O'Donnell also discusses how the protection and patronage of the Irish harpers passed from the aristocratic Gaelic order to the Ascendancy and affluent middle classes in Dublin and Belfast.Ireland's Harp brings to light the monumental importance of this instrument by highlighting the central place the harp occupied in the formation and expression of Ireland's cultural and national identity.