Belfast Harp Festival

A plaque commemorating the harpers

The Belfast Harp Festival, called by contemporary writers The Belfast Harpers Assembly,[1] 11–14 July 1792,[2] was a three-day musical and patriotic event organised in Belfast, Ireland, by leading members of the local Society for Promoting Knowledge (the Linen Hall Library): Dr. James MacDonnell, Robert Bradshaw, Henry Joy, and Robert Simms. Edward Bunting, a young classically trained organist, was commissioned to notate the forty tunes performed by ten harpists attending, work that was to form the major part of his General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music (1796).[3] The venue of the contest was in The Assembly Room on Waring Street in Belfast which was opened as a market house in 1769.

It was staged for the benefit of the Belfast Charitable Society but coincided with the town's Bastille Day celebrations with which it shared patrons and supporters. These celebrations involved the trooping of local Volunteer corps carrying flags and banners hailing the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, American liberties, and the new Polish Constitution[4] and concluded with town-meeting resolutions, carried by the new-formed United Irishmen, in favour of Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform.[5] A handbill, advertising the festival, had been clear as to its patriotic intent: in view of "how intimately the Spirit and Character of a PEOPLE are connected with their National Poetry and Music", it presumed that "the Irish PATRIOT and POLITICAN [sic], will not deem it an object unworthy [of] his patronage and protection".[6]

The festival is said to have marked "the beginning of a long association between northern Protestants and the Gaelic revival".[7] In the 1790s, interest in the Irish harp, stemmed from a combination of cultural and political motives. Emboldened by the revolution in France, Presbyterians in the north-east of Ireland were seeking to ally with the kingdom's Catholic majority against the Anglican ("Protestant") Ascendancy and in favour of a representative national government. Recognition of the Gaelic past as a common inheritance was seen to bridge the sectarian divide and, as a badge of separate and distinctive Irish culture, bolstered demands for greater autonomy from England.[8]

  1. ^ Sara C. Lanier, «"It is new-strung and shan't be heard": nationalism and memory in the Irish harp tradition». in: British Journal of Ethnomusicology; Vol. 8, 1999
  2. ^ "Belfast Harp Festival 1792, by Belfast Trad Fest". Cultúrlann. Retrieved 7 July 2023.
  3. ^ Irish Music; XXVII
  4. ^ Madden, Richard (1843). The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times (30 May 2020 ed.). Belfast: J. Madden & Company. p. 179.
  5. ^ Boydell, Barra (1998). "The United Irishmen, Music, Harps, and National Identity". Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr. 13: (44–51) 47. doi:10.3828/eci.1998.5. ISSN 0790-7915. JSTOR 30064324. S2CID 255973612.
  6. ^ Byers, David (2022). The Gatherings of Irish Harpers, 1780-1840. Belfast: The Irish Pages Press. p. 26. ISBN 9781838201883.
  7. ^ Bardon, Jonathan (1992). A History of Ulster. Belfast: The Balckstaff Press. p. 221. ISBN 0856404764.
  8. ^ Quinn, James (2002). Soul on Fire: a Life of Thomas Russell. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. p. 130. ISBN 9780716527329.