PRELUDE EVIDENCE
The following notes appear in the Introduction to Bunting's 1840 volume of The
Ancient Music of Ireland.
pp82-83
Feaghan Gleash. "Try if it be in tune."-An ancient Irish prelude. This
extremely curious piece was taken down from Hempson's performance in the
year 1792, and is given as he played it. It was with great reluctance that the
old harper was prevailed upon to play even the fragment of it here
preserved, to gratify the Editor, to whom he acknowledged he was under
obligations. He would rather, he asserted, have played any other air, as this
awakened recollections of the days of his youth, of friends whom he had
outlived, and of times long past, when the harpers were accustomed to play
the ancient caoinans or lamentations, with their corresponding preludes.a
When pressed to play, notwithstanding, his peevish answer uniformly was,
"What's the use of doing so? no one can understand it now, not even any of
the harpers now living." This relic is but one half of the prelude, as he
solemnly averred that he had forgotten the remainder. It is now forever lost;
but what has been preserved will serve, with other curious matters, to shew
the great attention formerly paid to every thing connected with music in
Ireland. The musical critic is requested to observe two striking peculiarities in
this first part of the ancient Irish prelude; first, the total absence of the chord
of the subdominant; and secondly, the evidently premeditated omission of
the two intervals of the diatonic scale, the fourth and seventh. Whether the
second part of the prelude included these tones or not cannot now be
ascertained.
'...the highly curious Lesson and Prelude of the sixteenth century, by Scott...'
p8
Féachain Gléis