RIA Manuscript Collections of Irish Traditional Music Newly Published
The Irish Traditional Music Archive has recently published the Pigot collection of manuscript music held in the Royal Irish Academy Library. In this blog, Nicholas Carolan describes the Forde-Pigot collection and the life and work of two of Ireland’s most important collectors of traditional music.
Over 110 years ago two large manuscript collections of pre-Famine Irish traditional music were donated to the Library of the Royal Irish Academy on the same day. One had been compiled in the 1840s by William Forde (1797–1850), a Cork city professional musician. It comprised some 1,900 melodies. The other had been assembled from the 1840s to the 1860s by John Edward Pigot MRIA (1822–71), a Co. Cork-born barrister-at-law and amateur musician who spent most of his life in Dublin, with the assistance of his musician wife Annie Prendergast (c. 1814–85). This amounted to over 3,100 melodies. Both collections consisted of staff notations of vocal and instrumental music written from live performance by singers, uilleann pipers and fiddle players, or copied from manuscripts and print.
The double donation was made on 14 November 1910, indirectly by the Pigot family and directly by the educationalist, historian and traditional music collector Patrick Weston Joyce MRIA (1827–1914) to whom they had entrusted it. He described the donation at the time as ‘the most valuable collection of the kind ever presented to the Academy’; Sir John Pentland Mahaffy MRIA (1839-1919), proposing a vote of thanks, agreed. It has been identified since in the Library as the Forde-Pigot Collection of Irish Traditional Music and it featured as such in the Treasures of the Royal Irish Academy Library volume of 2009.
An edition of each collection has recently been published by the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) in Dublin with the cooperation of the RIA Library, the latest of ITMA’s many hardcopy and digital publications of the music. The Forde Collection: Irish Traditional Music from the William Forde Manuscripts appeared in 2021, The Pigot Collection: Irish Traditional Music from the John Edward Pigot Manuscripts now in 2024. Both have been edited by Nicholas Carolan and Caitlín Uí Éigeartaigh, with music in staff notation set and laid out by Jackie Small. All of the music in the collections noted from live performance or preserved from manuscripts now lost is presented, arranged chronologically to the extent possible and transposed when necessary to keys suitable for traditional musicians of the present day. Variants are included. The Forde volume (lx + 380 pp., hardback) contains 922 melodies, the Pigot (xciii + 299 pp., hardback) 624. Each is accompanied by extensive introductions, biographies, facsimiles and illustrations, appendixes and indexes. Melodies copied by Forde, Pigot and Prendergast from print sources are not included; these are now available in Aloys Fleischmann’s monumental 1998 volumes Sources of Irish Traditional Music c. 1600–1855 and increasingly online in digitised facsimile.
William Forde divided his intense and highly active professional life between Cork and London. Trained in classical music, he was a performer on flute and piano, a promoter and musical director of concerts and festivals, a teacher of music and singing, and the author of instructional manuals and theoretical works on music. From the 1820s to the 1840s he edited hundreds of printed collections of classical and popular music for London publishers, before turning from 1840 to the dedicated collection and study of ‘Irish national music’. Working at first in Munster, he began in 1845 to collect from Irish musicians and singers in London, and in 1846, as the Famine worsened, he came to collect in the field in Connacht. He intended to publish his collection and issued an appeal for subscriptions but had not met with success by the time of his early death. About two-thirds of the melodies in the edition are the airs of songs in Irish and English; the remainder are mainly jigs, harp tunes, marches, work-song melodies and keens. A notable feature of the collection is Forde’s ethnographic notating of all the versions of a tune he could find.
John Edward Pigot, Co. Cork-born, was the eldest son of David Richard Pigot MRIA (1797-1873), the Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer, a close colleague in Westminster of Daniel O’Connell and his neighbour in Merrion Square, Dublin. An early Catholic graduate of Trinity College and an accomplished amateur musician on piano and probably violin, Pigot junior was deeply involved in many of the national political and cultural movements of the mid-century. He trained as a barrister in Dublin and London before returning to Ireland to practice in 1847. Keenly interested in Irish traditional music from childhood, he began to compile a personal Irish music manuscript in 1843, assisted from 1844 by Annie Prendergast, a collector in her own right. The two married in 1851. Pigot was also a dedicated nationalist from childhood. While an undergraduate, he came under the influence of Thomas Davis MRIA and was a member of the inner circle that published The Nation newspaper. A leading Young Irelander, he remained an advanced nationalist until his early death. Pigot has long been regarded as a highly active field collector of the music. In fact, while he did collect from singers, fiddle players and uilleann pipers in Ireland and London, this valuable part of his collection is small. His huge compilation is primarily a collection of collections, transcriptions of manuscript collections made by others (many women among them) and loaned to him for copying. Most of these are now lost but have been preserved by Pigot in his and Prendergast’s notations. He also edited Irish-language song melodies in Dublin for the publisher John O’Daly in 1849 and 1850, played a leading role in the establishment there of the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland in 1851, and enabled the publication of an important traditional music volume by George Petrie MRIA in 1855. Some half of the melodies in the new edition are the airs of songs in Irish and English; almost as many again are jigs in 6/8 and 9/8 time, with a variety of other tune-types. The music included from Pigot’s network of contributors provides valuable evidence of oral-print relationships in the music.
While P.W. Joyce MRIA published selections from the Forde and Pigot manuscripts in 1909 and Donal O’Sullivan MRIA made some use of them in his editing of the Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society from 1920 to 1939, neither collection has been rigorously edited and contextualised until now. Chronologically layered and geographically representative as they are, both are important historical documents. They provide multiple insights into the vigorous and complicated world of Irish traditional music as it existed two hundred and more years ago, before the Great Famine had wrought its cultural destruction and before the technological innovations of the twentieth century had greatly accelerated change in the music; they are available for further scholarly evaluation. But they also offer to contemporary singers and musicians the opportunity to connect with this early modern Irish music and reanimate it for enjoyment and enlightenment. In particular, song melodies can be united with the hundreds of traditional song texts recorded on such existing sources as Irish-language manuscripts and English-language ballad sheets but without their music.
Both publications are available for purchase from www.itma.ie/shop (€40 each) and from the Irish Traditional Music Archive, 73 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, tel. 01-661 9699.
