Belfast Harp Societies

The Belfast Harp Society (1808-1813) and its successor, the Irish Harp Society (1819-1839), were philanthropic associations formed in the town of Belfast, Ireland, for the avowed purpose of sustaining the music and tradition of itinerant Irish harpists, and secondarily, of promoting the study of the Irish language, history, and antiquities. For its patronage, the original society drew upon a diminshing circle of men and women, Presbyterians for the most part, who were veterans of the patriotic, reform and--in the case of several unrepentant United Irishmen--revolutionary politics of the 1790s. In a town, hostile in its sectarian division to Protestant interest in distinctive Irish culture, the society reconvened as the Irish Harp Society in 1819 only as a result of a large and belated endowment raised from subscribers, both Indian and Irish, in Bengal. Once those funds were fully exhausted the new society ceased its activity..

Belfast Harp Society

Subscribers

The list of the Society's original subscribers (191 names, representing a total annual subscription of 281 guineas) was headed town's proprietor, the Marquess of Donegall at 20 guineas. But the principal movers were Dr James MacDonnell and his brother Alexander (the Presbyterian sons of Michael Roe, a Catholic relation of the earls of Antrim) who stood apart, though not publically in opposition, to the Donegalls' Anglican establishment. They were well connected to those who, in the cause of representative government, had taken the test or pledge of the Society of United Irishmen (for whom the Irish harp was the symbol) to forward", a brotherhood of affection .. among Irishmen of every religious persuasion". Thus the list of subscribers included the author of the original test, Dr. William Drennan; Francis, John, and Mary Ann, McCracken, brothers and sister to Henry Joy McCracken who had been hanged as a rebel in "'98"; Drennan's early associate, Thomas McCabe; and William Tennent, who had been held as a state prisoner until 1802. Also among the subscribers was William Tennent's brother, Dr Robert Tennent who with Drennan produced the Belfast Monthly Magazine committed to Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform.

The school: O'Neill, Bunting and Cody

An original inspiration for the Society was the harpist Arthur O'Neill who had instructed James and Alexander MacDonnell in their youth. Through the society, they were able to provide their old teacher with a sinecure as a charitable tutor to poor children (from the age of ten) blind like himself. The musical director was the musician and collector Edward (Atty) Bunting. Bunting had for thirty years been a lodger of the McCrackens, and Mary Ann McCracken acted as his unofficial secretary (contributing anonymously to the second volume of his work The Ancient Music of Ireland in 1809). In July 1792, with the support of the McCrackens, Bunting had brought O'Neill to Belfast's first Harp Festival. This had been staged for the benefit of the Belfast Charitable Society but coincided with the town's Bastille Day celebrations, complete with parades by local Volunteer corps, and resolutions in favour of Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform. The festival was widely interpreted as an expression of a new republican-tinged patriotism.

The Society provided not only for the teaching and preservation of Irish music but also,from July 1809, classes in the Irish language. Provided by James Cody, these were welcomed by Mary Ann McCracken, who is known to have studied from Charles Vallency's Irish grammar,.and by her Gaeilgeoir friends, and fellow subscribers, the poetess Mary Balfour and the brothers Samuel and Andrew Bryson. Dr MacDonnell, Robert James Tennent (the son of Robert Tennent), and the engineer Alexander Mitchell contributed to an additional subscription to support Cody's efforts.

Crisis and demise

From 1810, money was raised for the Society by a winter season of six balls held in the Exchange Rooms under the patronage of the Marchioness of Donegall. In 1818, Whitelaw and Walsh, in their History of Dublin, observed that “several blind minstrels educated in the seminary at Belfast are found wandering through different parts of the country, affording a pleasing and harmless amusement to the people who hear them, providing a comfortable support for their necessities, and a sweet consolation to their infirmities”. But by then, the Society had already ceased operation, for which there are different accounts.

The conclusion drawn by the Irish antiquary, George Petrie, was that the society was flawed in conception:

The effort of the people of the North to perpetuate the existence of the harp in Ireland by trying to give a harper’s skill to a number of poor blind boys was at once a benevolent and a patriotic one; but it was a delusion. The harp at the time was virtually dead, and such effort could give it for a while only a sort of galvanised vitality. The selection of blind boys, without any greater regard for their musical capacities than the possession of the organ of hearing, for a calling which doomed them to a wandering life, depending for existence mainly if not wholly on the sympathies of the poorer classes, and necessarily conducive to intemperate habits, was not a well-considered benevolence, and should never have had any fair hope of success.

Others attribted the break up of the society in 1812-13, to its treatment of Arthur O'Neill. It is alleged that O'Neill, considered "something of a national treasure", was not adequately paid, so that he lived his last years in poverty, and that the resulting scandal induced people who had championed the work of the society to withdraw their support.

Irish Harp Society

The Bengal Subscription

Letters and poems were submitted to the major Belfast papers urging that something be done to help O'Neill, found to their way to expatriate community in India, and it is the impression that they created that prompted the unexpected "Bengal subscription". Readers both Irish and Indian, on O'Neill's behalf, raised £1,200. But as O'Neill was three years dead by the time this bounty reached Belfast, it was put instead to creating a new Irish Harp Society. Employing some of O'Neill's pupils classes were again started, and a small number of harps was procured, the pupils again being selected from "the blind and the helpless". When the subscription was exhausted, the Society's Academy in Cromac Street closed. As the society secretary, John McAdam, noted that was not sufficient local interest to sustain its activity:"Our gentry in Ireland are too scarce, and too little national, to encourage itinerant harpers, as of old; besides, the taste and fashion of music no longer bears upon our national instrument: it had its day but, like all other fashions, it must give way to novelty.".

Changing fashion

McAdam did also concede that, "like all other fashions," "the taste and fashion of music ... must give way to novelty.". From 1809 Irish harps were purchased by many titled women in Ireland. But after the year 1835, the "'fad' went out". ,Charles Egan's workshop in Dublin, the main supplier, went out of business. Irish harp was ousted in both drawing-room and in popular circles by the pianoforte and violin.

Belfast's waning "national" outlook

Events co-inciding with the demise of the first harp society in 1813, did suggest that in Belfast the necessary "national" outlook was waning. Orangemen, a relatively new element in the life of the town, had that year clashed with hostile, largely (but not exclusively) Catholic, crowds as they returned from their Twelfth of July celebrations in Lisburn. Two Orangemen open fire killing two. When Robert Tennent (the Harp Society's treasurer) pressed forward at a town meeting to protest he was accused of assaulting Rev. Edward May, Anglican vicar of Belfast and brother-in-law of Lord.Donegall and was subsequetly sentence to three months. When, following the Reform Act of 1832, the first opportunity arose of challenging the Donegall, and Orange-aligned tory, interest in a parliamentary election it was taken up by Tennent's son, Robert James Tennent (a patron of the Irish Harp Society). But he lost, having failed to commit himself on an issue that was increasingly to associate interest in Irishness with Catholic-majority separatism, the restoration of an Irish parliament.