and forgetting their origin, to wear their hair in the "coulin" or headdress of the Irish. Naturally the coulin became a symbol of loyalty to Erin, and the Irish maiden in the song-unfortunately its words have not come down to us-is said to have expressed her preference for the lad who wore his hair in the national manner over the stranger. Several well-contrasted variants of the air of "The Coulin " have come down to us, and we will examine three typical examples. Here is the melody in its most familiar form, which is also the form accepted by authorities as the most perfect. Ex. 1. The Coulin. For this melody it was that Moore wrote 66 Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see." It is one of the fairest jewels in Ireland's crown of song. The contour has the unaffected elegance of a lily and Chopin himself never infused greater variety of rhythmic charm into a composition of like proportion. How has this perfection been arrived at? Is "The Coulin " the little masterpiece of some individual musician whose name has not come down to us, or does it represent the Ex. 2. The Coulin as sung in Clare. refining labor of many generations of singers? Assuredly the latter alternative is the correct one; for, if the song had come into being perfect, like Pallas from the brow of Zeus, we should never find any such ingenuous version of the strain as Teague MacMahon learned in County Clare and gave to Petrie. The tendril-like elegancies of the familiar tune are There is wide divergence too in melodic Yet the identity of the two airs admits absent. outline. of no doubt. Reason and instinct alike persuade us that this is near kin to the air which gradually developed into the "Coulin " we all love to-day. Fortunately for our right understanding of this interesting problem in melodic evolution, Edward Bunting has preserved us an instrumental version of "The Coulin" which goes back to the close of the seventeenth century. Bunting, it will be remembered, was commissioned to write down the tunes played by the harpers at their famous meeting at Belfast in 1791. The most notable figure in that gathering was Denis Hempson, a musician of patriarchal age, in whose playing Bunting believed he could discern the remains of a noble artistic tradition. Hempson played for his young friend "The Coulin" as he had learned it in 1700, when a scholar of Cornelius Lyons, one of the last of the heroic race of harpers. This version is here reproduced; it shows the harper's disposition to regard the tune he was playing as a sort of given theme and to fretwork it with ornamentation of his own devising. It is easy to see how a player with a touch of genius, perceiving the golden possibilities in a simple strain, might convert it into a great melody. The primitive melody was, in all likelihood, the outcome of deep feeling in some person of musical genius, who may or may not have been a musician, for the gift of melody, like that of poetry, is the prerogative of no class, but a gift from Almighty God. The Clare tune probably comes nearest to the germinal strain. Perhaps some harper enriched it with the vine-like embellishments which we all love, and it may be that the bars of contrasting rhythm, which form so dainty an episode in the master version (Ex. 1), were added by a piper with a head full of jigs and reels. But this, of course, is pure conjecture and aims not so much to lay down the law concerning the growth of this particular melody as to indicate the influence commonly operative in the development of Irish music. |