Na Píobairí Uilleann

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An Píobaire

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8 4 18 20120927 O NE OF THE MOST CELEBRATED PIECES in the canon of Irish piping was the ‘Máirseáil Alasdruim’, a descriptive piece which commemorated the battle of Cnoc na nDos (Knockanuss, between Mallow and Kanturk), fought on 13th November 1647, at which Inchiquin defeated the Irish Confederate forces under Lord Taaffe. One of the Confederate com- manders, Alasdar Mac Domhnaill Mac Colla Ciotaigh (son of the Scottish warrior known to the English as ‘Colkitto’), was murdered after the surrender and his followers put to the sword. The musical piece seems to have been made to his praise and in his memory, and has fascinated hearers for nearly four centuries. It was attested in 1750 in Smith’s History of Cork, in 1786 in Walker’s His- tory of the Irish Bards, by Crofton Croker in 1824 in his Researches in the South of Ire- land and in 1861 by Canon Goodman (Rector of Ard- groom) in a version in his man- uscript collection of music. Despite the apparant tenacity of the piece, by the end of the 19th century it had all but passed from tradition. Mícheál “Cumbá” Ó Súilleabháin, the famous Kerry piper who died early in the 20th century, was the last piper to play the piece in its entirety. In 1899, under the title ‘Gol na mBan san Ár’, he recorded a portion of the full piece for the Feis Ceoil committee, on one of their Edison phonograph cylinders. These were usually scraped and re-used, but through some mira- cle this one survived to provide us with the only aural evidence of the manner in which this old piece was performed. This rendition was transcribed by Pádraig Ó Máille and in 1969 was published in Breandán Breathnach’s music journal Ceol. The Dublin piper Pat Mitchell then studied the transcription and original recording, learned the piece him- self, and included it on his 1976 Topic LP Pat Mitchell, Uilleann Pipes (Topic 12TS294), thereby becoming the first piper to perform the piece in over sixty years. Pat’s interest in the piece did not cease in 1976, and he has con- tinued to study the surviving printed and manuscript ver- sions, with a view to possibly re-creating the sound of the full piece. In the past few years I be- came involved with him in this quest, in a very non-creative role, I hasten to add – that of fetcher and carrier of materials that might be found to have a bearing on the original style of the piece. For it was essentially the style that was missing. As mentioned earlier, transcriptions of the piece had survived – one by Canon Goodman, one by Crofton Croker, and one by the Gaelic scholar Frank Keane (source of many tunes in the Petrie Collection referred to on page 6), which was contained in an 1876 manuscript in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. The illustration on the next page shows the beginning of that version. The RIA allowed me to photograph this collec- tion a couple of years ago, and sight of the ver- 18 ~ From the Archives ~ MAIRSEÁIL ALASDRUIM Pat Mitchell Tony Kearns

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2012-09-21T00:00:00

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