Celtic Music: A brief capsule of early Irish tune records. The world of Irish music is eagerly awaiting publication of a reported 5000 copies of early Irish tunes assembled by the late Prof. Aloys Fleischmann, by Garland Publishing Co. It was originally supposed to have apeared last year, but was not in their new titles catlog when I looked about two weeks ago.

At present the only very early Irish tunes that I know of are in the Wm. Ballat Lute Book MS (c 1580), with some of the same ones in the Fitzwilliam Virginal MS. A few Irish tunes appeared in England in the 17th century, and more in English publications of the early 18th century.

The Neals published in Dublin in 1724 'A collection of the most celebrated Irish tunes'(recently reprinted) and gave some more in a few collections of country dances spread over a few years subsequent.

About 1748 a collection of O'Carrolan's tunes were published (a few had appeared in ballad operas earlier), but all that survives, of what was apparently this, is a few pages. After about 1750 Irish printers issued single sheet songs with music, most of which were English songs, but books began to appear (not all of which are extant) about 1780.

The earliest known MS collection of tunes after those named earlier was one from a harper named O'Neill, 1787, and several tunes from the manuscript are in the Stanford-Petrie collection. I don't know if this manuscript is still extant. It has been said that the earliest manuscripts now known are those of Edw. Bunting. Donal O'Sullivan edited these and published the tunes in Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society, c 1927-9.

I have made an index of the titles of tunes in most of the works mentioned above (except I have used Bunting's 3 books rather than O'Sullivan's extended article) through the Stanford-Petrie collection (Petrie died in 1866), and I don't have Petries' 1855 volumes, and have 'theme coded' many so I can recognize the same tune under different titles (and there are a fair number of these). This is far from complete; I only have about 2500 tunes (but some are multiple versions of the same tune).

If anyone can add to or correct my brief account (beyond my poor spelling that is) here please do.

P. S. I almost forgot, there have been articles on Irish Music in Grove's Dictionary by O'Sullivan and the late (great) Breandan Breathnach. [O'Sullivan, usually good, when he made errors made huge ones so they are usually easy to spot. 'The Beggar's Wedding' (ballad opera) is not all Irish tunes, only about 10 out of 54 are. Peter Kennedy copied this error into his 'Folksongs of Britain and Ireland'.)