The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #159372 Message #3782195
Posted By: Jack Campin
30-Mar-16 - 05:35 AM
Thread Name: 'All the dear Spinning Eileens' (Irish harpists)
Subject: RE: 'All the dear Spinning Eileens' (Irish harpists)
The only musical connection I knew of for Lude was the splendid strathspey "Mrs Macinroy of Lude" by Joseph Lowe, from 200 years later.
It might well be possible to fill in the gap with other music, if somebody wanted to dig out the relevant genealogies and search for tunes associated with the names therein. (Was Miss Menzies of Culdares, for whom the strathspey is named, the one who married General Robertson of Lude?)
You might like this if you haven't already seen it. (I posted it to another forum in 2002). From the memoirs of Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus, about being in a big house in the Highlands under her governess at the age of 15 in 1812, getting up at 6am with her sister:
In winter we rose half an hour later, without candle, or fire, or warm water. Our clothes were all laid on a chair overnight in readiness for being taken up in proper order. My Mother would not give us candles, and Miss Elphick insisted we should get up. We were not allowed hot water, and really in the high- land winters, when the breath froze on the sheets, and the water in the jugs became cakes of ice, washing was a cruel necessity, the fingers were pinched enough. As we could play our scales well in the dark, the two pianofortes and the harp began the day's work. How very near crying the one whose turn set her at the harp I will not speak of; the strings cut the poor cold fingers so that the blisters often bled. Martyr the second put her poor blue hands on the keys of the grand-pianoforte in the drawing room, for in those two rooms the fires were never lighted till near nine o'clock - the grates were of bright steel, the household was not early and so we had to bear our hard fate.