25 Feb 08 - 02:47 PM An Buachaill Caol Dubh said, "In his 'Songs of the Irish', Donal O'Sullivan identifies the melody with O'Carolan's 'Kitty Nowlan', and attaches Irish words re. 'Caitlin ni Houlihan' to a variant.

I don't have that book but I do have Donal O'Sullivan's Complete Collection of Carolan's Irish Tunes and I can't find the Kitty Nowlan tune listed in that, or in Catriona Rowsome's brilliant book and CD's The Complete Carolan Songs & Airs.

The tune named Catherine Nowlan is listed as Tune 652 in the O'Carolan's Compositions section of O'Neill's Music of Ireland. He collected all of the tunes from a variety of sources but as I understand it, a lot of the tunes were learned, i.e. handed down over many years in the music tradition and the actual original sources of the tunes may not have been accurately known by the musicians.

The excellent Old Music Project of the O'Carolan section of O'Neill's book has the Catherine Nowlan tune in ABC, MIDI and GIF format, as well as the Noteworthy Composer format. (Note: I paid to download the music from this site and it is well worth it. I refer to it a lot. I can't praise it enough for the work which has been done to compile so many old music tunes into usable formats.)

I vaguely know The Lark in the Clear Air tune and I really need to look into the similarities between that tune and the Kitty/Catherine Nowlan tune but I thought it might be useful to know some specifics from the supposed O'Carolan connection. So far I don't think it is an O'Carolan tune but I am not a music or music history expert, just a huge fan of O'Carolan's music.