Beschreibung:

PADRAIG O NEILL (1765-1832) A very important collection of (mainly) Irish traditional music, collected and written down in manuscript by Padraig O Neill, of Owning, near Carrick-on-Suir, circa 1780-1800, comprising four books of tunes in manuscript, a goatskin folder of mainly 18th century Dublin-printed music with tunes in manuscript on the backs of many of the sheets, a fifth tune-book written probably by his son Conn, and some associated items including a range of printed works of literature from the family library. Provenance : Private Collection, Ireland This is a collection of the first importance for students and historians of Irish traditional music. It appears to be the earliest surviving collection of Irish music in manuscript, predating the Bunting collection (early 1790s) by about a decade. As a Munster collection, it offers obvious opportunities for comparative study with the Bunting collection (assembled mainly at the harpers' festivals in Belfast). Padraig O Neill [1765-1832] is himself a person of considerable interest. He was a member of a long-established farming family, descended from the Gaelic nobility, on the edge of the Golden Vale, near the borders of South Tipperary, Kilkenny and Waterford. The family descent can be traced to a branch of the O'Neill chieftains of Ulster, of which they were very conscious, and they were evidently comfortably off. Padraig operated a mill and farmed some 80 acres. He was a piper, known locally as 'an muilleoir meidhreach', 'the merry miller'. There is much about Padraig and his background in Col. Eoghan O Neill's books 'Gleann an Oir' (1988) and 'The Golden Vale of Ivowen' (2001). The family had a tradition of learning, and Padraig's father was a collector of Irish manuscripts. Padraig himself wrote poetry in Irish, and he assisted in publishing a devotional work (1796) and a collection of local verse in Irish (1816) in Carrick-on-Suir. He was related by marriage to the family of Sheffield Grace, and it is thought he supplied him with poetry in Irish on the Grace family, some of which Padraig may have written himself. There is a microfilm in the National Library of a substantial letter-book of Padraig's; the original is or was in the collection of Ring College. There is evidence in books surviving from his library to indicate that Padraig had some knowledge of Latin, Greek and French; he was of course bilingual in Irish and English. There were close connections in the area with the Irish regiments in the service of France. There is a local tradition that Padraig made pike-heads in his mill for the 1798 insurgents; a cousin and close friend, Aodh O Neill, fought at Vinegar Hill and had to flee to France afterwards. Padraig O Neill's collections were known to other musicians at least from the mid-nineteenth century. George Petrie's published collections include 24 airs drawn from the O Neill notebooks; it is said that one of these, titled 'Moreen', may have provided Thomas Moore with the air to which he wrote 'The Minstrel Boy'. Petrie (1855) says of this air, 'This setting has been copied from a MS book of Irish songs written in 1785 by Mr. Patrick O'Neill, a respectable farmer on the Bessborough estate'. Donal O'Sullivan, editing the Bunting collection in 1927, stated that 'the whereabouts of O'Neill's collection is now unknown'. Eoghan O Neill in 1999 described two notebooks, one written on the backs of published sheets, containing some 116 tunes. The present archive is more substantial than that described by Eoghan O Neill, but is evidently the same collection. The following are the principal contents of the collection, briefly described: 1. A collection of printed music folios stitched into a rough cover of goatskin, circa 35 x 23 cms, inscribed at front 'Padraig O Niall 48', also 'Musick Book No. 2', with about 100 tunes (almost all Irish traditional, mostly titled in Irish) inscribed in ms. on the blank backs of the printed sheets at front and rear, with a few sheet