Hi Alasdair I have just been looking at the part of Sally harper's
book that discusses Welsh manuscripts of English music theory... some
wild translations and misuse of English and Latin terms going on
there too. Have you seen this? Simon




On 26 Oct 2008, at 18:55, Alasdair Codona wrote:

> A' chàirdean,
>
> If you think Bunting or his source made a big day out of 'chanas',
> wait until you read about JFC Lacy who reinterprets and reworks the
> poor benighted verb form even further than Bunting. On 2 June 1890,
> F. St. John Lacy presented a paper to the Royal Musical Association
> called Notes on Irish Music which contains the following information:-
>
> "There was one grand scale in use which went by the name of
> Ardfideach, and this was divided into three parts, called Basascanus
> (or bass), Cionar (tenor), and Riunchanus (treble). When the harpers
> met at Belfast in 1792 this was the scale they used, and which I here
> reproduce from Bunting, as it gives the compass of their harps ..."
>
> Nowhere does Bunting transmit the information that any scale of the
> Gaelic harp was named 'ardfideach', which is a misspelliing
> of 'airfideach', a old, poetic Gaelic word that Bunting simply and
> rightly presents, in p30 of the General Vocabulary in his 1840
> volume, as meaning 'music, musician, harmony'.
>
> The last A in the element 'chanas' is spelled as a U, a convention
> indicates that 'chanas' is understood here as a noun rather than a
> part of a verb. This follows the precedent of the spelling and
> interpretation in Bunting's 1840 Introduction. Lacy's word 'cionar'
> seems to derive from 'ciontar/cionthar' (music/melody) on p31 of the
> Vocabulary and 'riunchanus' also seems to have derived from 'rinn'
> (music/melody) on p35. According to Bain, the word 'cionthar' is
> translated as 'music' in Shaw's dictionary of 1780. The Highland
> Society's Dictionary of the Gaelic Language spells it -cion'thar- and
> translates it as 'querulous music', using Alasdair mac Mhaighstir
> Alasdair as a source.
>
> 'Rinn' may in fact derive from the ancient masculine word 'rind'
> (point). It is equivalent in meaning to the latin word 'punctum' and
> was mainly used in relation to poetry. It may have been one of the
> Gaelic words for a musical note but there are no clear examples of
> such usage. Bunting's term 'rim ceól' or 'rimm ceol' may derive
> from 'rím ceoil' which may have meant 'counting of music', referring
> perhaps to the counting of beats during the process of musical
> composition, in a fashion analogous to counting the syllables of
> rhyme.
>
> Beannachdan,
>
>
>
> Alasdair
>
>
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