Brian Boru's March: A Song History
Brian Boru, king of Munster from 976 and high king of Ireland from 1002, died on 23 April 1014 at Clontarf near Dublin; by Britannica's account he was too old to fight, and after his son Murchad had won the day, a band of fleeing Norsemen came upon his tent and killed him.[1] The march bearing his name is tied to that battle in titles such as "Brian Boru's March to Clontarf," but the sources consulted here document no music from the king's own time, so the connection is best taken as tradition rather than history.[2][3]
John Egan, Portable Harp, wood and various materials, 1819. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An Irish harp made some eight centuries after Brian Boru's death, shown for its subject.
In the nineteenth century, Irish harpers played a march under this name.[3][4] The German travel writer Johann Georg Kohl, attending an evening of poetry and music at a Catholic priest's house in Drogheda, heard a blind young harper choose Brian Boru's March as his first piece; Kohl connected it with Clontarf and heard in it both victory and grief.[4] Harp historian Simon Chadwick lists the march among the pieces of the harper Patrick Byrne, citing an 1868 New York magazine account of an 1861 performance in which each section was introduced aloud to follow the stages of a battle, a description Francis O'Neill reprinted in 1913.[3]
The three-part march known today, usually in A Dorian, appears as no. 1801 in O'Neill's Music of Ireland, which irishtune.info, concentrating on sources after 1900, gives as its oldest dated source, from 1903.[2] The Fingal Trio of pipes, fiddle and flute recorded it in 1931, and The Chieftains included it on The Chieftains 2 in 1969.[2] On the harp, Chad McAnally recorded a version in 2011 based on the published description of Byrne's performance.[3]
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