Brighid's Flame: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"Brighid's Flame" appears in Ellen Pratt's Ensemble Arrangements For The Mountain Dulcimer, Volume 8, a book published by Ellen Pratt, where it is scored for four dulcimers in DAD tuning, each part marked capo 1.[1] The listing credits an outside composer for one other piece in the book but none for this one, and Pratt's own store page describes the volume only as original and traditional arrangements, so the sources consulted here do not say who wrote it or when.[1][2] Pratt's DulcimerDownloads biography says she began composing for dulcimers with four equidistant strings around 2004, and that her ensemble writing began after she joined a dulcimer orchestra in northeastern Connecticut.[3]

Faint pen drawing of a young woman in profile with her hair tied back

Profile of a Girl Holding a Candle, pen and brown ink, heightened with traces of white gouache, c. 1480. Shown for its candle; it has no connection to the piece or to St Brigid.

Neither the listing nor Pratt's store page explains the title.[1][2] Brigid (also called Brigit, Bridget or Bride) was, in Britannica's account, the abbess who established a major religious house at Kildare during the 400s, and she is honoured alongside Patrick and Columba as one of Ireland's three patron saints; Britannica gives her birth as about 450, a traditional date, and her death as about 525.[4] Solas Bhríde, the Brigidine Sisters' centre in Kildare, tells the tradition that a fire was kept burning at her foundation, adding that the twelfth-century Welsh chronicler Gerald of Wales found it still tended by her nuns and that it may have lasted until the monasteries were suppressed in the sixteenth century.[5] The same account says the flame was rekindled in Kildare's Market Square in 1993 by Mary Teresa Cullen, then leader of the Brigidine Sisters, and that on St Brigid's Day, 1 February 2006, President Mary McAleese presided when a perpetual flame, taken from the one the sisters keep, was lit in the town square.[5] No source consulted here connects the tune to the saint or to the Kildare flame.[1][2]

Our book that contains the song "Brighid's Flame"

Sources

  1. Ellen Pratt: "Ensemble Arrangements For The Mountain Dulcimer, Volume 8".
  2. Ellen S. Pratt: "Ensemble Arrangements for Mountain Dulcimer Volume 8".
  3. DulcimerDownloads: "Ellen Pratt".
  4. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "St. Brigid of Ireland".
  5. Solas Bhríde: "The Perpetual Flame".
  6. Image: Profile of a Girl Holding a Candle, pen and brown ink, heightened with traces of white gouache, c. 1480. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song