MacFarlane's Lament: A Song History
"MacFarlane's Lament" is a slow, mournful Irish air in 3/4 time, a single strain long, known in Irish as Caoine Mic Farlain and in older books as "Mac Farlane's Lamentation."[1][2] Edward Bunting was the first to print it, in his Ancient Music of Ireland of 1809, though the Traditional Tune Archive suggests the melody may have begun in Scotland, pointing to a Scots Gaelic text by Rob MacPharuig whose English translation, "MacFarlan's Lament," appeared in Albyn's Tale (1824).[1]
Harp, wood, various materials, 18th century. A harp of about Bunting's time, shown for the subject; it has no connection to the air.
The air went on to appear in a run of Irish collections: Walker's Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1818), J. Clinton's Gems of Ireland (1841), P. M. Haverty's One Hundred Irish Airs (1859), the mid-nineteenth-century Cork manuscripts of James Goodman, and O'Neill's Music of Ireland (1903), which marks it to be played mournfully.[1][2] Thomas Moore set new words to it, "Shall the harp then be silent," in the eighth selection of his Irish Melodies; the Philadelphia Saturday Magazine in 1821 found the poem tiresome, faulting the "sameness of the versification."[1] Charles Villiers Stanford's 1895 edition of Moore, which went back to the airs as Bunting and George Petrie had noted them, still names the tune "MacFarlane's Lamentation."[3]
Dana Gruber includes "MacFarlane's Lament" in Deja-New, a Fingers Of Steel collection of classic and traditional songs with a new twist, for mountain dulcimer with optional guitar chords.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "McFarlane's Lament" (annotation).
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "McFarlane's Lament" (tune versions).
- Library Ireland: "Shall the harp then be silent. Air: MacFarlane's Lamentation" (Moore's Irish Melodies, Stanford edition, 1895).
- Fingers Of Steel: "Dana Gruber, Deja-New".
- Image: Harp, wood, various materials, 18th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.