This iconic harp-song air survives in a possibly ‘pacified’ piano arrangement by Edward Bunting, in a fixed pulse. But a more relaxed setting – further removed from the strait-jacket of bar lines and time signature – exists in an evocative setting transcribed in 1943 by the music collector and musician, Séamus Ennis, from the playing of Frank Cassidy, the master Donegal fiddler born in 1900. This is the version of this majestic air that we will learn to play, and flesh out for two hands in an early-Irish harp idiom.

(part 1 of a two-part session)