(b Armagh, Feb 1773; d Dublin, 21 Dec 1843). Irish folksong collector. He was the son of a Derby mining engineer who had settled near Dungannon and married Mary O’Quin; he studied music with his brother Anthony. In 1784 he was invited by William Ware to take over his duties as piano teacher and organist at St Anne’s, Belfast, in which town his other brother, John, was already established as a teacher and pianist. He became articled to Ware and soon rose to prominence in Belfast’s musical life; in 1806 he was appointed organist of the Second Presbyterian Church, Rosemary Street, and St George’s, High Street. He became the best-known Belfast piano teacher of his day and was the chief driving force behind the organization of such events as the visit of Catalani in 1809 and the Belfast Music Festival of 1813, in which he took a prominent part as a pianist, playing a Mozart concerto. He was a founder of the Belfast Harp Society (1808–13) and the Irish Harp Society (1819–39). In 1819 he married Marianne Chapman, moving to Dublin where his brother Anthony was a piano teacher. There he was appointed organist of St Stephen’s, and was for a short time (1825–7) a partner in a music warehouse.
Bunting was the first systematic collector of Irish folksongs; of particular significance in his career was the meeting of harpers in Belfast in July 1792. On this occasion he acted as scribe, notating the performances of Hempson, O’Neill, Fanning and seven others who remained from the rapidly declining class of traditional players. He was thus only just in time to preserve the melodies from oblivion, and became virtually the only source for the manners and customs of the ancient tradition, which he described in the preface to his third publication. He embarked upon a systematic collection of further material, and travelled through the countryside where he was assisted by Patrick Lynch, an Irish scholar, who collected the Gaelic texts. Apart from his notebooks, which are extant (in the library of Queen’s University, Belfast), his publication A General Collection of Ancient Irish Music appeared in three volumes: the first containing 66 tunes (London, 1797), the second having 75 additional airs (with English words by Campbell and others) and a dissertation on Egyptian, British and Irish harps (London, 1809), and the third with over 150 airs and a 100-page dissertation on the history of music in Ireland (Dublin, 1840). Valuable as these publications are, it should be realized that Bunting was limited by the ignorance of his time concerning the characteristics of traditional Irish music, by the limitations of orthodox notation in coping with melismatic decorations, and by the demands of his day to provide the melodies with inappropriate words and unsuitable harmonies in the form of piano arrangements.
Bunting's collection (containing the original source of many of Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies) has been re-edited, restoring the appropriate Gaelic verses collected by Lynch, as Bunting's Ancient Music of Ireland: Edited from the Original Manuscripts by Donal O'Sullivan with Mícheál O Súilleabháin (Cork, 1983).
G. Petrie: ‘Edward Bunting’, Dublin University Magazine, xxix (1847), 64–73
E. O’Curry: On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (London, 1873/R)
C.M. Fox: Annals of the Irish Harpers (London, 1911/R)
M. McNeill: The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1865: a Belfast Panorama (Dublin, 1960/R)
G. Yeats: The Harp of Ireland (Belfast, 1992)
BRIAN BOYDELL