(b nr Nobber, Co. Meath, 1670; d Ballyfarnon, Co. Roscommon, 1738). Irish harper and composer. He was one of the numerous harpers who made their living as itinerant musicians; he was probably the last of them to compose, and is the only one about whom much is known. His father, John Carolan, was a subsistence farmer or possibly a blacksmith. When Carolan was about 14, the family moved to Ballyfarnon, where John Carolan was employed by the McDermott Roe family of Alderford House. Mrs McDermott Roe took an interest in the boy and gave him some education. When he was blinded by smallpox at the age of 18, she had him apprenticed to a harper also called McDermott Roe. She maintained him during three years of study, and when at 21 he was deemed a finished pupil she provided him with a guide, a horse and some money, so that he could begin his professional career.
When Carolan left Ballyfarnon he had no thought of composing; he was merely a performer, and not a good one, for he had begun the harp too late to master the difficult technique of the wire-strung instrument. At the very first house that he visited, however – that of Squire George Reynolds of Lough Sgur, Co. Leitrim – he was urged to turn his hand to composing songs. Thus he wrote his first, Sheebeg and Sheemore, and he continued to write songs for the rest of his life. His habit was to compose a tune while on his way to the house of a patron, and then to write suitable words for it. The song would then be ready for performance when he arrived at his destination. Carolan married Mary Maguire of Co. Fermanagh, and they had a family of six daughters and one son. They settled on a small farm near Mohill, Co. Leitrim, though Carolan was often absent, spending much of his time travelling throughout the country. He also played a good deal in Dublin, and was friendly with Jonathan Swift and many other leading figures of the day. He returned to die in the house of his earliest friend and patron, Mrs McDermott Roe, and the great numbers at his funeral attested to his fame.
Most of Carolan's music, much of which is in dance rhythm, is cheerful and lively, reflecting his own outgoing temperament. His pieces show influences of Irish folk melody, the traditional harp music of Ireland, and Italian art music. He was unusual among the Irish harpers in looking beyond the native tradition for musical inspiration. He knew and was greatly influenced by the music of the Italian composers of his own time, such as Vivaldi and Corelli, and he greatly admired Geminiani, whom he almost certainly met in Dublin. Much of his music attempts the Italian forms, with sequences and imitations: some of his longer pieces have a quick jig added as a coda, in the manner of Corelli.
About 200 of Carolan's airs survive, both instrumental pieces and songs with, in many cases, their words, but unfortunately most are only in single line form, so that it is not definitely known how he harmonized or accompanied his melodies. The key to this problem may lie in an incomplete book of Carolan's music in the National Library of Ireland. In the absence of the title-page, this book was until recently thought to have been published in the early 1720s; but examination of the watermark has now proved that the book dates from 1743 at the earliest. It seems almost certain that this is a fragment of the collection of Carolan's work published in 1748 by his son, in collaboration with Dr Patrick Delany of Trinity College, Dublin, and of which no complete copy has yet been found. As a harper himself, Carolan's son would have known how his father played, and the arrangement of the music in this book perhaps provides a clue to Carolan's own method of performance and to Irish traditional harping style as a whole. The melodies are accompanied by a single line bass. Salient features are the absence of conventional harmony, and the moving bass which is often in octaves with the treble, and frequently anticipates or echoes the melody lines. The earliest collection to contain tunes by Carolan was A Collection of The Most Celebrated Irish Tunes, published by the Neale brothers in 1724. Tunes by Carolan are also found in A Favourite Collection of … old Irish Tunes of … Carolan (Dublin, c1780), in many 18th- and 19th-century anthologies and printed collections of Irish music, and in manuscript collections, particularly those of Edward Bunting (Belfast, Queen's University) and George Petrie (EIRE-Dn, Dtc).
J. and W. Neale, eds.: A Collection of The Most Celebrated Irish Tunes (Dublin, 1724/R1986 with commentary by N. Carolan)
J.C. Walker: Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (Dublin, 1786, enlarged 2/1818)
T.Ó. Máille, ed.: Amhráin Chearbhalláin/The Poems of Carolan (Dublin, 1916)
D. O’Sullivan: Carolan: the Life, Times and Music of an Irish Harper (London, 1958) [incl. melodies of all known airs]
H.M. White: ‘Carolan and the Dislocation of Music in Ireland’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, iv (1989), 55–64
G. Yeats: The Complete Works of O'Carolan (Cork, 1989)
G. Yeats: The Harp of Ireland (Belfast, 1992)
GRÁINNE YEATS