TRADITIONAL IRISH
This month Declan Zapala brings you a beautiful new arrangement of an old traditional Irish classic, full of lush chords and sparkling harmonics to sink your fingers into.
The traditional Irish folk music archive is a treasure trove of timeless beauties, and the song featured this month is no exception. The origins of the melody of She Moved Through The Fair (or Thro’ The Fair) are unclear. The Eastern influence of the Mixolydian mode hints at the Moorish connection to Celtic culture, which goes all the way back to the first and second century BC, but as to whether the melody goes back this far or is merely inspired by this musical heritage is another question; the answer to which has likely been buried by the sands of time and will never be answered.
The music for the piece was first published in 1909 in a collection of Irish folk songs titled Irish Country Songs Volume I, and the music was prepared by Irish-born musicologist Herbert Hughes. A graduate of London’s Royal College of Music and a music critic for The Daily Telegraph from 1911- 1932, Hughes did for Irish musical heritage what Hungarian composer and fellow musicologist Béla Bartók did for Eastern European ethnic music. This was to be one of the first to collect, consolidate, and publish traditional melodies from their respective homelands thus exposing their country’s folk music to a global audience.
Hughes’ life work comprises seven different volumes of collections featuring almost two hundred traditional Irish folk songs. It is perhaps fitting that two composers with such similar career trajectories were born less than a year apart.
It isn’t uncommon for traditional Irish folk music to have no lyrics, since much of the music (for instance jigs and reels) would have been dances written for social events such as weddings and ceilidhs, and would have been played on traditional instruments like fiddle, flute and whistle, pipes, banjo and so on. Some tunes, especially airs like this, still have their Gaelic lyrics passed down, though sadly any original Gaelic for this song seems to have been lost. To make it an air that could be sung with lyrics, the Irish poet and friend of Hughes, Padraic Colum wrote the text that was included in the 1909 publication previously mentioned. Colum’s poem depicts the sorrow of a young man whose recently betrothed has, for reasons unknown, tragically died and visits him as a ghost in the night. “I dreamed it last night, that my true love came in. So softly she entered. Her feet made no din. She came close beside me, and this she did say, it will not be long love, ‘til our wedding day”.
With those lyrics in mind, the mellow tone of the nylo
