Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór

Turlough O'Carolan was born in 1670, lost his sight to smallpox at eighteen, and spent the next fifty years riding around Ireland on a horse playing the harp for whoever would put him up. His first patron was Squire George Reynolds of Lough Scur in County Leitrim, a harper and poet himself, who is supposed to have listened to the young Carolan play and told him he might make a better fist of his tongue than his fingers. Donal O'Sullivan, who spent a career on Carolan and published the standard collection in 1958, takes the tradition that this was the first thing Carolan composed as probable rather than proven. Nobody can do better than that at this distance.

The story attached to it is folklore and worth telling as folklore. Reynolds pointed out two hills near the lough, the small fairy mound and the great one, and told Carolan the local tale: that the two hills were the seats of two hosts of fairies who fell out and fought a battle, and that the dead were buried under the mounds. The mounds are real and are prehistoric cairns. Whether Carolan wrote the tune the same evening, as the story usually has it, is nobody's to say.

Edward Bunting, who did the first serious collecting of Irish harp music, thought the air was arranged out of an older one called The Bonny Cuckoo, and said so in print in 1840. The reason everybody knows it now is more recent than that: Seán Ó Riada took it up in the middle of the twentieth century and Planxty recorded it in 1972, and it has been the tune people learn first from Carolan ever since.

It is the gentlest thing on this shelf to play and the hardest to play well. The whole air stays between the open D course and the two B naturals at the seventh fret of the E course, and there is nothing quick in it, so the left hand has almost no work. All the work is in the right. Twenty three of the thirty two bars open on a half note or a dotted half, two or three beats on one pitch, and a mandolin cannot hold a note: you either tremolo it or you let it die. Start slow, pick each long note once and listen to how far it carries, then start filling those bars with tremolo and stop when the tune still sounds like a melody rather than a buzz.