Turlough O'Carolan(1670–1738)

Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin was born at Newtown near Nobber in County Meath in 1670, son of an iron-foundry worker of the Carolan line. The family moved when he was a small child to Carrick-on-Shannon in County Roscommon on his father's employment at the iron-works of the MacDermott Roe family of Alderford. He was schooled at the Alderford household school alongside the MacDermott Roe children, his patrons for the rest of his life, and at fourteen contracted smallpox, which left him permanently blind. The MacDermott Roes, recognising the boy's musical aptitude, apprenticed him to a wandering harper of the period for the three-year traditional Irish harp training, and on his eighteenth birthday equipped him with a horse, a guide and a harp and set him up as an itinerant professional harper.

He travelled across the next fifty years through the country houses of Connacht and Ulster, accepting the standard hospitality (three nights' bed, board, and a gold guinea) at each house in exchange for performing the harp at the household entertainments and composing a planxty (a personal air) for the head of the family. The houses he played at over the half-century run to a substantial roster of the surviving late-Gaelic and Anglo-Irish gentry of the period: the MacDermott Roes of Alderford and the Carolans of Mohill, the O'Connors of Belanagare, the MacDonnells of Mayo, the Plunketts, the Magennises, the Maguires of Tempo, the Burkes of Glinsk, the Crofts of Velvetstown, the Goldsmiths of Pallas, the Sterns of Skreen, and (at the southern limit of his circuit) the south-Kilkenny Powers, Butlers and Walshes.

The corpus of his composition runs to some two hundred and twenty surviving airs, the largest single body of work attributed to any individual harper of the Irish tradition. The two hundred and twenty include the great planxties (Planxty Burke, Planxty Connor, Planxty Maguire, Planxty Drury), the love-song airs (Eleanor Plunkett, Bridget Cruise, Fanny Power, Charles O'Conor), the satirical sketches (Carolan's Quarrel with the Landlady, Carolan's Maggot), and the great late farewell composition Carolan's Farewell to Music, composed at the MacDermott Roe house of Alderford in the days before his death in March 1738. His harmonic vocabulary, unusual in the older Irish-harp tradition, absorbed the European late-Baroque idiom he had heard from the Italian-itinerant composers in the great Anglo-Irish houses (Geminiani heard him perform in Dublin and is recorded as saying he had heard no harper of his equal in Italy).

He died at the MacDermott Roe house of Alderford on the twenty-fifth of March 1738 in his sixty-eighth year. His funeral lasted four days, was attended by every Gaelic and Anglo-Irish gentleman of Connacht and by harpers from across the country, and is one of the best-documented Irish funerals of the period. He was buried in the MacDermott Roe family vault at Kilronan churchyard near Ballyfarnon in Roscommon. His airs were first published by his son Charles O'Carolan at Dublin in 1747 in The Beauties of Carolan; the standard modern collection is Donal O'Sullivan's Carolan: The Life, Times and Music of an Irish Harper (1958), the foundational scholarly text on the tradition. The Carolan name in modern Irish music carries the weight of the two hundred and twenty airs.