Muse and Method in the Songs of Hamilton Harty: Three Early Works, 1895–1913

Against the backdrop of the Gaelic Revival and the foundation of the Irish Free State Hamilton Harty plied his trade as an organist, pianist, conductor and composer. It is his compositional output that is the focus of this thesis, and, more specifically, his songs, Sea Wrack, My Lagan Love and A Cradle Song. Both Harty and Herbert Hughes wrote an accompaniment for the folk-song My Lagan Love and set to music the poem “A Cradle Song”—both Harty and Charles Villiers Stanford set to music the poem “Sea Wrack”, all of which make for an interesting comparison. The purpose of this investigation is to explore Harty’s aforementioned three works with a view to finding evidence for the development of Harty’s compositional voice. Despite the publication in 2013 of Jeremy Dibble’s substantial volume, Hamilton Harty: Musical Polymath, the opportunity remains to analyse individual works in a detailed manner. Therefore, this paper will examine features such as genre, motif, harmony, text-music relationship and Irish traditional music in the context of nationalism. It is my contention that Harty’s musical language developed a greater level of complexity as he synthesized more elements identifiable with Irish music, such as ornamentation, modal harmony, inflection and pentatonicism, in combination with word painting and musical symbolism, in the writing of recognisable genres such as a parlour song, a folk-song and a lullaby. My analysis clarifies Harty’s position on the continuum from Anglo-Irish to Irish composers and provides a response to remarks such as Raymond Warren’s claim that Harty’s nationalism was in melody alone