THE TUNE.
Of all the different composers to whose music Moore's “sacred songs” were sung—Beethoven, 377 / 327 Mozart, Stevenson, and the rest—Avison seems to be the only one whose name and tune have clung to the poet's words; and we have the man and the melody sent to us, as it were, by the lyrist himself. The tune is now rarely sung except at church festivals and village entertainments, but the life and clamor of the scene at the Red Sea are in it, and it is something more than a mere musical curiosity. Its style, however, is antiquated—with its timbrel beat and its canorous harmony and “coda fortis”—and modern choirs have little use in religious service for the sonata written for viols and horns.
It was Moore's splendid hymn that gave it vogue in England and Ireland, and sent it across the sea to find itself in the house of its friends with the psalmody of Billings and Swan. Moore was the man of all men to take a fancy to it and make language to its string-and-trumpet concert. He was a musician himself, and equally able to adapt a tune and to create one. As a festival performance, replete with patriotic noise, let Avison's old “Sound the Timbrel” live.
Charles Avison was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1710. He studied in Italy, wrote works on music, and composed sonatas and concertos for stringed orchestras. For many years he was organist of St. Nicholas' Kirk in his native town.
The tune to “Sound the Loud Timbrel” is a chorus from one of his longer compositions. He died in 1770.
“THE HARP THAT ONCE THROUGH TARA'S HALLS.”
This is the only one of Moore's patriotic “Irish Melodies” that lives wherever sweet tones are loved and poetic feeling finds answering hearts. The exquisite sadness of its music and its text is strangely captivating, and its untold story beckons from its lines.
Tara was the ancient home of the Irish kings. King Dermid, who had apostatized from the faith of St. Patrick and his followers, in A.D., 554, violated the Christian right of sanctuary by taking an escaped prisoner from the altar of refuge in Temple Ruadan (Tipperary) and putting him to death. The patron priest and his clergy marched to Tara and solemnly pronounced a curse upon the King. Not long afterwards Dermid was assassinated, and superstition shunned the place “as a castle under ban.” The last human resident of “Tara's Hall” was the King's bard, who lingered there, forsaken and ostracized, till he starved to death. Years later one daring visitor found his skeleton and his broken harp.
Moore utilized this story of tragic pathos as a figure in his song for “fallen Erin” lamenting her lost royalty—under a curse that had lasted thirteen hundred years.
The harp that once through Tara's halls