Performance tells journey of blind, Irish harpist

“I have a master’s in Irish history from Dominican College. I studied the period he lived in but O’Carolan was virtually unmentioned in all my studies,” Ball said in a phone interview from his home in Sebastopol, Calif.

O’Carolan lived from 1670 to 1738.

	If you go WHAT: Patrick Ball WHEN and WHERE: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 12 at the Historic Old San Ysidro Church, Old Church Road, Corrales, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 13 at the Harwood Museum, 238 Ledoux St., Taos HOW MUCH: For the Corrales concert, $22 in advance at www.brownpapertickets.com or at Frame-n-Art; $25 at the door, if available. For the Taos concert, $15 general public at the museum’s admissions desk

His music has been important to musicians but in a larger sense he was just a footnote in Irish history, Ball said.

“The time he lived in was probably as depressing and dismal as any nation lived through. It was a time when the English got their mitts into the Irish in a brutal way,” he said.

Like many other Catholic families, O’Carolan’s was uprooted from their farm and forced to relocate to the rocky, infertile land of western Ireland. That was about the time that the teenage O’Carolan went blind from smallpox.

“So he had this whole darkness to deal with at many different levels,” Ball said.

“When he started on the harp he wasn’t considered very good but he discovered he had marvelous powers of composition. The pieces he composed were incredibly light and uplifting.”

He said O’Carolan wrote some 200 tunes.

Ball will perform 17 of O’Carolan’s instrumental compositions in his presentation Saturday, Jan. 12 at the Historic Old San Ysidro Church. It is part of the “Music in Corrales” series.

The music is interspersed with the story.

“A lot of the tunes had specific stories behind them. You listen to the tune and the story behind the tune,” Ball said.

He said the stage presentation has its own overreaching storyline that is based on O’Carolan’s friendship with Charles MacCabe.

“He was O’Carolan’s best friend and traveling companion for most of O’Carolan’s life. MacCabe is the person telling the story. I assume his character so it’s not a simple recounting of things that happened to O’Carolan. It’s a story of a friendship,” he said.

On Jan. 13 at the Harwood Museum in Taos, Ball will give a different one-man presentation. It’s called “Celtic Harp and Story.”

In both performances he will play the Celtic harp.

“It’s the same type of harp that O’Carolan played, a wire-string harp played with the fingernails. It had been played in Ireland for at least 1,000 years,” Ball said. “But shortly after O’Carolan’s time the harp died out. The English destroyed the bardic tradition. It was replaced with harps with gut strings played with the finger pads.”

The wire harp was revived in Ireland in the 1970s, he said.