This is a story of one fiddle player’s discovery of Denis Murphy’s archive materials – a story that musicians learning tunes from the old recordings of their musical heroes can perhaps relate to. This story of research into the Sliabh Luachra fiddle icon’s repertoire would not have been possible without the help of the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) which not only held answers for the origin of the tapes but also contained some never-before-seen details about Denis Murphy’s tunes, all that in a fascinating collection of manuscripts stored at 73 Merrion Square, Dublin. In keeping with the spirit of discovery, rather than providing all the answers up front, this chapter would follow the detective work as it unfolded, presenting the clues piece by piece. The author hopes that this would aid the future explorers of archive materials fascinated with the world of old and mysterious tapes, some of which can clearly be traced back to the work of the great collectors of Irish music.

Anton Zille is a Russian fiddle player, editor and web developer based in Serbia who specialises in the Sliabh Luachra fiddle style. His digital project #ProjectDenis explores the repertoire of fiddle player Denis Murphy (1910–1974).

July–November 2024

If you want to skip the introduction, you can go straight to the description of the Breandán Breathnach materials.

Mystery Tapes

I open my story with a bold assertion that the passing of recordings from hand to hand has become as much an integral part of learning traditional music as the pure drop passing down of tunes from person to person. It is so easy to record and share music in our times that we perhaps forget that recording devices became widely accessible just a few generations ago. 

It is all the more amazing that traditional musicians found ways and means to record and share music with their peers even at the times when it required the use of such novelties as transcription discs and reel-to-reel tapes. Some tapes would have been made at memorable house parties, others recorded alone in the kitchen and handed to friends on eve of emigration or sent across the Atlantic as musical greeting cards. These recordings contain uniquely intimate and unfiltered renditions of tunes that commercial records are not always able to capture. Bearing this and their private nature in mind, it is no wonder that such tapes have become venerated, cherished and guarded by traditional musicians. 

Yet sharing is vital to traditional music – and many of these tapes have inevitably started circulating in a discrete fashion, allowing for the tunes to be passed on again at the cost of some context lost along the way. Somewhere in the process the tapes made by musicians for musicians have become intermixed with recordings that had similar intimate quality but also a very specific purpose: fragments of recording sessions made by collectors of Irish music. Originating in all shapes and forms, they too were often made in kitchens of private homes or at arranged meetings in pubs yet they were seldom meant to be handed down as is. While some of this material was selected to then be published or broadcast, a large portion of it served as a source for the transcriptions of tunes with the aim of preserving the traditional heritage and spreading the music in widely accessible printable form.

Perhaps none were as ambitious in this regard as the Dublin music collector and uilleann piper Breandán Breathnach (1912–1985) who made it his life’s work to preserve the wealth of Irish traditional music by collecting thousands of tunes and then transcribing and categorising them within his catalogue of handwritten cards. Breathnach called his best-known card index An Cnuasacht Iomlán den Cheol Damhsa (CICD).

CICD was never published in full and neither were any of the source recordings but many of Breathnach’s transcriptions appeared in the landmark music book series Ceol Rince na hÉireann (CRÉ). The Breandán Breathnach Collection of reel-to-reel recordings formed the core of the Irish Traditional Music Archive in 1987 and in time became readily accessible to visitors of the archive. Read more about Breandán Breathnach’s work here.

This is the general, if simplified, picture of the variety of tapes I was faced with after becoming engrossed by the old recordings of Irish fiddle players, those from the Sliabh Luachra area in particular. On top of the out-of-print but easily traceable commercial recordings there were those mystery tapes made privately – but when, by whom and for what purpose, nobody could tell for sure. It took me the better part of two decades to begin investigating the source of these materials in earnest – and in 2024, as Sliabh Luachra marked the 50th anniversary of Denis Murphy’s death, I thought it was high time I had these nameless tapes demystified and their context recovered.

Detective Work

The tapes I was particularly fascinated with were the solo recordings of Denis Murphy made in a relaxed house setting and featuring some rare tunes not found on commercial recordings. They were largely untitled. One sequence of tunes stood out as I found it in five or so different collections with varying quality and playback speed, sometimes appended to seemingly unrelated sets of recordings. It would appear that this tape has been making rounds for quite a while but who recorded it, where and when?

The first major clue I got were a few short audible comments made on the tape by Denis and another man who I figured was the one recording. The man in conversation with Denis was clearly keen to learn the names and history of his tunes as he either asked for details or called out the name of a particular tune. 

Initial search for references to Denis Murphy materials in the archives yielded Breandán Breathnach as a likely candidate – but I couldn’t be sure since he was not the only music collector who recorded Denis and I wasn’t familiar with his voice. I was further convinced the collector was indeed Breathnach after discovering that some of these tunes were published in Ceol Rince na hÉireann, volumes 2 and 5. Notably, these collections repeatedly came up in search results of Tunepal while I was working to identify some of the rare tunes from the tapes. Looking up a few available transcriptions I realised they were closely matching the versions played on the recordings. Translated annotations found online suggested that Denis played those tunes for Breathnach between 1966 and 1970.

After identifying the tune names and their likely source, I mapped out the relative order of the same groups of tunes found in different sources that I thought were copies of the same recording – this helped in the final step of the evidence-gathering.

Searching the Archive

Knowing that ITMA is home to the Breandán Breathnach materials, I turned to searching its website and catalogue. I figured that the best way to go about it was using ITMA’s Soutron search which offers advanced filtering options and detailed annotations.

I quickly realised that the number of ITMA materials mentioning Denis Murphy is overwhelming – and so the first thing I had to do was to figure out how to filter the search results efficiently. The initial step would be selecting the type of materials in “Filter by content” which in my case was “Sound Recordings”. Even with the filter on, I still needed to optimise my search queries.

The Soutron search is quite sensitive to input and increasing the number of keywords or enclosing them in “…” in the plain search mode does not always result in better output. For best results one would be advised to use the advanced search – but for that you have to know which specific field each of the keywords corresponds to. For instance, if you know the recording’s year, you would want to go to the “Additional Fields” section of the advanced search and add the “Creation Date” field, same goes for “Creation Location” if you need to filter by specific place / county the recording was made in.

Thanks to the detailed descriptions of the items, I was soon able to pinpoint the Breathnach materials as having Breandán Breathnach Collection in the title. For a quick and easy search, typing this could be a good starting point if no other details are available – going to the “People” filter on the left and selecting “Murphy, Denis 1910-1974” or any other performer is the next necessary step. The above left me with over 40 items in the list.

Knowing from the Ceol Rince na hÉireann annotations that Breathnach got some tunes from Denis Murphy in 1966, 1967 and 1970, I limited the search to the reel-to-reel recordings of these years and looked through the tune titles mentioned there. 

Lo and behold – both the references and the expected names of several groups of my mystery tapes matched those found in Breandán Breathnach’s reel-to-reels numbered 30 and 40. ITMA track notes came with plenty of useful information: not only did they reference available publications such as CRÉ (e.g.: CRE 2, # 40) but also indicated whether the published version came “from this recording”. All this metadata helped confirm the origin of the tapes – furthermore, it suggested that these very recording sessions were used by Breathnach as the source for Denis Murphy tunes in Ceol Rince na hÉireann. 

Discovering CICD Index

I was excited that there were many more recordings of Denis Murphy from the Breandán Breathnach sessions stored at ITMA and that some day I may be able to listen to them in Dublin. However, I also wanted to reference these historic recordings in my #ProjectDenis database and there were several problems in the search listings preventing me from doing so. 

Firstly, while many of the tunes had titles and references to CRÉ, others were either untitled or titled ambiguously and were not published in any collections which presented a dead end for cataloguing. Secondly, Breathnach’s reel-to-reels often included several different performers and there was no detailed track-by-track breakdown in the Soutron search. 

Wondering what to do, I noted that many of the tracks contained additional references to Breandán Breathnach’s own catalogue index, abbreviated as CICD. At the time I had a fairly vague understanding of what its contents looked like and considered this to be information for internal use only. However, as I started reading about CICD, it gave me some ideas.

I found some old articles and posts referring to Breathnach’s index focused on his numeric system – the “music code” and learned that he used it for encoding and sorting of more than 6000 tune settings previously transcribed from the recordings of Irish musicians or copied from collections of music. The code represented on-the-beat notes of the first two bars of the tunes converted to numbers relative to the fundamental of the scale (1) – a reel encoded in such a way would look like eight numbers separated by a dot (bar line). This system allowed Breathnach to create unique shorthands for tunes and in theory enabled one to search for them irrespective of the key.

Describing his system in the Ceol magazine (vol. 5, no.2), Breathnach admitted to it not being perfect but suggested that it could be improved to account for variations after all the data would have been computerised. This unfortunately never came to fruition as Breathnach died in 1985, less than three years after the publication of that article. The CICD index remained unpublished and Breathnach’s music code failed to gain traction in Ireland – although, curiously, a very similar system has been employed by one prominent Scottish music collection online, citing Breathnach’s code as an inspiration.

Irrespective of its flaws, Breathnach’s system could still be effectively used for referencing the tunes contained within his collection, and its numeric codes – which I initially thought were the sole content of the CICD cards – could also be decoded to identify tunes. 

With this idea in mind, I contacted ITMA seeking the index of all CICD codes to serve as the key to all the references found in Denis Murphy annotations. It turned out that no such list was available – but the cards themselves contained a lot more useful information than expected. 

Thanks to the help of ITMA’s Archivist, Maeve Gebruers, and Artist Liaison and Field Recording Officer, Alan Woods, I was able to study over 200 CICD cards related to Denis Murphy and some of the associated archival recordings. The research took place between July and October 2024 and resulted in this pro bono project. 

The next chapter contains a brief overview of the actual contents of the Denis Murphy CICD materials and the list of primary sources for these cards that could be studied at ITMA.

The overview is followed by in-depth chapters on selected Denis Murphy / Breathnach materials broken down by tune type which contain never-before-published recordings and some fascinating new insights into the origin of tunes and characters associated with them. Some of this information has only survived thanks to the notes taken down by Breathnach on the relevant CICD cards.

The next chapter contains a brief overview of the actual contents of the Denis Murphy CICD materials and the list of primary sources for these cards that could be studied at ITMA.

The overview is followed by in-depth chapters on selected Denis Murphy / Breathnach materials broken down by tune type which contain never-before-published recordings and some fascinating new insights into the origin of tunes and characters associated with them. Some of this information has only survived thanks to the notes taken down by Breathnach on the relevant CICD cards.