SUMMER SCHOOL OF EARLY IRISH HARP
KEITH SANGER
Lecturer, Scoil na gCláirseach
Keith Sanger received a copy of Francis Collinson's book "The "Traditional and National Music of Scotland" as a birthday present from home, while working in South Africa, and was intrigued by some of the questions raised On returning to Scotland in 1972 he was able to find work in a hospital that was conveniently close to four of Edinburgh and Scotland's major archives, which then provided the springboard for further research.
Realising that there was no point in just sitting on his findings, where the material provided a coherent theme he wrote it up and published it in a variety of articles. This has led to several collaborations, most notably with Alison Kinnaird; their book "Tree of Strings - Crann nan Teud", a history of the harp in Scotland, was published in 1992, and they have provided a chapter on the same subject for the forthcoming volume 10 of the Compendium of Scottish Ethnology: "Scottish Life and Society; Oral Literature and Performance Culture". More recently Keith has collaberated with Roderick Cannon in an edited version of Donald MacDonald's 1820 piobaireachd collection, undertaken on behalf of the Piobaireachd Society. As a result of the research involved in this last work, further collaborations with Professor Cannon are still ongoing.
Keith retired from the health service last year and has made a seamless transition into fulltime research, covering Bagpipes and Harps in both Scotland and Ireland. He prefers to avoid coming to definitive conclusions being convinced that there is still a lot more information waiting to be found, a belief that he finds continues to be confirmed.