Cionar & Riunchanus
After Bunting's time, the term 'chanas' can be seen transmitted in very degraded form,
reinterpreted and reworked even further. On 2 June 1890, F. St. John Lacy presented a
paper to the Royal Musical Association called Notes on Irish Music which contains the
following information:
Nowhere does Bunting transmit the information that any scale of the Gaelic harp was
named 'ardfideach', which is a misspelliing of 'airfideach', a poetic Gaelic word that Bunting
simply and rightly presents, in p30 of the General Vocabulary in his 1840 volume, as
meaning 'music, musician, harmony'.
The last A in the element 'chanas' is spelled as a U, a convention which indicates that
'chanas' is understood here as a noun rather than a part of a verb. This follows the
precedent of the spelling and interpretation in Bunting's 1840 Introduction. Lacy's word
'cionar' seems to derive ultimately from Bunting's 'ciontar/cionthar' (music/melody) on p31
of the Vocabulary and 'riunchanus' also seems to have derived from 'rinn' (music/melody)
on p35. Neither term appears in MS37 item 17.
The word 'cionthar' is translated as 'music' in Shaw's dictionary of 1780. The Highland
Society's Dictionary of the Gaelic Language (1909) spells it «cion'thar» and translates it as
meaning 'querulous music', using Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair as a source. This word
is possibly also the origin of Bunting's term 'ceann ard cruit' (high head harp).
'Rinn' may in fact derive from the ancient masculine word 'rind' (point). It is equivalent in
meaning to the latin word 'punctum' and was mainly used in relation to poetry. It may have
been one of the Gaelic words for a musical note but there are no clear examples of such
usage.
Bunting's term 'rim ceól' or 'rimm ceol' may derive from 'rím ceoil' which may have meant
'counting of music', referring perhaps to the counting of beats during the process of
musical composition, in a fashion analogous to counting the syllables of rhyme.
There was one grand scale in use which went by the name of Ardfideach, and
this was divided into three parts, called Basascanus (or bass), Cionar (tenor),
and Riunchanus (treble). When the harpers met at Belfast in 1792 this was
the scale they used, and which I here reproduce from Bunting, as it gives the
compass of their harps ...