Carl Hardebeck

Carl Gilbert Hardebeck (Carl G. Hardebec) (10 December 1869 – 10 February 1945) was an Irish composer and arranger of traditional music.

Hardebeck, whose father was German and mother was Welsh, was born in Clerkenwell, London. He lost his sight when he was a baby. He attended the Royal Normal School for the Blind in London (1880–1892) where, under his teacher Frederick Corder (a professor from the Royal Academy of Music), he showed a marked aptitude for music.

In 1893, at the age of twenty-four, he moved to Belfast, where he opened a music store, but the venture failed and he became the organist of a small parish in the city, the Holy Family Church, Wellington Place. He entered an anthem, O God of My Salvation for contralto and chorus for the 1897 Dublin Feis Ceoil, and won; on this occasion he heard folk song arrangements of Charles Villiers Stanford and others for the first time. At the 1901 Feis Ceoil, he again won a prize, this time for a large cantata, The Red Hand of Ulster. In 1919, he was to become the director of the music school in Cork and became the first professor of Irish music at University College Cork in 1922. Ill-suited for administrative tasks, he relinquished the post after one year and returned to Belfast, which after the Irish Civil War had become the capital of Northern Ireland. In 1932, he finally settled in Dublin, where he worked for An Gúm, the Irish government publisher, as arranger of Irish traditional songs for piano and choirs, many of which became teaching material at schools in the nascent Republic of Ireland. He also taught Irish and traditional music in the Dublin Municipal School of Music for two years. On many occasions he acted as adjudicator in singing and musical competitions across Ireland.

Despite his mixed German/Welsh/English background, the events of the 1913 Dublin Lock-out, the outbreak of World War I, and the 1916 Easter Rising radicalised him, turning him into an Irish nationalist. He was quoted as saying "I believe in God, Beethoven and Patrick Pearse". He studied the Irish language and collected folk songs from around the country, making some unique arrangements that bridged the gap between traditional and art song.

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