ABSTRACT
At the mid hour of night' is without doubt an important song and has attracted a lot of attention due to the verbal correspondence with its musical structure. Matthew Campbell and Harry White have both noted how the rhythm of the text has been directly generated from the melody with Thomas Moore's prosody and rhyming schemes coinciding with its construction. As a general rule, performance indicators are vague in the Irish Melodies, relating to the character of the poetry rather than the music. The harpist Janet Harbison has noted the particular change of manner and tempo in the 'tender and majestic' Molly Macalpin, transformed into the rousing 'Remember the glories of Brien the brave'. Similar alterations received rebuke from Edward Bunting; in his third volume, the collector praised Moore's poetry while Sir John Stevenson was reproved for 'changes in the actual frame and structure of the melodies'.
