Carl Hardebeck

Carl Gilbert Hardebeck or Carl G. Hardebec (10 December 1869 – 10 February 1945) was a British-born Irish composer and arranger of traditional music. Biography 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 1914 Mary Reavy, Hardeback’s wife died. 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 Co