Musical Performance

An immense variety of harps have been played in different countries at different times. One of the most important is the triple harp, a high-headed frame type with three ranks of strings, the outer two providing the diatonic notes of the scale and the inner, the accidentals. This was known in the 4th century and was the first fully chromatic harp. Like the old Irish harp it had a clear, bell-like sound, the technique in this case being to strike rather than to pluck or pull the strings. It was played well into the 20th century in Wales and was known as the Welsh harp. The only known scoring for it was in Handel’s Esther.

It is generally believed that the first pedal harp was invented by the Bavarian Simon Hochbrucker between 1720 and 1740. It had a single- action hook mechanism connected to the pedals by wires and was thoroughly unreliable since it pulled the strings out of alignment and broke them. This harp was popular until Sebastian Erard replaced the hooks with a pronged disk which did not interfere with the alignment.

The first pedal harps adorned all aristocratic and fashionable homes, and the great luthiers or instrument makers were engaged in their manufacture — Lepine, Naderman and Cousineau among them. Many of these magnificent instruments are now only to be seen in museums, behind glass, untouchable and silent since they have become too frail to play. It was Cousineau who was the first to introduce a form of double action, but Sebastian Erard again improved upon it and altered the harp’s configuration to give it greater strength. Erard’s system, used world-wide today, consists of pedals connected to rods which pass up the fore-pillar and work pronged disks.

Technique

The strings of the harp are pulled or plucked with the tips of the fingers; all fingers except the little ones are used. The strings are plucked in the middle to produce the normal sound and near the sound-board for a somewhat metallic timbre.

Harmonics are produced by stopping the string half way up and plucking the upper portion; normally only the first harmonic, the octave, is called for. Rather dry sounds can be produced by stopping the strings with the hand immediately after plucking them; these are called sons pouffes. Raising and lowering the pitch of the strings by means of the double action of pedal and disk mechanism calls for rapid vet inaudible footwork.

All harpists carry with them a second set of strings or at least a selection of the major ones. These are colour-coded to assist identification. Strings are inclined to break — noisily in a bar of silence if Fate is unkind — and harpists must be able to re-string rapidly and retune.

Repertoire

Garner Read, who collated the Thesaurus of Orchestral Devices, wrote of the harp: ‘It is safe to say that no other orchestral instrument is so generally misunderstood by orchestrators and composers and so ill- used in the overwhelming majority of modern works . . . To the average orchestrator the harp unfortunately means but one thing — glissando, and more glissando!’ Liszt was in fact the firs.t composer to write glissandi for the harp, in his Mephisto Waltz. Berlioz of course had no less than ten harps in the Damnation of Faust, and Wagner contributed to the opulence of Der Ring des Nibelungen by scoring for six harps in all four operas in the cycle. But normally only one or two harps are seen in the orchestra. Perhaps it is some race memory of the ancient Celtic and Scandinavian harps that have made French and Finnish composers the most sensitive to the expressive powers of the harp. The Swan of Tuonela must be one of the most celebrated of all harp pieces, but in his First Symphony Sibelius also wrote a challenging part for the harp, requiring a lot of pedal changes. Debussy scored for two harps in the Prelude a l’ Aprês-midi d’ un Faune using, apart from the ubiquitous glissando, chords, spread chords and harmonics.

Both Debussy and Ravel were commissioned by harp makers to write for the instrument and Ravel published his Introduction and Allegro for flute, clarinet, harp and strings, a work which the American harpist Roslyn Rensch has described as ‘a master lesson in harp composition.’

One of the most popular and familiar of all harp passages is a cadenza in the ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker.

The variety of sounds and effects possible on the harp and achieved in solo harp music in, for instance, Berio’s Sequenza for solo harp, has rarely been exploited in orchestral music.

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