Irish Harp playing methods, speculation.(not for Nancyboys!)

[Baglady]

A few years back I found a story on the net that seemed to be contemporary about a harpist and a piper. I can’t find it now but the story line was something like this.

An itinerate harper came to a village wedding thinking to get some food and drink and a good bit of dosh. He played something and people listened politely and then called for the piper to do a few more tunes. The harper made some comments about low class tastes and lammented that the takings would be slim because of the piper.

Wish I could find it again.

[Underhill]

Simon Chadwick has a great site on the wire-strung harp, history, technique, etc:

www.clarsach.net

Denise

[The_Sporting_Pitchfo]

@Nanohedron

As to the wire-strung harp revived, in a word: Minnesota’s own Ann Heyman (OK, 4 words. Flog me). It goes from there.

A friend of mine plays, among other things, wire harp. Pretty good at it, too. I once asked him about wiremaking tech past and present, and as I recall, the way brass wire was made in the past is said to be known after all. I’ll talk to him and get back to y’all about that. It was pretty interesting and a straightforward procedure, as I remember. His historic info creds are fairly reliable for a Nancyboy (metrosexual, really. His wife condones the long nails you have to grow to play the beast), if you count a Jesuit education and degrees in ethnomusicology worth anything…arguably the worse for him, heh.

He has a theory that the piobaireacht is a direct outgrowth of the Irish and Scots bardic traditions’ styles of harping, which is hinted at but not known outright. Evidently there’s enough out there (also looking to the well-documented Welsh tradition for more hints) that suggests a similar approach to laying the ground and applying variations according to expected ways of executing it. Even if this is purely the fruit of speculation, it works. If ever you get a chance to hear piobaireachd-inspired harping, I think you’d find it very haunting. It SOUNDS “authentic”, at least.

Mr. MacAnally is certainly not alone with that theory. Scottish pipers Allan MacDonald and Barnaby Brown and harper Alison Kinnaird are all big proponents of this theory.

www.pibroch.net

[Nanohedron]

@Joseph E. Smith

My mother (…who’s name is Nancy by the way, ) plays Irish harp, and the good majority of her strings are gut. Very expensive and not too easy to find as I understand it (which is very little).

By the way, Joseph, do you find that gut strings sound different from nylon at all? Just wondering.

[system]

We still do not know how the strings were produced and neither do we know how the Oirish played their Harps.

But OC anything is possible on the internet!

[Nanohedron]

Toasty, did you check the link I provided on the history of wiremaking? Granted, granted, we don’t actually KNOW how the Irish went about it, but I’d lay odds on the die technique. I mean, it goes back to the Egyptians, after all.

[Joseph_E_Smith]

Nanohedron wrote:"By the way, Joseph, do you find that gut strings sound different from nylon at all? Just wondering. "

Yes, I do. I find that they have a richer tone to them. But, they are also quite responsive to changes in environment… which puts them almost on a par with Uilleann Pipe reeds. Nice thing about nylon is they tend to retain their tuning longer and better than gut.

[Lar]

Just joined the forum and reading old threads, thought I’d comment on the wire harp thread:

@Nanohedron

As to the wire-strung harp revived, in a word: Minnesota’s own Ann Heyman (OK, 4 words. Flog me). It goes from there.

SNIP SNIP

Old Irish writings also refer to harpstrings of silver and gold, if we can take this to be more than mere poetic license. The friend I referred to, who also happens to build harps, has worked with gold wire in custom jobs for some of the bass strings, and said that the harmonics are especially rich. Obviously too cost-prohibitive to be a stock item, though.

I second the suggestion that Ann is the best. She plays in the fashion that she believes from her research was the original style: harp on her left shoulder, left hand high, and plays with her nails. She has made a life’s-work of studing the original sources to try to reconstruct how the old harpers played. Equally important, she is a brilliant player. Give a listen to anything she has recorded and you’ll be amazed.

Ann and Charley played in early August on the closing concert at this year’s Somerset (NJ) Folk Harp Festival, along with Therese Honey and June McCormick/Michael Rooney. Ann was playing her new reproduction of the Trinity College harp (often mis-titled the “Brian Boru” harp), which survived by some miracle from the time when harps in Ireland were wire strung.

This harp (and the reproduction) has a rather unusual “harmonic curve” - shape of the neck, so that the bass strings are shorter than on modern harps. As Ann worked with the builder to get the harp strung, they found that the only way to get a decent and even audible sound out of the bass strings was to use gold! Calculations they did showed that brass or steel strings would have to a lot longer, and silver strings significantly longer in order to give an equivalent sound. This can be considered circumstantial evidence that the reports of old harps being strung with gold (at least for their bass strings) were likely accurate.

'Twas a brilliant concert, BTW.