Traditional and Historical Scottish Harps by Bill Taylor

Traditional and Historical Scottish Harps by Bill Taylor WHY DISTINGUISH between traditional and historical harps? It is not an easy question to answer. In its true sense, traditional means that which is passed on by word of mouth from one generation to another. Indeed, it means we’ve always done it this way . Harp playing right now is in the midst of a tremendous revival. Given that harps have been played for thousands of years, it would follow that there is no single harp which can claim to be traditional. Rather, there are many different harp traditions which span the centuries and the globe. Harp terminology is a minefield. Nowadays, we speak loosely of ‘clarsach,’ ‘Irish harp,’ ‘neo-Irish harp,’ etc, without really knowing the fine distinctions of these words. It was the same in the ancient and medieval worlds: cithara, lyra, rotta and harpa, were all seemingly interchangeable names for a number of different stringed instruments. Terms which described particular instruments in one culture came to mean something else at another time or place. Although the word remained the same, the instrument it referred to changed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our modern English Bibles. In the King James Bible, Psalm 150 reads: Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp. Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs. It is clear that many different instruments were used in Old Testament times, but whatever they were they weren’t modern trumpets, pipe organs and pedal harps. Of course, the Bible wasn’t written in English; it was translated over and over between ancient Hebrew, Latin, Greek and other Middle-Eastern languages. With each translation, subtle nuances undoubtedly altered the original meaning of the terms. In order to discover what it was that King David actually played, we must go back to the Hebrew and Aramaic terms used in the earliest versions of the texts: kinnor, nevel, qaytros, etc. Then, it is a matter of examining archaeological evidence for contemporary representations and surviving fragments of these instruments. What makes a harp a harp? By modern definition, a harp is an instrument with a plane of string s running perpendicular to the soundbox or resonator. This separates harps from lyres, violins, guitars and hammered dulcimers, all of which have strings parallel to the soundboard. In the British Isles, harps have been played since at least the eighth ce ntury AD. There is much conjecture about the origins of the harp here, but pictorial evidence supports the theory that it was the Picts in the Scottish Highlands who first used the true frame harp in Europe. From the eighth to tenth centuries we have several stone carvings of harps, many of which are simple triangular shapes, generally with straight pillars, straight string arms or necks, and soundboxes. At this time, Irish stone carvers are continuing to represent quadrangular instruments, more likely to be lyres than harps in modern classification. What did these Pictish harps sound like? The overriding principle in re-creating accurate period instruments from any era is to use materials and techniques known to the original makers and players. Local timbers by necessity would have been used rather than exotic imported types of wood. We know the Pictish harp makers would have carved their soundboxes out of single blocks of wood instead of using a glued construction. They simply wouldn’t have had glue strong enough to support the tension of the strings, which pulls the soundboard up towards the neck. Furthermore, without a fine steel saw they wouldn’t have been able to cut thin planks of wood so easily. It was easier by far to hollow-out a log. Such carving may sound like a crude approach, but the resulting sound is, in fact, wonderfully clear and light. With a delicate, thinly-carved soundbox the vibration is able to travel across the entire box without being interrupted by glue joints. Modern harps tend to be strung in nylon or gut; the Picts had a few other alternatives. Any hunting culture would have quickly discovered the tonal properties of gut, originally being used for snares and bowstrings. Along with gut, hair from horses’ tails has long been used for plucked and bowed stringed instruments across Europe and Asia. Horsehair strings are prepared by twisting bundles of hair together and give a bright resonant tone not unlike gut. The Picts were master metalsmiths and would also have been able to create thin brass or silver wire for strings, as they did for their exquisite jewelry. Consequently, we have three different options for the stringing of these instruments: gut, horsehair or wire, and each option would have given a different sound. The harp played by the Gaels between the tenth and eighteenth centuries was certainly wire-strung. During this period, the Scottish Gaelic word clàrsach described a wire-strung harp with a massive carved soundbox, a reinforced curved pillar and a substantial neck, flanked with thick brass cheek bands. Amazingly, a handful of these instruments survive from the Middle Ages: the Trinity College Harp (Trinity College, Dublin), the Queen Mary Harp and the Lamont Harp (both in the Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh). This is the style of harp on Irish coins and the Guinness label. Especially popular in sixteenth and seventeenth century English courts, it was played all over Europe and was usually called the ‘Irish’ harp. An early seventeenth-century musical encyclopedia by Michael Praetorius, Syntagnum Musicum , illustrates such a harp and describes it as the Irlendisch Harff mit Messinges Saiten – ‘the Irish harp with brass strings.’ A better term might be Gaelic harp , as it was played by the Gaelic-speaking peoples of both Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. Played with the fingernails, the pronounced sustain of the metal strings led early writers to describe the sound of the Gaelic harp as bell-like. This can be used to great effect, but it must be accompanied by a skilful technique of damping selected strings with the fingerpads. Otherwise, the sound is a blur, like playing the piano with the sustain pedal constantly down. The other harp in Praetorius’ illustration is a gut-strung harp. This has the slender profile of the Gothic harp found across Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Labelled Gemeine Harff or ‘ordinary harp’, this is the sort of instrument often played by angels in late-medieval altarpieces. Although strung with gut, these harps did not sound like our modern pedal and lever harps. Instead, they buzzed like sitars because of the ‘bray’ pins, making each string bray like a donkey. These were tiny crooked pegs which held the strings into the soundbox and lightly touched them, causing the strings to buzz. For several hundred years, this was the common sound of the pan- European gut-strung harp. Although considered the ‘Welch’ (Welsh) harp by English standards, by the late seventeenth century such an instrument was also described as ‘the true English harp’. Within sixteenth-century Scotland, clársach was the word used for the wire- strung harp of the Highlands and Hebrides, whilst the word ‘harp’ tended to refer to the gut-strung instrument favoured in the Lowlands. Certainly, as in the rest of Europe, this harp would have been fitted with bray pins. Painted on a seventeenth-century ceiling in Crathes Castle, Aberdeenshire, are a number of musicians playing different Renaissance instruments: viol, lute, flute, harpsichord, etc. Amongst them we find a lady playing a ‘Flemish’ harp, one variety of Renaissance bray harp. The narrow soundbox in the original painting would produce a rather quiet sound; the bray pins supply an additional sonority, which allows the harp’s gentle buzzing to cut through the texture of instruments in an ensemble. Sadly, the Victorian restoration does not include the detailed profiles of the tiny L-shaped bray pins. The original painter (or the restorer) was not up to the same standards of quality as the 15th century Northern European painters – Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Memlinc and Jan Van Eyck – whose fine technique accurately depicts details of portraiture, clothing, furniture, landscape and instrument construction, down to the smallest bray pin. By the eighteenth century, harps of any sort had fallen out of use in Scotland and Ireland due to changing social, political and economic conditions. At the same time, new chromatic harps were being created on the Continent for a bourgeois audience; harps with multiple rows of strings and harps with sharping mechanisms for playing the fashionable music of the time. In the mid-nineteenth century, a revival of all things Celtic brought attention back to Gaelic culture, sparking interest in native language and music. Small gut-strung harps, fitted with chromatic mechanisms, were constructed by John Egan in Dublin in the early nineteenth century, based not on the ancient harps but on the pedal harp used in orchestras, but scaled down. These were promoted as portable harps and offered to customers who purchased full-sized pedal harps. It is from these miniature orchestral harps that the current ‘traditional’ harp of Ireland and Scotland evolved. These harps still use the glued-soundbox construction of the pedal harp, the gut strings of the pedal harp, the harmonic arm of the pedal harp, related chromatic mechanisms of the pedal harp and are played with the thumbs-up/fingers-down fingerpad technique of the pedal harp. Although considerably different in construction, playing technique and repertoire from the ancient Irish and Scottish harps, they have become in our modern day ‘traditional’. Borrowing the ancient Gaelic word, the Scots named this lever harp the ‘clarsach’ and a new instrument replaced the Scottish medieval and Renaissance designs.

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