Harp: Ireland musical instrument

The harp is a multi-string musical instrument that has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicularly to the soundboard of the musical instrument. The musical instrument in the common category of chordophones and has its own sub categories that are called the harp. All harp instruments have a neck, a resonator and some strings. Some, called frame harp, also have a pillar; those that do not have pillar can be called open harps. Depending on the size of the musical instrument that differs, a harp can be played while placed in the lap of the player or while it stands on a table or on the floor. The strings of the musical instruments may be of nylon, gut, wire or silk. On smaller versions of the musical instruments, like the folk version, the core string material will typically be the same for all strings on a particular harp. Larger versions of the musical instrument, such as the modern concert harp mix string materials to gain their extended ranges. The player of this musical instrument is called the Harpist or the Harper.

source of picture: en.wikipedia.org

Different kinds of the musical instrument are seen in Africa, Europe, North and South America as well as in Asia. In antiquity, harps and some related musical instruments like the lyres were very popular in almost all cultures. The musical instrument was predominant with medieval bards, minnesingers and troubadors throughout the Spanish world. This musical instrument kept growing in popularity because of the improvement in their design and construction through the starting parts of the 20^th century.

A number of non-harp-like musical instrument are colloquially called harps. Some chordophones like the Aeolian harp as well as the autoharp is not harp instruments; rather, they are zithers, because the strings of the instruments are not perpendicular to their soundboard. Analogously, the several varieties of harp guitars and harp lute, while chordophones, belong to the family of lute and are not harps. All kinds of lyre and kithara are also not harps, though belong to the 4^th family of the ancient musical instruments under the chordophones, lyre.

The term harp has also been applied to several musical instruments that are not chordophones. The vibraphone was sometimes called vibraharp, but it has no strings and the sound is manufactured by striking metal bars.

The origin of the musical instrument has been traced back to Mesopotamia.  The earliest harps and lyres were seen in Sumer c, 3500 BCE. Many harps were seen in burial pits and royal tombs in Ur. The oldest portrayals of the harps without a fore pillar are from 500BCW that was the Persian version of the musical instrument. The musical instrument flourished in Persia in many forms from its introduction, approximately 3000 BCE until around the 17^th century. The original version was the arched harp found at Choghâ Miš.

Around the 1900 BCE, the arched versions of the instrument were substituted by the angular versions of the musical instrument with vertical or horizontal sound boxes. By the beginning of the Common Era, robust, vertical angular versions of the instrument that had become very popular in the Hellenistic world were valued in the Sasanian court, angular harps were renovated to make them as light as it can be; while they become more elegant, the instrument lost their structural firmness.

The work of the Tamil Sangam literature stated the yaal harp parts and its kinds. Attestations of this musical instrument are as early as 200 BC in Tamil Sangam literature and the harp was the first instrument that is played by the people of Tamil. The Tamil Sangam literature performed a crucial function in documenting the yaal harp. The documented history of the musical instrument started as early as 500 BC with picture testimonies and literary attestations that portray the Sangam Tamil people using the musical instrument with 100 strings called aathi yaal.

The old Indian veena of the Gupta era and before was a harp that was played with its strings kept parallel to the player’s body, of the kind of the Saung or the Burmese harp. In fact, this version of the musical instrument that is still found in Burma today was perhaps introduced from India and descends from this kind of veena. One popular portrayal of that instrument that attests of the popularity of this kind of harp in Indian in that period is seen on some of the Samudragupta gold coins. The picture shows the king Samudragupta performing the musical instrument himself.

Harps are fundamentally triangular and are prepared mainly of wood. The strings of the modern versions of the musical instrument are normally of nylon or gut for the strings that are A above low G and metal for low G and down; the tuning pins of the strings are metal materials. The bottom ends of the strings is fed via a small metal eyelet and tied in a knot on the inside of the instrument’s soundboard that is the upward-facing surface of the resonating chamber. The body of the musical instrument is hollow and when a taut strings is plucked, the body of the instrument resonates, projecting tunes both inward towards the player of the instrument via a series of normal oval openings and much more essentially and powerfully, outward via the flexible and taut-strung soundboard. The neck of the musical instrument contains the mechanism that determines the pitch alteration for the strings of the musical instrument. The upper ends of the strings are affixed to pins in holes bored via the neck of the instrument at particular intervals and at particular distances from the soundboard of the instrument.

The longest side of this musical instrument is known as column or pillar. In those harps that have pedals, the longest side is a hollow and encloses the rods that have the control function of pedal mechanism. At the base of the pedal harp are seven pedals that activate the rods when the pedals are pressed downwardly. The modern refined musical instrument spanning 6 ½ octaves in fundamentally all keys was made perfect by the 19^th century French producer called Sébastien Érard and because of the instrument’s pedal-driven ability to perform all sharps and flats of all notes that are within its range, the instrument continues today as the typical pattern of most large professional concert grand harps.

Lever harps do not have rods or pedals and the only function of the pillar in the instrument being to hold up the neck against the great strains of the instrument’s strings. The lever harp use a shortening lever on the neck that is next to each individual string that should be activated manually to shorten the strings and raise the tone a half step.

A string of the musical instrument tuned to natural may be performed in sharp, but not flat. A string of the instrument tuned to flat may be performed in natural and not sharp. Also, to be able to change a string from one tone to the other during the playing, a player of the musical instrument must take one whole hand off the harp for a moment and switch the lever, as for the brief moment only one hand of the player will be used. The lever harps are said to be lighter in weight than the pedal harps and are smaller in size and number of the instrument’s strings. Also they are much easier to produce, less easily spoiled, easier to overhaul and less expensive to manufacture and maintain.

Finally, several harps are constructed without either levers or pedals. These harps can only perform in a single key in a performance, but any string on a harp can be tuned to a corresponding sharp or flat prior to a performance and then be returned to the normal key after that with little or no effort.

Angle harp and bow harp continue to be in use to the modern day. In Europe, there was further development on the musical instrument, which is adding a third structural member; the pillar to assist the far end of the arch and the sound box of the instrument. The triangular frame harp is portrayed in sculpture from the 8^th century Pictish stones in Scotland and in manuscripts from the early 9^th century France. The curve of the musical instrument’s neck is because of the proportional shortening of the basic triangle form to keep the instrument’s strings to intermediate. If the strings of the musical instrument were uniformly distanced, the strings of the harp would be distant apart.

European versions of the harp in medieval and Renaissance times often had a bray pin attached to make a buzzing sound, when the strings of the instrument are plucked. By the baroque period, in Spain and Italy, more strings were added to the instrument to permit for chromatic notes on the instrument; these were normally in a second line of strings.

The first original version of pedal harps was fabricated in the Tyrol region of Austria. Hochbrucker was the next person to design a better-quality pedal mechanism, and then followed by Krumpholtz Nadermann in succession and the Erard Company, who came up with the double mechanism of the instrument. In the second half of the 17^th century in Germany, diatonic single-row harps were fitted with manually tuned hooks that fretted individual strings to raise the pitch by half step. Ij the 18^th century, a link mechanism was fabricated connecting the hooks with the pedals, leading to the invention of the single-action pedal version of the musical instrument. A second row of hook was later installed along the neck of the instrument to permit for the double-action pedal harp that is capable of raising the pitch of a string by one or two half steps. Though the idea was extended to triple-action, they were never common. The double-action harp has remained the normal version of the musical instrument in the western classical orchestra.

Harps were widely distributed sparsely in the Latin America, except in some regions where the cultures of the musical instrument are very strong. Such crucial centers are Venezuela, Andes, Paraguay and Mexico. They derived from the harps that were taken from Spain during the colonial era.

In Peru harp is used generally in the Andean music that is known as Huayno.

There are many versions of harp that can be found in Africa. They do not have fore pillar and are either bow harps or angle harps. There are a good number of musical instruments that are hard to classify, normally being called harp-lutes. Another name for these musical instruments is spike harps. The West African kora is the most complicated and best known instrument that belongs to the group of instruments. It does not fit into any category, but many, and must be awkwardly classified as a double-bridge-harp-lute. The strings of this musical instrument run in two divided ranks making the kora a double harp, they do not end in a soundboard, though they are held in notches on a bridge making the kora a bridge harp, they came from a string arm or neck and cross a bridge directly supported by a resonating cavity making the musical instrument a lute also. Another kind of the instrument is commonly called African harp.

In Asia, there are few of these instruments today, though the harp was prominent in the old times. However few harps are still found in the continent today, the most notable of them being the Burma’s saung-gauk that is seen as the national musical instrument in the country.

The concert harp is a big and technically contemporary, designed harp for the classical music and played solo, as part of chamber groups, and in symphony orchestras and in popular commercial songs. The musical instrument typically has 6 ½ octaves, weigh approximately about 80 pounds and the height of the instrument is about 1.85 meters, the instrument is about 1 meter deep and is 55 cm wide at the bass extreme of the soundboard. The notes of the musical instrument range from 3 octaves below C♭to 3 ½ octaves above, normally ending on G#. With the use of the octave designation, the range is about C♭1 to G♯7.

The concert version of the musical instrument is a pedal harp. Pedal harp use the mechanical action of pedal to alter the pitch of the instrument’s strings. There are about 7 pedals, each of them affecting the tuning of all strings of one class, and each pedal is fixed to a rod or a cable with the column of the instrument that connects with a mechanism within the neck of the instrument. When a pedal is moved with the foot, small disc that is at the top of the instrument will rotate. The disc are embossed with two pegs that squeeze the strings of the instrument as they turn, curbing the vibration range of the strings.

In the middle position, the top wheel squeezes the strings, leading to a natural, giving the scale of C major if all the pedals of the instrument are set in middle position. In the bottom position of the instrument another wheel is turned, limiting the strings of the instrument again to produce a sharp, giving the scale of C-sharp major if all the pedals of the instrument are set in the bottom position of the instrument.

The three strings on the pedal harp have no pedal tuning pattern: the two lowest strings and the highest string. The strings are often tuned C, D and G natural respectively. They can be tuned manually to sharp or flat via scordatura before performance. The mechanism is known as double-action pedal mechanism, perhaps fabricated by Sébastien Érard in the year 1810.

The tension of the strings on the instrument’s soundboard is approximately equal to 10 kN or 2,000 pounds. The east strings are manufactured of copper or silver-over-silk over steel, the lower middle strings are made of gut from cow or sheep and the upper middle strings or the highest strings is either made of nylon or gut.

The pedal harp is performed with the fingertips of the first four fingers of the hand, with force from the hand and arm, and ultimately the upper body of the player. The tiny fingers of the hand are not normally used in the playing of the musical instrument. The fingertips are drawn in to meet the palm hand, thereby releasing the string from any pressure that was placed upon it by the finger of the hand. The fingers are naturally curved as they are touching the strings of the instrument and the thumb is gently curved as the tip rises to the string as an arc from the base, this is known as plucking of the instrument. There are varying schools of technique for the playing of the musical instrument. The largest of them all is the different French schools, followed by the particular Russian schools, Viennese and some other schools from differing areas in Europe.

The musical instrument found its early orchestral use as a solo musical instrument in concerti by several baroque and classical composers and in the opera houses of London, Paris and Berlin and so many other capitals. The instrument started to be used in symphonic music by Hector Berlioz but found performances frustrating in such countries like Germany where few harps and few good players of the instrument are found.

Amplified hollow body and solid body electric lever harps are manufactured by several producers of the musical instrument at this time, like Lyon and Healy Harps out of Chicago, Salvi Harps out of Italy and Camac Harps out of France.

In the 20^th century, an American builder and musician, Robert Grawi manufactured an electric double-harp-lute on the West African Kora though tuned and strung in a different way. Gravikord is a light ergonomically designed musical instrument produced of modern materials commonly stainless steel tubing. The musical instrument is a double harp with 24 strings that are evenly divided in two ranks arrayed on a free standing ‘V’ shaped bridge that is constructed of sympathetic material including the integral piezo-electric sensor. The tuning of this musical instrument is an extended version of G major / E minor tuning mechanism of the Hugh Tracey kalimba while the entire physical structure of the instrument is derived from the African version of the musical instrument called kora. It was created to enhance easier playing of hard African cross rhythms on an African derived modern electro-acoustic harp instrument.

The laser harp is not a stringed musical instrument at all. Rather a harp-shaped electronic musical instrument that has laser beams where harps have strings. The laser beam that can be configured like the harp strings does not manufacture any sound themselves but functions as a trigger for electronic synthesized sounds. They can as well be programed to trigger other dramatic effects in sync with performances like sound effects, video loops, lighting, etc. For some other events they can be made in protracted customs without any frame, though only a long parallel rank laser beams yet are still known as laser beam.

Some modern day players of the contemporary electric versions of the musical instruments, specifically solid body and minimalist design musical instrument, have been able to add the merit of movement on stage into their musical performance. With the light strong musical instruments and modern wireless amplification, these music players can stand, move and incorporate dance on stage while performing the electrical versions of the musical instrument.