>
>
> On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, David Kilpatrick wrote:
>>
>> I'm curious one day to find a wire harp - never seen one here in Scotland -
>> and yes, I would like to try repairing something like that, but you are
>> quite right about the carriage.
>>
>
> There are none in Scotland?? Aren't wire harps the traditional
> harps of the Gaels that date back to antiquity?
>
>
Not really. The traditional harp is a horsehair harp, and was for a very
long time, but the Scottish generally played using gut strings unlike the
Irish tradition which was almost entirely wirestrung until the late 1800s.
The wire harp seems to have been current in mediaeval times alongside the
hairstrung harp and the gutstrung harp, as harpers travelled widely.
The best illustration of the differences between the harps tends to come
from Alison Kinnaird's work - writing and recording.
Being realistic, the wirestrung harp would have been an unlikely instrument
for the inventors of the triangular open frame lap harp (clarsach) who were
not the Gaels (Celtic) but Picts, who remain a bit of a mystery but
certainly preceded the movement of the central European Celtic people into
the western fringes. It's from Pictish sources that the earliest triangular
harps are identified and they could not have supported wire even if the
Picts had worked with the right materials (hard bronze).
The Celts most certainly worked with wire and were superb with metals
generally - a visit to the Marianburg Museum in Wurzburg, pretty much
central territory for the Celts prior to their migrations westwards, would
convince anyone - endless, endless numbers of torques, weapons, jewellery
and functional metalwork of remarkable form and craftsmanship. We never see
anything LIKE the Celtic artefacts found in Central Europe, here in
Scotland. However, the Celtic wire-strung harp seems to have been more like
a lyre or occasionally soundboard harp - equally much the ancestor of the
zither or (dare I say it) the autoharp!
The Irish wire-strung harp seems to be a phenomenon of mediaeval Ireland. I
love the sound. Apparently (according to Kinnaird) the Welsh harps were
horsehair strung. She can even manage to make sense of Bonnie Annie (etc) in
which the girl's hair becomes the harpstrings, here finger bones the tuners
(pins), her breastbone the soundboard. It would have been possible. Animal
bones were used for some parts like the pins and hair was used for the
strings.
I've asked the question about wire elsewhere with respect to other
instruments, and it looks as if from around 1100 to 1600 the use of wire
really supplanted a lot of hair or gut type strings in all kinds of uses,
from guitar-like things to fiddle-like things - but also destroyed the
instruments so we don't have any left to look at!
I just wish we could hear today what they really sounded like.
David
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