Wire strings were not "deemed an implausibility" on early harps - it was used for centuries. The Irish had developed the technique of wire-drawing which not only gave them magnificent-sounding harps (as evidenced by the rapt verbal descriptions of their contemporaries) but also allowed for the finely-wrought metal work on early Celtic jewelry and other historical treasures. If you read the written accounts of the Medieval Irish harpers (who travelled all over the continent) both they and their instruments seem to have been king of the mountain. Early continental harps used gut (or "sinew") and even horsehair (presumably braided or twined in some manner) in contrast with the Irish whose metal strings rang on and on. Good harps spawned good players, whose increased demands spawned better harps...
As late as the Belfast Gathering in 1792 the harpers played wire-strung instruments, though only one of them was still using fingernails by that time. After a long reign, the old-style wire-strung Irish harp and its tradition died out in the years directly following this event, which was due more to the nature of music tonality itself: it had become too chromatic for the limitations of the old harps, both with regard to semi-tone requirements and also the sustained resonances (which clash). It was really the changing musical fashions and assorted social influences which overtook the metal-strung harps, not that the string material itself was unsatisfactory. Interestingly, James Joyce alludes to a harper plucking wire strings in one of his "Dubliners" stories, though by that time (c.1904) the wire-strung harp was extinct. There had been one old man who used to busk around Dublin on a wire-strung harp (a pupil of one of the Belfast harpers) though he was dead by Joyce's time; but he would have been remembered by the local people, and is perhaps the model for the story. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >RE wire strings, which were somehow deemed an implausibility on early harps: > This is pure conjecture, but I think that by the middle ages craftsmen had > been working with various metals long enough to have figured out how to draw > it through a die to get wire. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to making good > musical stings would be impurities in the metal which could lead to easy > breakage or poor pitch focus. > When were gimped gut strings first used? They require wire. > Any more knowledgeable contributions to this? > >Regards, >Leonard Williams > > > >To get on or off this list see list information at >http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > > > > >
