>> The use of this music at the time is nearly invisible to history, >> as it was mostly by women wealthy enough to have access to a harp, >> which meant domestic performance. But it's obvious that women >> were the major market for instrumental sheet music, and the harp >> was their central instrument. > But it wasn't the clarsach, and it was not a Scottish tradition. Like > Scott's daughters, they were taught harp on a ruddy great big > continental monster with levers and stuff. It was an orchestral harp.
Not quite the modern one: the Erard design is from 1810. Bigger and louder than a typical modern clarsach, but the range used for Scottish repertoire is generally no wider and fancy chromaticisms are rare. > Unless, of course, the harp at Abbotsford is actually some later > Victorian horror just put there because there are so many references > to the girls' harp playing. Scott could well have afforded to be first on the block with an Erard (and being a superstar he could probably have dropped a hint and got one free, the way Madonna doesn't pay for anything). They must have taken a long time to supersede older types in the rest of Scotland, particularly given the series of recessions that hit the country between 1815 and 1848. At some point I need to look at music shop advertisements to see what types were being sold when. > I sort of assume that 'real' harp music must be older than that, and use > a smaller instrument altogether, since that is what's shown in pictures > or carvings etc - a lap harp, not a floor harp, and live tuning, not > levers. Also, even with a very sturdy apprentice, a harper couldn't > really lug around something made to sit permanently in a palace or big > country home. Itinerant harpers must have had instruments of a size you > could manage on a packhorse, or maybe even on your own back. I'm aware > that some players were extremely well paid and spent long periods in > each castle/big hoos, and had large and costly instruments. But is that > all there was? Nobody knows. There's a good Darwinian reason why nothing smaller than the Lamont harp escaped being used for kindling. I have come across an account of some gent in the Highlands in the middle of the eighteenth century buying a spinet. He got one of his workers to carry the thing single-handed on his back on a two-day trip with no made roads. A human back could easily carry a Lamont harp if driven by a sufficient degree of poverty and/or clan loyalty. A harp isn't an instrument you can expect to move around a lot and set up quickly; there are far too many strings far too sensitive to damp and temperature. There are a number of accounts of harpists taking up residence in a house for a season, and that makes sense given the way it works. If you want to be ready to play for a dance in a barn at a moment's notice you want something with fewer strings or none at all. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
