From Ur to the Concert Stage: The Story of the Harp

Harps of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt

The earliest harps were probably inspired by the simple idea of a hunting bow: a curved stick with a string that sounds when plucked. Add several strings of different lengths and a hollow body to amplify them, and you have an arched harp. Images of harps appear in Mesopotamian art from around 3000 BCE, and the finds from Ur include both harps and the closely related lyres.

In ancient Egypt, the harp was one of the most important instruments for more than two thousand years. Tomb paintings and carvings show harpists playing at banquets and religious ceremonies, sometimes on graceful arched harps taller than the musicians themselves. A well-known pair of painted harpists in the tomb of Ramesses III, in the Valley of the Kings, shows how richly decorated these instruments could be. Some of the songs sung to the harp, known today as harpers' songs, survive as texts about life and death.

The frame harp and the harps of Ireland

Ancient harps had no front pillar, so their strings could not be very tight. At some point in early medieval Europe, harp makers added a third side to the frame, the forepillar, creating the triangular frame harp. Exactly where this happened is debated, but some of the earliest images of such harps are carved on Pictish stones in Scotland and on Irish stone crosses from around the ninth and tenth centuries.

In Ireland, the harp became the instrument of a highly respected profession. The Gaelic harp, or cláirseach, was strung with brass wire and played with the fingernails, producing a bright, bell-like ringing sound. Harpers were attached to noble households and held high status. The famous harp kept at Trinity College Dublin, often linked by tradition to the high king Brian Boru although it was made centuries after his time, is now a national emblem of Ireland.

The old Irish harping tradition declined as the Gaelic aristocracy that supported it lost power. The blind harper and composer Turlough O'Carolan (1670 to 1738) is the best-remembered figure of its final era, and many of his tunes are still played. In 1792, a gathering of the last traditional harpers took place in Belfast, where the young musician Edward Bunting wrote down their music and helped preserve it.

Wales and the triple harp

Wales had its own long harp tradition. From the seventeenth century, Welsh harpers took up the triple harp, an instrument with three parallel rows of strings that had come from Italy. The two outer rows gave the notes of the scale and the middle row supplied the sharps and flats. The triple harp became so closely associated with Wales that it is still often called the Welsh harp, and the harp remains a symbol of Welsh musical life.

Érard and the pedal harp

For centuries, harpists struggled with a basic problem: each string plays only one note, so changing key meant retuning. Early solutions included hooks that a player could turn by hand to raise a string's pitch. In the early eighteenth century, makers in southern Germany developed the single-action pedal harp, in which foot pedals moved the hooks. It became fashionable in Paris, and Queen Marie Antoinette was among its players.

The decisive breakthrough came from Sébastien Érard, a French instrument maker working in London and Paris. In 1810 he patented the double-action pedal harp, in which each pedal could be set in three positions, so every string could sound flat, natural or sharp. With seven pedals, one for each note name, the harp could finally play in every key. The basic design of the modern concert harp still follows Érard's idea, and in the late nineteenth century the Chicago firm Lyon and Healy became another major builder of pedal harps.

The harp in the orchestra and on film

Composers quickly took advantage of the new instrument. Hector Berlioz wrote for harps in his Symphonie fantastique of 1830, and later in the century the harp's cadenza in the "Waltz of the Flowers" from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker became one of its most famous moments. In the early twentieth century, French composers wrote some of its greatest music: Claude Debussy's Danses sacrée et profane and Maurice Ravel's Introduction and Allegro, both from the early 1900s.

When film music developed in the twentieth century, composers borrowed the harp's sweeping glissando and gentle arpeggios to suggest dreams, magic, memory and romance. The sound became such a familiar convention that a harp glissando can signal a flashback almost on its own. Beyond the screen, the harp reached new places too: Harpo Marx played it in his comedy films, and jazz harpists such as Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane proved it could swing and explore.

The harp today

Today the harp lives in many forms. Concert harpists play pedal harps with around 47 strings in orchestras and solo recitals. The smaller lever harp, often called the Celtic harp, enjoyed a strong revival in the twentieth century and is loved by folk musicians, therapists and beginners. Wire-strung harps in the old Irish style have been rebuilt, electric harps play in bands, and harp traditions flourish from Paraguay to West Africa.

You can also try plucking a few strings without a harp of your own: HarmonyHub lets you play a virtual harp free in your browser, including Celtic and concert harp sounds, and you can explore its relatives among the string instruments. More than four thousand years after the craftsmen of Ur, the simple magic of a plucked string still works.

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