Facts About The Harp

This year I have been writing posts about the string family of musical instruments. At first, I concentrated on the most recognisable instruments of that orchestral family and you can read my posts by clicking here:

Facts about Families of Musical Instruments

Facts About The Violin

Facts About The Cello

Facts About The Viola

Facts About The Double Bass

And lately I have been looking at those instruments that while they are obviously stringed instruments, they are not necessarily the instruments that you would immediately think about – the guitar and the ukulele:

Facts About The Guitar

Facts About The Ukulele

For what will almost certainly be my last Instrumental Facts blog post of the year, I am going to look at the harp. This is an instrument that prior to writing this post I was not particularly familiar with, so it was nice to learn more about it with you. I do find it a beautiful instrument and am very excited to be singing in a concert where we perform with harp when the choir I am in performs Britten’s Ceremony of Carols in December. (I may have mentioned this concert a couple of times in my social media already, and this may not be the last time I mention it… )

What is the harp and how do you play it?

• The harp is an instrument in the string family of instruments. This family is called the string family because they are all played by either plucking, strumming or running a bow along a number of strings. In the case of the harp, it is played by plucking the strings.
• A person who plays the harp is called a harp player, or a harpist.
• While the harp is not a regular member of the orchestra, there are a number of pieces of orchestral music which feature the harp, or which have a harpist performing as a soloist with an orchestra.
• The harp is one of the oldest musical instruments, and has existed in one form or another in pretty much every continent through recorded history.
• There are a number of different sizes and types of harp. Some you play sitting down, some standing up. Some you can have in your lap while you play, and others you definitely can’t! In this post I will mostly talk about the harp that we are most familiar with in Western music – a modern concert harp – but other types of harp include the hook harp and the Celtic harp.
• There are harps with fewer strings, but a modern concert harp has 47 strings and 7 pedals. The function of the pedals is to sharpen or flatten the sound of the note produced when a string is plucked. Harp strings are coloured depending on the note they produce to help the harpist when playing this instrument. C strings are coloured red, F strings are coloured black or blue and the other strings are white.
• While a concert harp will have 47 strings, beginners (and children) would probably start with a smaller harp that has 22 strings.
• The strings on a harp are generally made of metal, gut (actual sheep gut, which is not very pleasant to think about) and sometimes nylon for the highest pitched strings.
• The harp is a distinctively triangular shape and made mainly from wood. One side of the triangle is called the column, probably because it looks rather like a column, and it runs down to the foot of the harp. This is the longest side of the harp. The foot is so called because it is at the bottom or, yes you guessed it, the foot of the harp. The other 2 sides of the harp are called the neck and the body. The corner of the harp where the neck and body meet is called the knee. Strings on the harp run from the neck, where they are secured by tuning pins, down to the body.
• To play the harp, a harpist will lean the harp towards themselves so that the body of the instrument leans in towards their own body, leaning the knee of the harp over their right shoulder.
• A harpist will use their thumbs and the first 3 fingers on both hands to pluck the strings, the little finger being too short and weak to play the harp.
• Pedals on the harp are operated with a harpist’s feet so their hands are free for plucking the strings.
• Strings on a harp are all different lengths and tensions (so how tightly it is secured between the neck and body of the harp), and the strings will be of varying thickness. All of these things will have an effect on the pitch of the note the string can produce – a thicker string will vibrate more slowly when plucked producing a lower pitched note. A string that is very tightly secured between the neck and body, so having a greater tension, will produce a higher pitched note. Longer strings produce lower pitched notes, as the vibrations made by plucking the string have further to travel along the string, and shorter strings produce higher pitched notes.
• Because of the pedals on the foot of the harp, a harpist often has a lot more options in terms of the tuning of their harps (and therefore the pitches produced by it, and the music they can play) than many other orchestral instruments.

History of the harp

• The harp is one of the oldest instruments in history. The first evidence of harps existing dates back to Ancient Egypt, to around 2,500BC, where pictures have been found of instruments shaped like bows with strings strung between two pieces of wood.
• There is artistic evidence of a frame harp, which has a more familiar triangular appearance with a third piece of wood on it like today’s concert harps, dates from around 800 AD. The pictures suggest that these Irish Harps had probably around 10 or 11 strings.
• The hollow soundbox was added to the harp around the 14th Century, the soundbox amplifying the sound the harp could produce. Several more strings were added to the instrument by the 15th Century, with many harps now having 30 or so strings. By this date, the strings started to be made out of brass.
• By the 1700s, the Diatonic harp had been developed. These harps, often called Renaissance Harps, had strings made from sheep gut attached to the neck of the instrument with wooden pegs.
• In the late 16th Century, early 17th Century, harps with 3 rows of strings appeared in Italy. Harpists found that by using these instruments they could play music with fast, repeated notes could be played much more easily, and the sound they could produce was a much larger, louder sound.
• Later on that Century harp makers started to add pedals to the foot of the harp, initially just 5 pedals but increasing to 7 over time. When these pedals were pressed they linked to a hook that would sharpen the note played by the harp.
• Over time improvements have been made to the way that the pedals and the hooks work to alter the pitch that the harp can produce and give harpists more flexibility in the tuning of their instrument and the pitches they can produce, until we get to today’s concert harp.

Famous harpists

• Famous harpists include Carlos Salzedo, Joanna Newsom, Alice Giles (performing in the YouTube video above, Nancy Allen, Jana Bouskova, Dorothy Ashby and Sasha Boldachev.
• There are also a number of people famous for other reasons who also play the harp. These people include King David, of David and Goliath legend, Comedian Harpo Marx, lead singer from the band Yes Jon Anderson and Baroque Composer Marco Marazzoli.

Harp World Records

• The World Record for the largest harp, which measures an astonishing 28.03m tall and 21.8m long was set on 18 October 2021 at Sichuan University of Culture and Arts in China.
• On 25 October 2022 the World Record for the longest marathon harp playing was set when harpist Kateryna Oliinyk played the harp for 3 hours and 1 minute and 54 seconds in Dubai, UAE.
• The world’s largest harp ensemble involved 420 people playing together on 26 October 2013 at the 7th Festival Mundial del Arpa in Asunción, Paraguay.
• An unusual World Record of the highest altitude playing on harp was achieved by Siobhan Brady when she played her harp at Singla Pass in India at an altitude of 4,954m
• The world’s most expensive harp is a very ornate harp from makers Lyon & Healy. This harp is made in the rococo style of King Louis XV and known as the Louis XV special harp. It is priced at around $189,000, or approximately £144,000.

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