My new cross-strung floor harp arrived on Wednesday, August 20th! 
Stoney End Rebecca (I’ve decided to change the spelling of her name slightly to the Biblical Rebekah) has 51 strings, with the bottom 10 being wound metal like a wire harp. Most of the strings are nylon, a significant departure from my nearly 20 years of playing wire-strung harps!
She has a soft, sweet sound, excellent volume projection with minimal effort and most importantly, she offers four octaves of chromaticism that allows me to explore the classical music literature without taking the (very!) expensive step of acquiring a Lyon & Healy student pedal harp. These latter typically start around $19,000. (A full concert pedal grand harp in fine playing condition can top out around $80,000 or more.)
Cross-strung harps were first developed in Europe over a century ago and they were originally intended for European classical music. I have a tutorial book, written entirely in French, with excellent exercises for developing playing technique on these early instruments, that I’ve been working out of. Debussy and Ravel both wrote for the Pleyel cross-strung harp. It was superseded by today’s concert pedal harp. New designs on cross-strung harp construction were developed in the late 20th century, becoming a folk music instrument in America, where it is (fortunately!) quite affordable. And lightweight. Rebekah weighs only 24 lbs. I was delighted to discover I didn’t have to use my harp cart to move her, which I find essential for moving my Triplett Luna wire harp around. Pedal harps, by contrast, can weigh between 75 to 90 pounds and concert pedal grands between 84 to 100 pounds.
Rebekah Harp in my kitchen!
For the moment I have her in my kitchen, while I work on getting familiar with her string geometry. She is the big sister to my 2014 wire-strung Stoney End Esabelle, a much smaller lap harp with limited range. Esabelle’s strings are very close together, as is common with wire harps, so getting used to the wider nylon string spacing on Rebekah took a little while. Also the nylon strings are thicker than the wires I’m used to. I’m still playing with my wire harp technique: nails, pad damping, striking from mid-air rather than placing, hands held in a cup-like position with the thumb nails pointed slightly up and inward towards the strings. 20 years of muscle memory and reflexes are very hard to overcome so I’m continuing on in that tradition! It sounds good on nylon, so I don’t plan on changing what works.
Rebekah’s wood is maple and she comes with a matching 4″ base that raises her to a comfortable playing height for a comparably short harpist like myself seated in an average chair (although currently I’m playing from a rocking chair with cushions). A 6″ base is also available for taller people but I’m pretty sure I won’t need it! The little clip-on tuner is also very nice, since it doesn’t seem to pick up room conversations and extraneous noise the way my phone tuner does. But it is not adjustable to other pitch references (i.e. A=415), so I’ll just keep it for this harp.
Rebekah is easy to tune! Wire-strung harps can be very temperamental and they like to pop their strings if you take them up too fast, too soon. I’ve learned how to gently bring a wire harp up to tune without breaking any strings, in all kinds of weather changes and humidity, but tuning Rebekah’s nylon strings makes me realize just how careful and precise I’ve been with my other harps all these years. She’s a joy to tune, holds pitch well and doesn’t mind if I bring all her strings to complete tuning in one sitting. Nylon-strung harps are indeed more forgiving! I was aware to some degree that they were, just not this much! (Although my nylon-strung Paraguayan harp and Jasmine’s cardboard kit harp are also very agreeable on this point.)
I’ll be bringing Rebekah over to church in a couple of weeks after we get our piano relocated to the far wall so we have some space to put her; at present people need room to walk past organ and harp after receiving Communion and that area is a bit cramped. I also need some more time to get familiar with playing her.
Here’s Ben Kitty helping to open the harp box on arrival! It was full of shredded paper for cushioning. He really liked that and wanted to make a nest out of it!
Jasmine discovers a new harp!
And here’s Jasmine Kitty, who just celebrated her 17th birthday in August! She’s just discovered the new harp in the kitchen, alongside her own little cardboard kit harp, that she got for her 10th birthday.
More photos later, when Rebekah’s properly ensconced at church!