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 It was superseded by today’s concert pedal harp.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!

My preceding posts on reading Gregorian chant didn’t go into how to play it on the wire-strung harp.

Gregorian chant is a vocal music, not an instrumental one. So there’s a little bit of re-interpretation here. Wire harps, unlike nylon-strung Celtic harps, ring for quite a while after you pluck a string with your nails, unless you damp them immediately with your finger pads. This trait allows you to simulate some of the aspects of singing.

If you pluck a note on your wire harp and let it ring, consider it as a sung note. When you play the next one, it will blend in with the previously played note (unless damped), creating a vocal line that rises or falls, depending on the written melody.

Repeated notes in chant merit their own discussion.

Depending on the context, you can either choose to play these as one long sustained note and not pluck them rapidly three times…

Or.

You can play them with an alternating improvised counterpoint, as long as the notes you choose are appropriate to that mode (i.e. don’t play a Bb if the mode doesn’t call for one). Using the above example to illustrate this idea, the effect will have a rather Baroque feel, reminiscent of Vivaldi violin concertos: Ex. C, B, C, A, C, G then F, E, F, D, F, C, F.

When I play this latter style on my wire harp I tend to play the repeating note with one hand and the descending (or ascending) notes with the other. It’s especially easy on my little cross-strung wire harp Esabelle, because if I need the Bb it’s right there in the middle of the string course and at the top on the left side of the harp.

On the subject of wire harp damping:

I don’t tend to damp much either with the Baroque style of alternating notes… I just let them ring. Then I might lightly damp the last note and move on to the next set of neums. But I find that excessively heavy damping does not sound very good; it tends to cause an inappropriate abruptness which is not conducive to a meditative quality in church harp music. The only time I do some damping is if there are a fair amount of consecutive seconds which may clash, but even there it’s quite light and subtle. I’ve found a way of playing ornaments and graces quickly with some rapid fingerpad damping which does not draw overt attention to itself. The idea is to make the wire harp sound like it is singing and fading gracefully away in the church’s acoustic resonance space like an echoing cathedral pipe organ, not like it is abruptly starting and stopping. This latter style is more suitable for secular music.

Also I tend to touch the wires lightly on initial contact with my fingernails and not “dig” into them, so there is no harshness of tone, even at louder volumes. The idea is to play the room, much as the pipe organ does, and let that space resonate, even more so than my harp’s soundbox does. To accomplish this, I try to point my soundboard up at the church’s ceiling and back corner so that the sound waves coming off of my harp are reflected back into the sanctuary space. After some experimenting I can usually find the sweet spot and make the entire worship area easily resonate, along with the pipe organ.

My wire harps ideally, should sound sweet and angelic in church… singing as a heavenly chorus of angels. At no time should any of my harps sound strident, brash or hint at the worldly, pop culture of our times. The tonal ideal is to be transcendent, helping the congregation to pray and to seek unity with our Lord and Savior in His House.

Since my double strung harp is out of commission for the time being, I’ve been relying on my lightweight (10 lbs.!) Esabelle harp to come to church with me every Sunday.

Playing her on a weekly basis has certainly helped improved my technique! Cross-strung (X) harps are usually not wire; they normally have nylon strings instead and therefore don’t call for the usual wire harp playing techniques: nails, damping, etc. But nylon and wire X harps both share similar playing methods: the fingers of one hand reaches up for chromatic notes while the fingers on the opposite hand goes downward for the same sharps and flats. This is due to the angle of the chromatic rank of strings as it passes across diatonic string rank. Looking at the strings from the player’s point of view above the neck, one sees an X.

Looking down from the top of Esabelle. Two rows of strings: one diatonic, the other chromatic.

On a nylon strung cross harp, learning this geometry is challenging enough. Add in the long-ringing resonance of wire strings that occasionally need damping, and the repertoire of basic playing technique for this instrument grows!

However, it’s not impossible. Play the cross wire harp as you normally would, but also using your nails as on a traditional wire harp. In the beginning, as you’re learning, you will naturally play at a much slower speed. You may find you have to consciously start thinking about damping strings with your finger pads, which is often times an automatic action after years of playing wire-strung harp.

As one finger(nail) goes up to pluck, the previously played note, especially if it’s an interval of a second above or below, can be damped by the thumb pad simultaneously going down to damp. Or vice versa, depending on which hand is playing. Intervals of seconds, like C sharp and B, can be a little jarring on a wire harp in a way that they maybe aren’t on other instruments. At least that’s been my experience, so I have a tendency to damp them in favor of more consonant intervals, like thirds and fifths, that support the natural harmony of the bell-like wire sound.

(But please note that they don’t really sound like actual cast bells; carillonneur husband George Matthew Jr. has made that clear to me. There’s no minor third in ringing wire harp wires as there is in real carillon bells! Harp wires tend to have a fundamental and a strong octave overtone though.)

Getting used to playing a wire X harp takes some time. I started by focusing on two keys: F Major, which uses the Bb string and G Major, which uses the F# string. Learning to hit those angled chromatic strings instead of the natural B and F is a good workout for your brain and your ears will certainly tell you when you’ve plucked the wrong one!

My learning strategy started with playing those two scales and breaking it down even further: just play A Bb C and notice how different it looks and feels from playing A B C.

Or try playing F# F back and forth and note the string spacing before going back to playing E F# G. Then try playing the entire scale.

After getting comfortable with the placement of the chromatic notes, then you can try playing a very simple melody.

I usually don’t play chords on Esabelle very much. Her individual strings are very harmonically rich in overtones and trying to play chords just sounds overwhelming and I lose the sense of what’s going on in the underlying melody. I’ve found though, that she makes for a very good contrapuntal instrument. I’ve started exploring Bach’s organ music transcribed for lever harp and found she is an excellent harp for that! Baroque harpsichord music is another possibility.

Esabelle’s range is quite modest, being a lap harp: G to G 22 strings, so it took me a while to find some nice Bach arrangements that would work well on her. Eventually I plan to play these on my double wire Argent Fox harp, which has a larger range. But she is also excellent for playing a variety of international and little-known Advent/Christmas carols for the upcoming season!

Stoney End Esabelle’s little sound hole heart ~ A much-loved harp!