Much of what we read is a continuation of earlier studies over the years; more focused and  applied in various ways to our respective arts: George as Middlebury College Carillonneur and myself as liturgical harpist at St. Thomas & Grace. We each find that there are various areas that we could know more about or that we could apply traditional and ancient music in innovative ways on our instruments: 48 bell carillon, pipe organ, wire-strung Irish harp. And quite often, we both find that we seem to be alone together in the development of our respective styles over the years (which is not an uncommon thing, as knowledge and skills become ever more focused over time).

As I play what are essentially Medieval harps in church each Sunday (only with modern features like steel strings, machined steel tuning pegs, and book-matched wood) and play in the ecclesiastical modes of over 1,000 years ago instead of our major/minor scale system for the Communion, and lastly play counterpoint on Gregorian chants for the prelude with George accompanying on the pipe organ, I feel a need to understand the history and context of the era in which this church music and my harps originate from.

Earlier this year I was also licensed as a lay Episcopal preacher, in addition to Morning Prayer leader (two years ago) and am continuing my studies, starting with St. Augustine’s works in translation (although I can read some Latin).

I’m listing the books I’m reading in the side bar, in case anyone is interested and wants to check them out further. Clicking on the cover images will take you to a Google Books page with more detailed info about them and availability.

They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.   Psalm 1:3

]]> http://sherrimatthew.com/wordpress/summer-reading/feed/ 0 http://sherrimatthew.com/wordpress/playing-sacred-music-on-the-irish-wire-strung-harp/ http://sherrimatthew.com/wordpress/playing-sacred-music-on-the-irish-wire-strung-harp/#comments Sun, 01 Dec 2024 19:20:51 +0000 http://sherrimatthew.com/wordpress/?p=1915 Sing unto the Lord with the harp; with the harp, and the voice of a psalm. – Psalm 98:5

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.

Jasmine Kitty has aspirations!

If you’ve just discovered the wire harp (or heard one being played), for starters it’s good to know that most folks in the overall world of harps (Classical, Celtic) tend to think of historical Irish wire-strung harp when this branch of the harp family comes up. That is, replica instruments of period harps made in Ireland sometime during the 1600’s and 1700’s and the accompanying music repertoire, e.g. O’Carolan, etc.

These harps are small, have no sharping levers and are diatonic: think playing in the key of C if you are familiar with the piano. No sharps or flats. To extend this analogy to the piano, you can only play music that doesn’t use the black keys. Unless of course, you stop and retune the harp to a different key, say F. Then you would get a Bb in there. But modulation to another key, like E Major, would be impossible.

The Trinity College Harp, Dublin, Ireland.
(Source: Wikipedia)

Around 1830 or so, or just before then, maybe in the late 1790’s, the old diatonic Irish wire-strung harp was beginning to die out. Its replacement? The new concert pedal harp, which made changing keys possible. But it was not a wire harp, with the beautiful, singing ringing tones of wire. It was really a different kind of harp altogether… the concert pedal grand that most people think of when you say “harp”. The orchestra harp.

However. In the world of wire harp there is another branch, albeit a small one. Contemporary wire-strung harps make no pretense to being historic replicas of an instrument from any period in the past. Instead, they look to the future, with their structural design emphasizing flexibility to accommodate today’s music. Certainly they can play the music of the past very well, but they allow instead for the growth and development of a long tradition, now being able to play sharps and flats, thus opening the door to a much wider array of music you can play on them.

Here I am playing my cross-strung wire harp with husband George at the pipe organ, Sunday services at St. Stephen’s

They have sharping blades or levers. They are cross-strung. They are multi-rank (more than one set of strings, each with a set of levers). The possibilities are endless.

For just getting started though, you will probably want to stay in the realm of the diatonic and move on to sharps and flats (chromatics) after you’ve learned the basics. There are a number of issues in playing wire strings that make things quite different from a nylon-strung Celtic harp or indeed, a concert pedal grand. For the most part, they’re played with the fingernails – usually – and there is a whole art form in learning to correctly damp with the finger pads because the strings have a very long ringing sustain. If the strings are not damped, everything runs together and sounds like mush. After a while this way of playing becomes automatic and you won’t have to think about it, but in the beginning you think about it quite a bit!

The wires are very high tension and they are not pulled like a guitar string. Doing so would cause breakage. For the most part, you lightly draw a nail over a string and a millisecond or so later another finger pad drops down on a previously played ringing string. Eventually you learn to pluck chords and intervals and smoothly damp the previously ringing ones as you progress to the next, all without making the damping sound like an abrupt end to the ringing tones. Or buzzing if you accidentally touch just so.

There are a couple of very good introductory method books that you can start with, if you have access to a wire-strung harp (of any kind). Ann Heymann has published two tutorial books that will get a beginner up to proficiency, although her repertoire is very traditional. Her Secrets of the Gaelic Harp is the one I began with and probably the best one you will find on the subject. This book will make you work very hard but get through it and her follow up one Coupled Hands for Harpers and you should be good. Once you have the basics down you can start to study technique from other harping traditions. For me, it was Yolanda Kondonassis’ On Playing the Harp, a pedal harp exercise book, with lots of beautiful arpeggios.

You’ll probably find your harp to be teaching you just as much as the textbook does. And you may well find yourself modifying the traditional techniques you’ve mastered to suit your own style and your harp.

Another kind of harp!

Harp image: Photo 130374963 / Concert Harp © Alina Osadchenko | Dreamstime.com

Harp seal image: Photo 130374963 / Concert Harp © Alina Osadchenko | Dreamstime.com