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 It was superseded by today’s concert pedal harp.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

This is a harp that I had accidentally knocked over while recovering from Covid and was still too weak to really move around well. The harp hit a Victorian roll top desk and cracked the ornate pillar shield with the Celtic knot abalone inlay fracturing along the edge, the bubinga wood stave back separated at the back and along the left side all the way to the top, and the entire sound box rotated off its base to the right.

Months later I attempted to repair the damage with some shims, wood putty and MinWax gel stain but the force of the harp under tension continued to pull the soundbox apart. In July I shipped it back to Triplett’s.

Moments after impact… outrageous damage to my harp… never again!!

Rotated soundbox… the repair work features structural reinforcements to insure this cannot happen again!

I felt sick when George picked up my harp (and me) off the floor and I saw this… pillar shield crack… shudders!

You would never know it was damaged!!

The harp looks and plays like brand new!!

Amazing repair work from the shops of Triplett Harps!!

Moral of the story: never practice your instrument when you’re really, really sick or recovering and can just barely move around (uncoordinated). Very bad things can happen. Maybe stay in bed with a small lap harp?

This beautiful harp will not be making her grand re-appearance at my church just yet… we’ve decided to hold off until next May when our heating season is over. We’ll be rearranging some of our church furniture at that time so Luna harp can reside in our sanctuary throughout the warm spring and summer months right into autumn, eliminating the transportation piece from my house to church each Sunday (my church is literally 800 feet from my house!). Less worry about bumps, loading into the car and inclement weather from week to week.

My harp family portrait:
Triplett Luna stands tall in the middle, with Stoney End Esabelle to her right, Argent Fox “Forest” in front and my Paraguayan harp in back.

The other announcement is I’ve placed an order with Stoney End Harps for my second harp from them! Rebecca is a cross-strung floor harp in maple, a big sister to Esabelle, but with nylon strings. This harp will be what I call “full chromatic”, that is, all sharps and flats available, just as on a piano keyboard.

I will probably call her “Rebekah”.

This large x-harp will allow me to pursue the classical concert literature more in depth. A historic Pleyel cross-strung harp is a bit out of my pocket book’s reach and to the best of my knowledge, neither Lyon & Healy nor Salvi have ever built a concert pedal grand harp for lefties (the strings on the opposite side of the neck). My Triplett Luna is also a custom-built lefty harp.

I’ve played Esabelle, my wire cross-strung lap harp for ten years now and so I’ve researched the topic of x-harps quite a bit. Over the years I’ve built up a collection of cross-strung books on classical music, one for the Pleyel cross-strung harp written in French, with progressive lessons and repertoire. Another goes into the history of the instrument, both in the 19th century European music conservatories and its rebirth in America as an affordable folk harp of varying sizes.

Update – June 2025 –

Strings are in short supply and the bottom-most strings for my Rebekah harp are not yet available. Two string makers have gone out of business, leaving one small family business to be the supplier to the U.S. folk harp builders. Rebekah is more or less complete, but still waiting for her bass strings. I don’t know when that will happen.