Mit und ohne Haken

TC: Dear Mrs Frau Papadopoulos, You began studying the classical harp at a young age in Athens and later encountered historical harps in Italy. What ultimately led you into the world of early music?

FP: Actually, I discovered early music in Paris. After completing my modern harp studies in Italy, I moved there to pursue a Master’s degree in Musicology at the Sorbonne. Until then, harp and musicology had followed two parallel paths in my life, and early music suddenly brought them together, allowing me to combine performance with research.

At the time there was no historical harp class in Paris, so I joined the lute class at the CNR on Rue de Rome. Studying as a harpist in a lute class was an unusual but enriching experience, based largely on listening and personal research. After two years, I realized I wanted to pursue this path seriously and needed a dedicated harp teacher, which led me to move to Milan to study with Mara Galassi at the Scuola Civica.

TC: Seeing ancient harps from cultures such as Egypt, one gets the sense that every culture developed its own harp. Could you give us a brief – and necessarily incomplete – overview of the history of the European harp?

FP: This is indeed a difficult question, because any history can be told from many different perspectives. I personally see the history of the European harp as a continuous transformation of the instrument in order to keep pace with the musical language of its time, and the central issue has always been chromaticism.

The basic idea of stretching free strings on a frame and plucking them with the fingers is very ancient, but the number of strings on a harp has always changed according to how many notes were needed to perform the music of the current time.

Single-row harps, like the ones you will hear in the concert played by my colleague Claire Piganiol, coped with their repertoire for many centuries through devices such as specific “scordaturas” (specific ways to arrange the tuning of strings).

Around the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, the “cultivated” harp evolved toward instruments with multiple rows of strings in order to accommodate chromatic notes—roughly speaking, the “black keys” of a keyboard. The program I explore in my concert on February 22 focuses precisely on this moment of invention and flourishing of a very modern instrument: the “arpa doppia”, which was soon exported beyond Italy.

Single-row harps, however, never disappeared and continued to evolve as well. Manual shortening devices, known as hooks, were added to the strings to raise the pitch by a semitone. These harps, especially widespread in the 18th century, were common in popular music and eventually also entered art music in German-speaking countries. The decisive breakthrough, however, came with the invention of pedals—a system that shortens the strings via foot-operated mechanisms.

Throughout the 18th century, Europe saw a rich coexistence of many different harp models, each with its specific sound and aesthetic features, attempting to solve the challenge of chromaticism in its own way, according to the context and repertoire needs.

From the end of the century onward, however, the harp clearly followed one path in art music: a single row of strings combined with a pedal system.

TC: Was the harp in early music primarily an accompanying instrument for singing, and did it only become a solo instrument in the Classical period?

FP: Every musician could sing, as musical education for children was mostly shaped through choir training. The harp was the perfect companion for singing, and some of the most famous Italian virtuosi at the end of the 16th century were female singers who accompanied themselves on the harp, such as the “cantatrici” Laura Peperara and Adriana Basile.

But the harp didn’t become a solo instrument only in the Classical period—this happened much earlier.

Our earliest source of harp instrumental music dates from around 1540 (Leipzig I.191). Ascanio Mayone, the focus of my upcoming concert, was a harpist, organist, and chapel master. The Neapolitan school around Mayone and Trabaci created solo pieces for the arpa doppia—Toccatas, Ricercare, Partite—the same kind of repertoire an organist would play. In 18th-century England, John Parry was a famous harp virtuoso who left a large body of solo music. These are just a few examples—there’s a solo harp repertoire throughout the Baroque period.

I’ll be there

by David Fallows

Back in the late 1970s when colleagues and I were preparing for what became the complete recording of the Chansonnier Cordiforme of Jean de Montchenu (c1475), one great excitement was the publication of the collection of pictures of music-making in the fifteenth century assembled by Edmund Bowles in the series Musikgeschichte in Bildern. And I can still remember Tony Rooley telephoning me in 1977 to say that the book had arrived and that it had two seriously unexpected surprises. First, lots of trumpets; and second, lots of harps. In those days the harp was absolutely not part of the normal early music ensemble, but we drew the right conclusion and recruited a recently graduated harpist, Frances Kelly. What Frances told us was that the seriously interesting thing about harps in the fifteenth century was the use of brays to give body to the sound…