Harfenparcours, St. Alban-Tal, Basel
etween winter air and warm lights: a journey through the St. Alban quarter, featuring solo harp music in three cozy, intimate locations. The Renaissance was a period of remarkable developments for the harp family: the instruments became larger, their sound evolved—among other things through the increased use of buzzing hooks – and early attempts were made to develop a fully chromatic harp.
The “Harp Parcours” leads to three performers and thereby three sound worlds of the Renaissance harp:
Claire Piganiol – The Gothic bray harp, with repertoire from the Welsh Ap Huw manuscript, one of the very few sources that transmits playing techniques and repertoire specifically for the late medieval harp.
Carolin Margraf – The early arpa doppia, the two-row chromatic harp, featuring instrumental music and diminutions from a Polish source dating to the mid-16th century
Flora Papadopoulos – The arpa doppia a tre ordini, with courtly music from the Kingdom of Naples around 1600
Please choose any starting point for your parcours route and arrive by 18:00.
– St. Alban’s Church, St. Alban-Kirchrain 11
– Event Room of the Basel Paper Mill, St. Alban-Tal 37 (3rd floor)
– Sternensaal, Gasthof zum Goldenen Sternen, St. Alban-Rheinweg 70
Free admission – collection
Option: From 20:00 you can reserve a 3-course menu (CHF 65) at the Gasthof zum Goldenen Sternen – the perfect way to round out the evening! Book directly through the restaurant: https://www.sternen-basel.ch/ | Tel. 061 272 16 66 | info@sternen-basel.ch
Harfenistin von Jost Amman, aus: Der Ander Theil Deß neuwen Kunstbuchs […], Frankfurt am Main: Sigmund Feyerabend, 1580, fol. 37r © The Trustees of the British Museum
März 2025
Was ist ein Lautenparcours?
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…
So we let her use brays, but only for one piece (because the whole idea was entirely foreign to us). Fifty years later, the world has changed. Everybody knows about brays and a thousand other things that contributed to making the harp one of the central instruments in the early music movement. All the same, the three mini-recitals with different harps in February’s ReRenaissance concert will be a rare treat, all in lovely venues on the Rhine in the St-Alban-Quartier.
Barfüsserkirche, Historisches Museum Basel
Barfüsserkirche
Historisches Museum Basel
Barfüsserkirche,
Historisches Museum Basel
Sa Nydeggkirche, Bern
Su Barfüsserkirche, Historisches Museum Basel
