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San Francisco's "History of the Harp" Exhibit
By Maureen Ustenci
First printed in the "Folk Harp
Journal" Spring 2003
The Annual Festival of
Harps which has become a San Francisco Bay Area institution, has since
1989, been host to every possible manifestation of harp, harp player,
and harp tradition. Festival goers have been treated to harp music
from five continents and three millennia. The Festival's
popularity is such that in the year 1999, to celebrate the Festival's
first decade, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown declared November 14th to
be "Festival of Harps Day". It has been celebrated as
such ever since, with free public concerts and other harp-related
events.
One such event has been a lecture-performance at the
San Francisco Main Library, entitled "History of the Harp".
This presentation was developed by FOH Director Diana Stork and her
musician husband, Dr. Teed Rockwell, the President of the Multi-Cultural
Music Fellowship, which produces FOH, and other musical events.
This year, Diana and MCMF were honored by a request from library curator
Everett Erlandson to create a "History of the Harp" exhibit.
The exhibit opened in mid-November 2002, dovetailing nicely with the
opening of FOH. This was great for Festival goers and harp fans in
general, but it presented a potential logistical nightmare for Diana,
already consumed by FOH matters. She had less than 2 months to get
the exhibit organized and ready to open.
Fortunately, a call for help brought in expert and
generous assistance from every corner of the harp world, and MCMF was
able to find all the help needed to get the exhibit in place.
Contributors included harpists, harp scholars and ethnomusicologists,
among them many names familiar to FOH fans. As Diana remarked,
"Only a small part of the harp's 5,000 year history could be
presented" and certain choices had to be made. The exhibit
expands on the topics in Stork and Rockwell's "History of the
Harp" performance, including Prehistoric, African, Asian, Celtic,
Latin American, and Western European (designated as "Historical
Harps"); the harp in literature and media; harp-making; and a
segment on "New Directions for the Harp". Each
contributor assembled as many notes, photographs, and actual harps as
the space would allow.
One only wishes that a bit more space might have been
allowed. The exhibit is housed on the fourth floor of the library
- the Music and Performing Arts section - in and just outside the Steve
Silver Beach Blanket Babylon Room (donated by the founder of yet another
San Francisco musical tradition). The graceful round room makes a
fine setting for the exhibit. The rather small size of the floor
cases makes it impossible to display the spectacular larger harps, but
the exhibit makes up in aesthetic appeal for what it lacks in drama.
Outside the room's entrance
is a wall case featuring sections on each of the categories covered.
The amount of information and number of visual images of the harp
contained in this one case is astonishing, and provides a very visceral
sense of the length and breadth of the instrument's history and
influence. Over this case hangs a hunting bow, an image as ancient
and archetypal as the harp itself. The bow is thought to be the
origin and ancestor of the harp.
A stunning crimson and gold
Burmese bow-harp draws your eye immediately to the central floor case as
you enter the exhibit room. Bow-harps, common to Asia and Africa, have a
sound-box and a harmonic curve to which the strings are attached, but
are missing the fore-pillar of the familiar European harp. Perhaps
the most surprising information in the exhibit relates to harps in
Africa and Asia. Not only do they exist there, they have enjoyed
great importance and prevalence. In Africa there is an area known
to music scholars as the harp zone, extending across sub-Saharan Africa
from the east to the west coast. Nearly 150 different African
peoples use the harp, and three different types of harp are common.
Best known to Westerners is the African bow-harp known as the adungu.
James Makubuya, a scholar and master of the adungu, designed the African
harps exhibit.
Rudiger Opperman, harpist and
harp builder, who has spent many years researching non-Western harp
music, contributed "Harps in Asia". The Asian harp seems
to have originated - again, in the form of a bow-harp -- in Central Asia
and spread to every direction, carried by the Scyths, the Mongols, the
Turks, and other Asian nomads to every corner of the continent. Many
forms of the Asian harp, sadly, have died out, remaining only in art and
in literature. In China the harp has survived in two forms, a
horizontal form similar to a koto (the Japanese horizontal harp), and a
bow-harp. China's history demonstrates how political factors
contribute to the demise or popularity of an instrument: the Maoist
government condemned the horizontal harp and persecuted its players
because of the harp's connection with Confucian and Taoist ideals.
The bow-harp, on the other hand, won their full approval and support.
One of the Asian harp section photographs shows a Chinese harp master,
Cui Junzhi, playing a harp of her own design which incorporates features
of both types of harp. He does not mention whether the People's Republic
has approved this hybrid, but Cui Junzhi now lives in Northern
California.
Celtic harpists Mitch Landy
and Maureen Brennan contributed the materials for the contemporary
Celtic harp display, including small harps. Ann Heymann, one of the few
masters of the traditional Irish wire-strung harp provided the ancient
Celtic harp segment. Heymann's notes, clearly exhaustively
researched, are fascinating, includes a glowing review of Irish harp
technique from a twelfth century music critic as well as an ancient
Irish legend tracing the origin of the harp to a disillusioned housewife
and a beached whale. The ancient Celtic harp design and playing
techniques were sharply different from those favored today, and here
again, politics played a role. In Ireland, under a suppressive
English rule that lasted five centuries, harp players were rightly
perceived as Irish nationalists and the harp itself as a symbol of Irish
freedom. Queen Elizabeth I ordered succinctly, "Hang the
harpers and burn the harps," with the eventual result that harp
playing, once essential to Irish culture, died out altogether.
Both Celtic harps and harping have had to be almost entirely reinvented,
and much of this has been done in the years since the 1970's.
Landy's exhibit deals chiefly with new Celtic harp design and the
playing of musicians of this latest harp renaissance.
Dr. Cheryl Ann Fulton traced
the harp's development in Western Europe from medieval to
nearly-modern times, with special attention to the Welsh triple-strung
harp, of which she is one of only a handful of masters living today.
Dr. Fulton's presentation was especially lavish in photographs,
including many of paintings depicting the harp, often drawn from
Biblical themes. Harpist Laura Simpson provided a history of the
development of the double-action pedal harp, changes which moved the
harp into its place in the orchestra but contributed to the temporary
demise of the diatonic harp. Fortunately, the classical and the
folk harp are at last learning to live together.
The European baroque harp tradition, according
to Latin musicologist Allegrah Hardulfi, was the ancestor of a wholly
different descendant: the harp music of Latin America. Among the
Spanish immigrants to Latin America were musicians who brought with them
their large, light-bodied harps. The Spanish were amazed at how
quickly the native population adopted the harp. Combining the European
method of playing with their own musical traditions, they created not
one but many new styles, varying greatly from country to country. The
harp has become integral to the folk music of Mexico, Venezuela and
Peru, to give only a few examples.
Of particular interest was
Teed Rockwell's segment on "New Directions for the Harp".
In the new harp music we find combined every element of both traditional
and contemporary music. Stork and Rockwell's own group Geist has
drawn upon the harp's African, Celtic, Asian and Latin roots in their
original compositions, combining them with jazz, rock, funk, country,
and Indian ragas, while juxtaposing the folk harp with the electronic
Chapman stick. Europe's Andreas Vollenweider and Rudiger Oppermann,
as well as America's Sarah Voynow, have created astonishing new sounds
by altering harp construction and stringing, and adding electric
amplification and sound modification. Park Stickney, a jazz
harpist who has been known to transport his harp in the sidecar of a
motorcycle, has created pedal techniques that let him play jazz chords
and progressions which had formerly been thought impossible to play on a
classical harp. The answer to the question, "What direction is the
harp heading in these days?" seems to be, "Anywhere it wants
to". There does not seem to be a border the harp can't cross
in the hands of an innovative player.
Materials on harp-making came
from William Rees and from Lyon and Healy, some of the best-known harp makers
in the world. They have shown their versatility and love for the
harp by keeping up with the times, developing diatonic and electrically
amplified harps in response to the demands of the new generation of harp
players.
Much of this information, of
course, will already be familiar to readers of the Folk Harp Journal.
To many other people, the harp brings to mind images of the quaint, the
sentimental or the archaic. The value of this exhibit is its
ability to reach a great many people with the news that the harp is
vibrantly alive all over the world, speaking new languages and taking
new forms. It's hard to imagine anyone seeing this exhibit without
wanting to go out and hear some harp music.
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