In August 2009, it was reported that an early nineteenth-century Irish harp had been found in a dumpster in New York City (see The New York Times, August 10, 2009). The story fits well the old narrative of a vanishing culture – Thomas Moore’s minstrel boy expiring on the battlefield, but first tearing asunder the chords of his harp – or the priceless relic saved at the last minute from oblivion – the manuscripts of Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, snatched from the flames. The Irish harp and harper belonged to the Gaelic aristocratic world, destroyed by the Elizabethan and Cromwellian conquests. The harp, already a symbol of Ireland, lingered on as part of a living musical tradition, to be recorded by Edward Bunting at the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, before finally dying out.
So goes the usual narrative. Part of the importance of Helen Lawlor’s book is to convincingly go against that by showing an unbroken continuity in the Irish harp tradition despite substantial change, and to demonstrate the importance of the harp within contemporary Irish musical culture. The harp in the dumpster was made by John Egan, who in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries brought technical innovations to bear on the instrument, which he made for a new performative context: the drawing room and song accompaniment. Egan’s harps were beautifully ornate, adding to the instrument’s symbolic and now Romantic role. Evidence for harp playing in the nineteenth century is limited, but with the national cultural revival from the 1890s, conditions were propitious for the renewed popularity of the harp.
The role of middle-class convent schools in the promotion of the harp in the first half of the twentieth century was of great importance, and provided the model for the art-music style of playing. During this period the harp was largely the preserve of these schools and maintained some of the elitism that characterized it in the drawing room. The harp found a new popularity in the 1950s and 1960s as accompaniment to singing, in solo and ensemble concerts, on radio and on television, and a few practitioners became stars.
From the 1960s, wider dissemination of publications and concerts, increased teaching and the foundation of a dedicated body of harpers contributed to a revival of art-music Irish harping. Characterized by “a literacy-based transmission and a unique repertoire,” it draws on art music practices and “operates within the same systems as other art-music instruments.” From the 1980s on, benefiting from the legacy of the folk revival and following a few pioneering musicians, harpers played the traditional dance music repertoire and integrated the harp into a type of music of which it had never previously been fully a part. Lawlor defines this style of music as traditional because “it adheres to the same musical principles (oral tradition, recognized repertoire, use of characteristic ornamentation, variation, phrasing, rhythm and approach) as Irish traditional music.” The revival of the early Irish harp is part of the Early Music movement. In effect, the harp of the aristocratic native Gaelic culture of Ireland and Scotland is the focus, with practitioners researching early harping and commissioning replicas of extant early harps, of which a small number survive. In Ireland this revival dates from the 1950s, but began much earlier in Scotland.
Art-music style, traditional music style, and early Irish harping thus are all important today, with significant overlaps in performers and in repertoire. The harp has been successfully revived as a popular instrument and has reached much wider audiences than heretofore. Formal teaching is now readily available for the different styles of harping. In the Gaelic aristocratic tradition, male harpers dominated, but since then it has largely been a female instrument.
Besides giving a historical narrative of twentieth-century harping, Lawlor discusses the music itself, the key teachers, promoters, and performers of the harp with concise treatment of central themes such as music revivals, gender, and authenticity. The book itself, well written with its argument clearly articulated, makes an excellent contribution to the study of the modern Irish harp.
Finally, why would anyone want to throw out an early-nineteenth-century Irish harp (even if the revolutionary Wolfe Tone, hearing the instrument played at the Belfast Harp Festival, famously commented, “The Harpers again. Strum strum and be hanged”)? It had belonged to Rose Augustine, whose company had developed the first nylon guitar strings. When the company was moving premises, some years after Mrs. Augustine’s death, its old factory was cleared out. Some valuable musical instruments were removed, but the harp was in such poor condition that it was thrown out. Happily, it was retrieved and, by all accounts, has found a good home.
--------
[Review length: 776 words • Review posted on October 22, 2013]