Medieval harp12/18/2023 ![]() ![]() We are not even sure if the harp performance described here reflects contemporary practice, or if it is the poet's idealization of some dimly-perceived, mythical courtly yesteryear. I felt that it must be possible to experience the essence of such harp playing in our own day.Īnd yet, the passage offers very little of what we would call "useful historical performance information" about the instrument its specific tuning, materials, size, playing technique, and the pieces being performed are all shrouded in mystery and vagueness. When I read it for the first time, I was like a listener at Tristan's performance: my "thoughts were awakened in many ways." Without ever having touched a harp before in my life, this scene made perfectly clear to me the essential nature of the instrument, its power over hearts and senses, and the magic role it still embodied in the collective memory of Gottfried's early thirteenth-century courtly audience. This passage, excerpted from what is arguably the most famous description of a harp performance to have survived from the Middle Ages, is single-handedly responsible for my own involvement with the instrument. And the eyes were not spared either: many who were there intensely watched his hands.") ![]() ("He played such sweet tones and struck the harp so perfectly in the Breton manner that many who stood or sat nearby forgot their own names hearts and ears began to lose touch with reality, like mesmerized fools, and thoughts were awakened in many ways…With determination and agility his white fingers went into the strings, so that tones were created which filled the whole palace. ![]() I'll begin with a passage from a story which delighted courtly European audiences in the thirteenth century: Eco assures us they probably will be, I hope they might at least nudge a few brave players to find out for themselves, the hard way, how the harp can sing again for us today as an authentic musical instrument. ![]() Since scholarly sources of information about the harp are relatively easy to locate, I will limit my narrative to the current state of my own relationship with this small instrument and its potent musical voice. The following are personal reflections on these questions, specifically as related to the use of the medieval harp. What is the missing element which might allow us to nourish ourselves as musicians so that ratio and anima can work in harmony with hands and ears? Where is the missing link between information and intuition? As a result, coherent and thoughtful schools of playing have been slow to emerge, whereas superficial imitations of non-European musical traditions are hailed as "innovative research." We risk arriving at a permanent state of indigestion as less dedicated players mindlessly begin to copy the performances and recordings of others, creating something which seems reassuringly like a tradition, but which merely completes a self-referential circle. Among today's passionately dedicated players of medieval instruments (and not a few singers), many seem confronted with a feast of information and opinion which they cannot convert into useful musical nourishment. One of the strangest aspects of performing a music we have decided to label "medieval" is that the quantity of iconographical information about instruments and the debates on performance practice are rarely matched by the quality of actual music-making. Everyone has his own ideas, usually corrupt, about the Middle Ages. ![]()
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