Harp

Laura Lohman Laura Lohman has taught university arts and humanities courses for over 10 years. She has a PhD in the history of music (University of Pennsylvania), MS in Human Resources and Organization Development (the University of Louisville), and BM in music performance (Indiana University). She holds senior human resources, affirmative action, and project management certifications. • Instructor No one person can be identified as the inventor of the harp. Instead, many ancient civilizations developed harps from existing tools and materials, such as the hunter's bow and animal intestines and hair. Evidence of harps can be dated to at least 3000 BCE in the ancient Mediterranean and the Middle East. The harp is a Harps used around the world have at least the first three of these four parts: • Strings • Neck, to which strings are attached • Resonator box or soundboard, to which strings are also attached and which vibrates with the movement of the strings to produce the sound • Pillar or column, which stabilizes the strings A curved neck, resonator box, and strings can be seen in three adungu harps of different sizes from northwest Uganda. Adungu harps in northwestern Uganda. Unaltered photograph by Rwhaun, CC BY-SA 4.0. Harp resonators and necks are often made from wood. Harp strings may be made of gut (sheep intestines), silk, metal, or nylon. Longer strings produce lower pitches, while shorter strings produce higher pitches. The range of the instrument depends on the numb...

Mike Parker playing the harp previously owned by Jane Austen’s cousin Eliza at Chawton village hall. Photograph: Ollie Thompson/Solent News & Photo Agency/Solent News Mike Parker playing the harp previously owned by Jane Austen’s cousin Eliza at Chawton village hall. Photograph: Ollie Thompson/Solent News & Photo Agency/Solent News When the musician and restorer Mike Parker finally tracked down the harp, it was broken and stained, a shadow of its old self when it was played by a beloved relative of But after careful restoration the instrument began to sing sweetly again and this weekend it was played in the apt surroundings of Chawton, The 250-year-old instrument was once owned by the novelist’s cousin Eliza, whose vivacious character is believed to have been the inspiration for harp-playing Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. “It’s not in perfect condition, but the incredible thing is the fact it has survived,” said Parker, who found the harp in Belgium. “When I got it, it was pretty derelict, it was grotty. It had 150 years of nicotine on it. “The neck had been badly broken, it needed to be fixed. Once I got it tuned and up to pitch, what came out of it was this beautiful, lovely little sound. “It was a voice from the past. I heard a sound that modern instruments just don’t have. It sang when the world was different.” The Holtzman harp was made in Paris in 1777 where Eliza, who had married a captain in the French army, Jean-François Capot de Feuillide, began to play it. As ...

Contents • 1 History • 1.1 Preparations • 1.2 Construction • 1.3 Operations • 1.4 Closure • 2 Testing • 2.1 5-inch gun systems • 2.2 7-inch gun systems • 2.3 16-inch gun systems • 2.3.1 High Altitude Research Facility • 2.3.2 Highwater Range • 2.3.3 Yuma Proving Ground • 3 Martlet projectiles • 3.1 Martlet 1 • 3.2 Martlet 2A, 2B, 2C family • 3.3 Martlet 2G and 2G-1 • 3.4 Martlet 3 • 3.4.1 Martlet 3A • 3.4.2 Marlet 3B • 3.4.3 Martlet 3D • 3.4.4 Martlet 3E • 3.5 Martlet 4 • 3.5.1 Martlet 4 Control Systems • 4 Further reading • 5 See also • 6 References • 7 External links History Preparations Project HARP originated as the brainchild of During the late 1950s, Bull conducted preliminary launch experiments at the CARDE (now known as In 1961, Bull resigned from CARDE and Construction In 1962, Bull and Mordell established a McGill University research station on The installation of the 16-inch gun began at the newly established High Altitude Research Facility in April 1962. A gun pit was dug into the island's coral base, and a concrete emplacement was built on a plateau so that the gun barrel could stand vertically. The 16-inch naval gun barrels provided by the U.S. Army served as the barrels of the HARP gun. They had to be transported to the site on the U.S. Army landing ship, the 1⁄ 2 miles from the beach using a temporary purpose-built railway. Operations The projectiles fired by the 16-inch HARP gun on Barbados belonged to a family of cylindrical, finned missiles called Martle...

Although you may have only seen a harp strumming out the background music in your dreams, they’re a genuine instrument that many accomplished musicians still use today. You may even want to learn the harp and wonder what the different parts of a harp might be. If you’re earnestly trying to learn the harp, you need to know every nook and cranny of your instrument. In this article, we’ll go over the various parts of a harp and how they interact with one another. After reading, you’ll be off to a good start on your journey of learning the harp. Anatomy of a Harp Harps are some of the more intricate instruments out there. While there are several types of harps, we’ll only cover the parts of a pedal harp for the purposes of this article. Lever harps are also popular, but they share many of the same parts, minus the pedals. Pedal harps have four distinct sections that encompass the instrument’s smaller parts: • Body • Neck • Pillar • Foot Below, we’ll give you an in-depth look into how the different parts work together to achieve the unique sound we all know and love. Body If you consider the full harp as a triangle, the body is the longest side that sits closest to the player. They cradle the body in their own, one hand strumming strings from the left, the other from the right. The harp’s body is semi-cylindrical, shaped similarly to a half-cone with straight edges. It can be pretty wide if you’re dealing with a large harp or relatively narrow when playing smaller or portable o...

When the sublime is in fashion, quiet beauty struggles to be heard. Dorothy Ashby, America’s first great jazz harpist, came of age amid the clamor of giants—men like Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane, whose fissile innovations endowed the once-“cool” genre with density and heat. New elements were constantly being discovered, but there wasn’t much room for a woman playing an instrument that wasn’t even on the periodic table. Ashby could have stuck with the piano, which she’d studied, or kept her strings in the orchestra where they belonged. Luckily, she had something to prove, a new sound to pluck from the thorny garden of unheard vibrations. “I always had the hangup on jazz,” she once said. “The challenge was so much greater.” Ashby was a “bebop angel,” as the journalist Herb Boyd once wrote, cutting eleven albums whose sapphiric elegance belied the extraordinary difficulty of jazz improvisation on a harp. Yet despite the acclaim she achieved—awards, appearances on “The Tonight Show,” a long-running radio show in her native Detroit—her catalogue sank into obscurity after her death in 1986. Only recently has it begun to rise from the depths. Ashby’s music has been sampled by hip-hop artists like J Dilla and Swizz Beatz; Ashby was born Dorothy Jeanne Thompson in 1930. Her father, who was a travelling jazz guitarist during the Depression, taught her to accompany him on the piano at a young age. She fell in love with the harp at Cass Technical High School, whose ...

Harps were widely used in the ancient Mediterranean and bce. Many were played in vertical position and plucked with the fingers of both hands, but Mesopotamia also had horizontal harps. Placed on the player’s lap, strings toward the player, they were plucked with a plectrum. Horizontal harps are pictured in India as late as 800 ce but apparently died out in the Middle East about 600 ce. At this same time Chromatic harps were built as early as the 16th century—e.g., the double harp, with two rows of strings, and the Welsh triple harp, with three rows. They also include the chromatic harp, invented in the late 19th century by the Pleyel firm of Paris, with two crossing sets of strings (like an X), and its U.S.

Noun About 20 students are currently in the harp program. — Miriam Marini, Detroit Free Press, 14 Apr. 2023 Unusually cast in two movements, slow then fast, with a cadenza in the middle, the concerto calls for a supporting ensemble of strings, piano and harp. — Dallas News, 9 Nov. 2022 Instead of getting wings and a harp, Angus is assigned to a job in an umbrella factory. — Washington Post, 10 May 2022 Made of ivory and gold the ancient scepter features the national emblems of the rose, thistle, harp and fleur-de-lis with a cross, on which perches an enameled dove. — Monique Jessen, Peoplemag, 10 May 2023 In his voice there were fiery pillars and crackling skies, not harps and halos. — Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 28 Apr. 2023 Assistant concertmaster Stephen Tavani did lustrous work as the score’s protagonist, but his colleagues on clarinet, oboe, bassoon, cello, and harp were no less evocative conjuring a string of colorful moods and characters. — Zachary Lewis, cleveland, 11 July 2022 Jaws drop at the sight of the Chillman Suite's spectacular carpet, vivid greens and golds and classical objects from the harp to the fireplace. — Robin Soslow, Chron, 13 May 2023 First, there were the Aeolian harps of ancient Greece, which sang and hummed using just the wind's breeze. — Brigid Kennedy, The Week, 12 May 2023 Verb That's an easy statistic to harp on, since everybody loves bashing Congress. — Corey S Powell, Discover Magazine, 20 Feb. 2013 Conservatives harp about bad governa...