59 Fun Facts About Harp

The 'Waltz of the Flowers', which begins with a famous harp cadenza, comes from which ballet?

The Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky thought the ballet 'infinitely worse than Sleeping Beauty' and its first staging disappointed; the concert suite that ends with this waltz was the instant hit.

Which electronic musician made the laser harp a concert trademark?

Jean-Michel Jarre. He has played one at most of his concerts since 1981, but the harp he made famous was built by another Frenchman, Bernard Szajner.

Which composer's String Quartet No. 10 is nicknamed the 'Harp'?

Beethoven. No harp plays in it: the nickname comes from the first movement, where the players pass plucked notes back and forth in imitation of one.

On a pedal harp, what colour are the C strings?

Red. A harp has no keyboard or frets to guide the hand, so the coloured strings are landmarks from which the player finds every other note.

Roughly what total tension do the strings exert on a pedal harp's soundboard?

About a ton. All of that pull bears on a soundboard usually made of spruce, a wood chosen because it is light yet strong and pliable.

Despite Ireland's green image, its coat of arms sets a gold harp on a field of which colour?

Blue. The gold harp on blue is also the Irish president's flag, while the well-known green flag with a gold harp belongs to the province of Leinster.

Which Irish brewer's harp trademark faces the opposite way to the harp on Ireland's state emblem?

Guinness. It put the harp on its labels in 1862 and trademarked it in 1876, decades before the Irish state adopted the same harp in 1922, facing the other way.

Both the Irish state emblem and a famous stout's trademark are modelled on which medieval instrument?

The Trinity College harp was taken apart and rebuilt by the British Museum in 1961, so the real one is wider than the slim harp on Irish coins, which copies its earlier, badly repaired shape.

The medieval Irish harp used as the model for the state emblem is popularly named after which High King?

Brian Boru died in 1014, centuries before the harp that carries his name was made, so the story that the High King owned it is only a legend.

Which English king adopted the harp arms when he declared Ireland a kingdom in 1541?

Henry VIII raised Ireland from a lordship to a kingdom and took the gold harp as its arms; it joined the British royal arms in 1603 and stayed there even after Ireland was partitioned.

Which Irish airline features a stylised harp in its logo?

Ryanair. Named after co-founder Tony Ryan, it began in 1985 with one 15-seat turboprop flying between Waterford and London Gatwick.

Which Scottish football club, founded by Irish emigrants, has a harp in its badge?

Hibernian. Irish immigrants founded the club in 1875 and named it with the Roman word for Ireland; the harp was dropped from the badge in the 1950s and restored in 2000.

In which fairy tale does a boy steal a golden harp that sings on command?

Jack and the Beanstalk. The harp is the last thing Jack takes from the ogre, after a bag of gold and a hen that lays golden eggs, and it nearly gets him caught by calling out to its master.

Who patented the double-action pedal mechanism still used on modern concert harps?

Sébastien Érard's double movement of 1810 lets each string be shortened by one or two semitones, so a harpist can play in any key.

Which composer wrote a Concerto for Flute and Harp in 1778 for a French duke and his daughter?

Mozart wrote it in Paris for the flute-playing Duc de Guînes and his daughter, whose harp playing he called magnificent even though he found her hopeless as a composition pupil.

Rather than C major, a modern concert harp with no pedals pressed is tuned to which scale?

C flat major. Each pedal can raise its strings twice, first to natural and then to sharp, so the open strings start a semitone low and pressing every pedal once gives C major.

What is the term for a harpist's rapid sweep up or down across many strings?

Glissando. On a pedal harp the player can first set the pedals so that neighbouring strings sound the same note, turning one sweep of the hand into a chord with no wrong notes.

Which future king of Israel is said to have soothed King Saul by playing the harp?

David. Older Bibles gave him a harp, but the Hebrew word is kinnor, a kind of lyre that medieval writers mistook for one, which is why painters still show him with a harp.

What is the longest side of a harp, which supports the neck against the strings' pull, called?

The pillar, also called the column, is hollow on a pedal harp so that the rods linking each pedal to the mechanism in the neck can run up inside it.

Which of these so-called harps is really a zither, because its strings run parallel to the soundboard?

The autoharp, named in an 1882 American patent, has padded bars that mute every string outside the chosen chord, so a single strum always sounds a clean chord.

A player of a folk harp is traditionally called what, as opposed to the pedal-harp's harpist?

A harper. The trade gave English the surname Harper as early as the 12th century, though today the line is loose and folk players are often called harpists too.

Lyres and harps some 4,500 years old, among the oldest stringed instruments ever found, came from royal tombs in which city?

Ur. Leonard Woolley excavated the city from 1922 for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, which is why the instruments are now shared between Baghdad, London and Philadelphia.

Mid-3rd-millennium BCE tomb paintings from which civilisation show arched harps like a hunter's bow?

Egyptian. Arched harps later fell out of use across the Middle East, but bow-shaped harps of the same kind are still played in parts of Africa today.

The triple harp originated in Italy but became the traditional instrument of which nation?

Wales. The Italian instrument reached London in the 1600s, and Welsh players kept it after the rest of Europe gave it up for pedal harps, so the triple harp became known as the Welsh harp.

Which South American country counts the harp as its national instrument?

Paraguay. Its folk harp descends from the harps brought from Spain in colonial times, a plain European design that survives in Latin America though Europe itself moved on to pedals.

The 'harp of the plains' leads joropo, the national dance of which country?

Venezuela. The harp arrived with Spanish colonists and took root on the Llanos, the cattle plains shared with Colombia, where it is played alongside the small cuatro guitar and maracas.

Which Southeast Asian country regards the arched saung-gauk harp as its national instrument?

Myanmar. The saung-gauk is thought to have come from India, where arched harps all but died out, while in Myanmar it has been played without a break for over a thousand years, mostly at the royal court.

The kora, West Africa's 21-string harp-lute, has a body made from what?

A large gourd. The calabash is cut in half and covered with cowhide, and the kora is traditionally played by griots, hereditary musicians who sing the praises and histories of their patrons.

A harp riff drives the hit 'Dog Days Are Over' by which British band?

Florence and the Machine. The band has had its own harpist, Tom Monger, since it formed in 2007, so the harp is part of its sound rather than a studio extra.

An Aeolian harp is played by what?

The wind. It is named after Aeolus, keeper of the winds in Greek myth, and in the Romantic era people left one in an open window to hear it sing by itself.

The Jew's harp has no link to Judaism; the oldest known examples were unearthed in which country?

China. More than twenty bone examples about 4,000 years old were found at the ancient city of Shimao, and nobody is sure how the instrument got its English name.

Which French composer wrote his Introduction and Allegro in a rush to show off a Paris firm's pedal harp?

Maurice Ravel finished it in a week of frantic work and three sleepless nights so he could leave on a boating holiday; a rival firm had just hired Debussy to promote its harp without pedals.

Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre opens with a harp repeating one note to imitate what?

Midnight chimes. The harp sounds the same note twelve times, for the hour when Death arrives to play his fiddle while the skeletons dance until the rooster crows.

Which queen of France played the harp at Versailles and championed the composer Gluck?

Marie Antoinette. She had learned the harp as a girl in Vienna with Gluck as her music teacher, and as queen of France she became one of his patrons.

In which 1935 Marx Brothers film does Harpo play the song "Alone" on the harp?

A Night at the Opera. Stowed away on an ocean liner, Harpo clowns for the other passengers after dinner, then turns serious and plays the film's love song as a harp solo.

What did the self-taught Harpo Marx copy to work out how to hold his harp?

A picture of an angel. He spotted it in a shop window and hurried home to copy her pose, having realised he had been resting the harp on the wrong shoulder.

Which English composer set medieval poems for boys' choir and harp in his 1942 work A Ceremony of Carols?

Benjamin Britten wrote it at sea in 1942, sailing home from America in wartime, after picking up a book of medieval poems during a stop at Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Which blind Irish composer wrote harp tunes for his patrons?

Turlough O'Carolan lost his sight to smallpox at 18; his patron Mrs MacDermott Roe had him taught the harp, then gave him a horse and a guide to set him on the road.

Which jazz pianist took up a harp that her saxophonist husband had ordered before his death in 1967?

Alice Coltrane. The harp that John Coltrane had bought for her arrived only after he died, and she built it into albums such as Journey in Satchidananda.

Which American singer-songwriter and harpist released the albums Ys and Have One on Me?

Joanna Newsom. She asked Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson's lyricist on Smile, to write the orchestra for Ys after falling for his album Song Cycle; the record has only five long songs.

Which harpist became a new-age star of the 1980s on an electro-acoustic harp of his own design?

Andreas Vollenweider found the traditional harp too limiting, so he rebuilt it to suit his own music, and in 1987 his album Down to the Moon won the first Grammy given for new-age music.

Which Beatles track from the 1967 album Sgt Pepper is backed only by a harp and strings?

She's Leaving Home. Session harpist Sheila Bromberg played take after take for three hours late into the night, then found when the album came out that Paul McCartney had used her first one.

Which Breton musician, son of harp maker Jord Cochevelou, recorded Renaissance of the Celtic Harp?

Alan Stivell, born Alan Cochevelou, was a boy when his father finished a prototype meant to revive the abandoned Breton harp, and his childhood recitals helped it catch on again.

What is the Irish-language name for the traditional Gaelic harp?

Clairseach. The old instrument died out around 1800 with its last players, so the clairseach heard today is a lighter revival that began in Dublin about twenty years later.

The Queen Mary and Lamont harps, two of the oldest surviving medieval harps, are kept in which city?

Edinburgh. Both are in the National Museum of Scotland, and family tradition says that Mary, Queen of Scots herself gave the first of them away as a gift.

According to Genesis 4:21, who was "the father of all who play" the harp and flute?

Jubal. He belongs to the line of Cain, the Bible's first murderer, whose descendants Genesis credits with founding herding, music and metalwork.

The harp seal gets its name from what?

Black wishbone-shaped marks on its back, said to look like a harp, appear only on adults; pups are born in the fluffy white coats that made them a target for the fur trade.

In Beowulf, the sound of harps and singing in the mead hall enrages which monster into attacking?

Grendel. The poem says he heard the harps ring out in King Hrothgar's hall night after night until he could bear it no longer, and he went on raiding it for twelve years.

Modern folk harps without pedals raise a note's pitch by what means?

A lever on the neck sits beside each string; flipping it shortens that string just enough to raise the note by a semitone, so the player can change key mid-piece with one hand.

What are the three parts that every harp, whatever its type, must have?

Neck, resonator and strings are all that the oldest bow-shaped harps had; the third side that makes the familiar triangle was a later, European addition.

In Psalm 137, the exiles hang up their harps and weep beside the rivers of which city?

Babylon. The psalm's exiles refuse to sing for their captors, yet its opening lines became a worldwide pop hit in 1978 as Boney M.'s 'Rivers of Babylon'.

Which Caribbean island's flag shows a woman in green holding a golden harp, a nod to its early Irish settlers?

Montserrat. The woman is Erin, a personification of Ireland, and St Patrick's Day is a national holiday there, honouring both the island's Irish heritage and a failed slave uprising on that day in 1768.

Which Baroque composer's Harp Concerto in B flat was first published, in 1738, as an organ concerto?

Handel. He is thought to have written it as an interlude for his 1736 ode Alexander's Feast, and it was printed two years later among his organ concertos because it works on either instrument.

By the 1500s, the strings of Gaelic wire-strung harps were most commonly made of what?

Brass. It gave the old harp a ringing, bell-like sound that lasted so long a player had to damp each note just played while sounding the next.

How did players sound the wire strings of the medieval Gaelic harp?

With long fingernails. The habit later faded: at a famous gathering in Belfast in 1792, only Denis Hempson, then in his nineties, still played that way, while the rest used their fingertips.

In the first film of which series does an enchanted harp keep a three-headed dog asleep?

Harry Potter. Hagrid lets slip to a hooded stranger that music sends his three-headed dog Fluffy straight to sleep; in the book Harry does the job himself, with a flute Hagrid carved for him.

Which singer worked with harpist Zeena Parkins on her hushed 2001 album Vespertine?

Björk. She called Vespertine modern chamber music, recalling a time when music-making was domestic and people played harps for each other.

Which Chicago harp maker began in 1864 as a sheet music shop?

Lyon & Healy. Patrick Healy decided to build harps only after noticing how many arrived at the firm's repair shop needing constant work, and its first was finished in 1889.

Which Romantic poet wrote 'The Eolian Harp' in 1795 for Sara Fricker, the woman he was about to marry?

Coleridge. He began it in August 1795, weeks before the wedding, after visiting the Somerset cottage where they would start married life, though the marriage proved unhappy and the pair later separated.