Carbon Fiber Concert Harps….Please soon!

[Christian Frederick]

This thread is a good example of:

1) Mob mentality

2) Bullying

and to quote from a recent thread under Harps and Accessories:

“….. just a bunch of so called adults acting like a bunch of spoiled spiteful children with the need to bully others not part of their pecking order or group.”

[Christian Frederick]

I forgot to add…..

This is an example of a HIJACKED thread, which is about the only thing happeng lately.

[David Ice]

I certainly can’t argue with that!

[David Ice]

I find it very interesting that a professional harpist, Basil, recently posted, in response to why his “nick” changed:

“there was a problem in my name some one used my name and wrote something bad,by stoling my password so i had to change my name for a time being, i may come back to my name.”

[patricia-jaeger]

I was told by Earl Thompson, maker of the non-pedal Linrud harps which were part fibreglas, why he set up his factory to produce harps of that kind. Mr. Thompson is now elderly and no longer produces the harps that sold so well

[sherry-lenox]

I wonder if the developer of the Luis and Clark instruments was familiar with Mr. Thompson’s sailing hobby. He developed the body of the Luis and Clark cello after studying the fiberglas sailboat.

So really, there is a more substantial body of history here than I for one had realized. I think it’s time for some qualified maker to give it a try, whether lever or pedal.

As another interesting sidebar (NOT OT), Luis Leguia has often said that if a musician is willing to play one of the instruments the opinion expressed will have merit, but someone who rejects the idea on tradition alone is not in a position to speak positively or negatively. (broadly paraphrased).

[tony-morosco]

Patricia,

That is very interesting about Mr. Thompson.

I have a 30 string Celtic type harp that has a fiberglass body, but the makers name on the inside is so worn I could never make it out. Only the date which I think is 1975. I always wondered who made it and it very well could have been Mr Thompson.

Unfortunately I did a search on the Internet and from what I read it looks like Mr. Thompson has passed away in April of this year.

[David Ice]

What a fascinating story!!

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

I must have missed something.

[unknown-user]

I have a Thom harp and love the sound of it. They are not completely carbon fibre. The soundboard is cedar reinforced with carbon fibre. The soundbox is aluminium. Every note is clear and beautiful with just the right amount of sustain. I see no point in clinging to tradition for traditions sake alone. If all wood produces a significantly better sound then by all means. If as good a sound or better can be achieved with progress then why not?

I’ve put my harp up against all wood harps from several makers and some of them significantly more expensive than my harp. I still prefer the sound of mine to those others. Innovations have produced great strides in what’s possible for harps over the centuries. Possibly people scoffed at the first pedal harps too as being mechanical and un-musical. But where would we be today without them?

[HBrock25]

Oh YES!! I’m with you on this one!

[barbara-brundage]

>Possibly people scoffed at the first pedal harps too as being mechanical and un-musical.

No.

[barbara-brundage]

The closest thing I can think of would be Dorette Spohr supposedly giving up the harp after the double action harp came out because she found it too hard to move from the single action pedal harp, but supposedly she said it was because she could see the superiority of the new harps but was just too frustrated. I’ve always been a little agnostic about that story, myself. I think it more likely that she had other reasons and found a good premade justification.

Because people are (often justifiably) not always eager to jump up and down about the latest technological advance these days, it’s become axiomatic that people have always taken this attitude towards everything, but it’s just not the case.

I can’t think of a single recorded anecdote of anyone looking at the early pedal harps and getting all bent out of shape about the idea. Anyone else know of one?

[carl-swanson]

-I can’t think of a single recorded anecdote of anyone looking at the early pedal harps and getting all bent out of shape about the idea. Anyone else know of one?-

Ooooooooh yes! Naderman for one, who himself was a builder of the single action pedal harp. In the introduction to his Methode, there is a long diatribe about the double action pedal harp, in essence saying that there isn’t anything that you can do on the double action harp that you can’t do on a single action, except perhaps some cheap effects like glissandos.

What harpists of the day did, as you would expect, is buy the double action harp and use it like a single action instrument, because that’s what they were used to. They would tune it in E flat and then use half of the mechanism. Even Berlioz complained about this in his treatise on orchestration.

This is why Parish-Alvars is so important to the history of the harp. He’s like the kid with a Rubic’s cube. He was the one who figured out what the double action harp could really do and wrote pieces that for the first time in harp history could ONLY be played on the double action harp. it’s interesting to me that he almost never used the glissando effect. But in addition to figuring out how to use the full pedal mechanism, he also figured out how to write more effectively on the harp, with widely spaced chords that reached well over an octave in each hand.

[barbara-brundage]

That’s not the same as someone who had no financial stake in it, Carl.

Naderman Pere didn’t say, “Let’s keep those hooks!”, did he?

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