I was out in California in September and paid a visit to Dale Barco. While we were talking in his workshop(for hours), I kept looking at the harps in there and wondered what the cord looped around the neck and mechanism and attached to a beam in the ceiling was for. I thought maybe he had some way of working on harps that I had not thought of! Then I finally asked him about it. He smiled and said it was earthquake protection. He advised all California harpists to do that. The cord is attached to a hook in the ceiling and is just long enough to loop once around the neck and mechanism(between two strings. It has a metal latch on it to hook onto the cord coming from the ceiling.
I was at the San Diego conference years ago when there was an earthquake that lasted 42 seconds!! It happened around 5 in the morning, and I woke up to the sound of coat hangers banging together in the closet and pictures banging on the wall. Being from Boston, it didn’t occur to me that this was an earthquake. I remember thinking as I woke up to all this noise, What the %$^@ are they doing in the next room?!?
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