ram’s-head harps

[jessica-wolff]

This is getting a little off topic, but my teacher once told me that pedals presented a different set of problems. Some folks have posted here that they have problems with pedals that are too close together or too far apart, and you can’t see them while you’re playing.

My Erard is fairly plain, with an undecorated soundboard, but the gilt is in reasonably good shape and I think it’s a beautiful harp. The single action gives you the same range of keys as a lever harp, but frees up your left hand. For whatever reason, I’ve never seen a double-action with the ram’s-head design, almost as if they dropped it like a hot potato when they went over to double action.

[barbara-brundage]

At the time that the ramshead designs were most popular, harps were single action. There are a very few early double action harps with that kind of ornamentation, but Erard (the maker of the majority of the surviving harps from that period that you see in the US and UK) needed to alter things because column capitals got longer to accommodate the wider action plate necessitated by the extra row of discs on a double action mechanism, and also styles were changing, too, starting to move away from the extreme simplicity of the early Empire period, just as the Empire styles were a reaction against the more extravagant styles of the 18th century (when elaborate scrolls were the thing).

The most popular early motif for Erard double actions was the so-called Grecian design, with a row of Nikes (the winged goddess, not the shoe) around the capital:

http://www.hbryan.com/restored/bigkirihrp.jpg

This in turn was followed by the famous Erard Gothic design (for the larger double-action harps which succeeded the Grecian), very much in tune with the trend for all things gothic in the early Victorian era.

[jessica-wolff]

Thanks for that explanation, Barbara. Makes sense.

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