Introduction (part)

The system of gestures is one of the ‘secrets’ of historical Irish and British harp technique. It takes some time to learn the gestures, but the results can be startling, especially to modern harp piayers who have not come across them be ore.

The historical harp traditions of Ireland, Scotland and Wales p reserve a lot of interesting information about ancient native idiom, style and technique. It is possible that they represent the tail end of much more widespread European indigenous traditions that died out or changed with the spread of fashionable art music in the late medieval, Renaissance, baroque and classical periods of music.

These native harp traditions all became extinct hundreds of years ago. The Welsh harp tradition known as cerdd dant (the art of the string) died out in the 17th century; in Scotland, the Gaelic harp had disappeared by the mid i8th century, while in Ireland it started on into the 19th century. But none of the old players was recorded on wax cylinder, and only one, Patrick Byrne, was photographed.

The reason why the traditions died out, I think, is that they were archaic remnants of much older strands of European learned culture. I suspect that in earlier medieval times, this is the kind of tradition that was common across Europe. As literate learning took over, and developed through the centuries from medieva times right through to the 19th and 20th centuries, the older oral learning was displaced; and became confined more and more to the edges .........