Harps and Harpists, Revised Edition / Roslyn Rensch

This book could well be subtitled "everything you ever wanted to know about the harp, but didn't know enough to ask." It's all here, from the birth of the harp in ancient times (harps, generally shaped more or less like a J, with one side open, are pictured in artworks dating back several millennia) through its development--acquiring the column, or "forepillar" that makes it three-sided--in medieval Europe; from the first pedal harps to the computerized Camac "memory" harp. Roslyn Rensch, a professor of harp, addresses everything from Welsh bards and that aristocratic harpist Marie Antoinette to the late-20th-century return to interest in various small folk harps and Andreas Vollenweider and his electronically enhanced instruments.

This is the paperback edition of a book originally published in 1989. It is lavishly illustrated (the picture credits run to five pages) and exhaustively footnoted. Although Harps and Harpists is certainly written with a rather narrow core audience in mind--readers who are involved personally or professionally with harps--it is quite readable. It should also interest readers who are curious about the social history of ethnic Celtic societies in which the harp played a significant cultural part, and of 18th-century France. --Sarah Bryan Miller
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