Give a man a harp...

“Harpists spend ninety percent of their lives tuning their harps and ten percent playing out of tune.”–Igor Stravinsky

The Gaelic for harp is clarsach. I have no idea how this should be pronounced but the older form of the word is cruit & thus a harpist becomes cruitire or clairsair. I like clarsach which seems to have a nice splashy sound.

I began studying about the clarsach when I first investigated the file ~ an order of druidism ~ & initially I made no distinction between the poet [file] & the cruitre, harpist, because in our time & world they are all too often the same thing. That was not the case in the ancient Celtic world. The file was the important subject, the harpist a mere accompanist. The file was allotted magical properties ~ or if like me you are a little more cynical, the file were good students of human nature & they played upon their knowledge.

Why, oh why, would anyone waste their time investigating a dead musical tradition? Well my lovelies, if you know your Celtic mythology you will grasp the inherent possibilities for a fantasy writer when music is credited with the abilities the Celts gave it ~ able to induce sleep, awaken passion, transport the soul. Add in the glam, a curse or two, a pretty maiden & voila! Fantasy 101.

Now I once read an Alan Garner quote, & Alan Garner has a very interesting Celtic tradition of his own, wherein he said of the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, why use a made up word when a real one is available? Yes, both weirdstone & Brisingamen are real words. This thinking intrigued me. Why invent something when you can use a tradition that already exists? Reality gives the sort of hard edge fantasy writers would kill for. It is why their books are riddled with bits & pieces of other people's mythologies ~ though not always well done.

I can be a little obsessive...all right then, a lot obsessive because I read & the first thing that struck me is how the Celts described their harps ~ strung with silver & bronze & gold! Can you imagine how the light would have shimmered through the moving strings?! These instruments were beautifully decorated, lovingly carved & painted. I know nothing about music so I kept reading & read all sorts of people saying all sorts of things about how you couldn't string a harp with gold wires ...& then I read about Brian Boru's harp, the Lamont harp & Queen Mary's harp. These are the oldest Celtic harps in existence ~ The Boru harp is in Dublin, the other 2 at Edinburgh museum. I don't understand the maths or the mechanics but I understood enough to realise that the reconstructionists were having massive problems tuning these things. They just wouldn't tune across the whole soundboard! It didn't matter if you used nylon, hair or wire the harps would not tune. The bottom octave remained stubbornly out of tune.

Then Ann Heymann came along & went into cahoots with a goldsmith & they came up with a way to make a gold wire hard enough & strong enough to be used as harp strings. Guess what? Gold wire tunes on an ancient Celtic harp! The stories are literally true! I was flabbergasted ~ & I'm one for thinking there is always a grain of truth in the old stories. I forget which way it works but a mixture of gold & bronze strings means you can tune these harps across the octaves. Funny that.

Now the old Irish & Scottish harpers grew their nails long because the strings were plucked rather than stroked. This gives the notes a bright sort of tinny sound that lasted & there is some evidence that fake tin nails were used by some harpers or if a nail got broken.

That is all fascinating enough but what has always intrigued me because it is such a Celtic way of thinking are the stories of the great war harps that stood taller than a man & were strung untuned for the wind to wail through. Can you imagine? Serious nightmare stuff I'm sure!

The harps that remain are old & fragile, too old & fragile to be restrung & played now & they are relatively late ~ Medieval pieces. We know that the harps were round earlier than that. There are pics carved on Pictish standing stones showing a left handed orientation & we have the metal harp keys used for turning the tuning pegs. We also know there was an unbroken music tradition in both Ireland & Scotland until Good Queen Bess took it into her pretty red head to outlaw harping & kill off all the harpers. I'm sure she had a good reason for this. I should look into it. Then again the Harpers were druids & the druids were patriots of a rather rampant sort. The only patriotism Bess wanted was the sort that adored her. Neither the Irish or the Scots were good at admiring the English ~ for good reason, but we won't go into all that.

So when I finally get to see one of these harps, a harp I can neither touch nor play, yet passed down through generations of tenured families who held the secrets of the strings in their very souls I hold all this history in myself & the harp becomes more than just a harp. It is the story of a people nearly destroyed, stubbornly clinging to survival.

This present madness.

“'But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. Lewis Carroll
It has begun, the great madness.


It's all Ditz's fault, you know. She would do it. Her father thinks it's terrific; he's not the one driving her hither & thither. I'm looking at my next fortnight & contemplating Pern. Pern is out Rabkat way in some whole other galaxy.


We have gone round & round with QPAC about tickets for the Friday night concert. First they said yes, then they rang & said no. Then they lost all the details & offered us Thursday night. Liddy is working so I wasn't interested. I asked them to refund my money & resigned myself yet again to not seeing my daughter in concert. I spoke to 4 different people who obviously had not spoken to each other & the last was so camp I was struggling not to burst into giggles throughout our whole conversation. Eventually they gave us tickets for Friday night. We get seats initially reserved for the disabled. I think it's highly appropriate. My sense of the ironic is killing me.


Having rung the accompanist for the exam no~one wants [*sigh*] & left a message saying we would be home by 8pm we toddled off to choir. This required a detour to buy a flesh coloured camisole [what's a camisole?] because the kids do not have a dressing room at QPAC & as Alison pointed out, 'I do not want security footage of you all standing round the backstage corridors in your underwear!' Yikes! A camisole it was.

Being the odd person I am I enjoy rehearsals far more than the real thing & I particularly enjoy watching Alison rehearse her ensemble. I am always amazed at how close the kids come to meeting her very high expectations. Having run through their two big songs she began the excruciating process of having the entire choir sing the piece solo, one by one, because how can she fix faults if she doesn't know what they are & who is doing what?

This alone is an eye~opener. Those who have been with Alison a while don't even think to quibble. When their name is called they stand & sing a Capella as directed & they wear her comments without suffering a major meltdown. The newbies, all from a public school, squirmed out of it. Ditz, homeschooled & coming in to a choir trained to stand & sing, doesn't quibble either. Even the most experienced kids find this daunting. Their voices get the occasional wobble & loss of pitch. Poor old Ditz had to sing second ~ & she sings seconds so was singing a slightly different tune to the first girl & being Ditz she hasn't bothered to learn all the words because she picks up on what's next from the singers around her. I did rather expect Alison to eat her alive. Instead she got the biggest compliment.

Now I must point out when it comes to singers I like Grace Slick & Meatloaf; big, raw voices with a lot of power behind them, or slightly odd ones like J.J. Cale. To me Ditz has a *pretty* voice; nothing special. Apparently not. Alison told her how much her voice had come on then went on to tell her how much she likes her voice which is, apparently, pure & clear like her flute. I nearly died. Seriously? Our Ditz? Obviously I don't appreciate the girl enough. Apparently she is an extremely valuable member of the ensemble & brings a unique quality to it. O.k, I'm gobsmacked. And do remember I listen to this ensemble week in, week out & I've heard all the voices solo at least once & there are voices I appreciate far more than my Ditz's. Not that I would tell her so for love or money. She's been told to keep working on the songs because the acoustics at QPAC mean that the kids aren't going to be able to hear each other. The individual miking means they are only going to be able to hear themselves & it will sound to their ears as if they are singing solo. And that's before we get to the fact that as guest artists when this show is televised the whole lot of them will be panned so they want to have it really together. I am having this major panic; my daughter has barely batted an eyelash. That is probably a good thing.

So thinking rehearsal was nearly done & Alison had merely run overtime I packed my book, found the car keys & prepared to bolt. Nope. Long rehearsal. Frantic phone call home to tell Liddy who had to field the accompanist's phone call. My life is out of control. However the accompanist explained exactly what would happen at the exam. Good. She said if we picked her up she would direct us in. Better. She is calm & knows what she's doing which is more than we do. Best of all. Naturally Ditz's mind is not on her exam. I explained about the singing. Local woman. Knows Vocal Manoeuvres. Impressed. Why am I always the last person to know how big a deal we've landed in the middle of?

We were late home. Ditz was very late to bed. We were tired & hungry & Ditz was whirring & spinning like a top. Excitement & tiredness are not a good combination. We will pay for it today. We have a local rehearsal Saturday morning, a QPAC rehearsal Sunday, two during the week that I am still not sure we can get to, then the performances: Thursday, Friday, two Saturday. Oh my! We will not be schooling this week. Ditz will have to do her flute practise but everything else must go on hold. Neither of us need the stress.

And this is why we homeschool. I wish my daughter would get this point because we have been here with Liddy who was in public school. Liddy regularly made regional teams for athletics, soccer & softball. She would be gone from class for days, & sometimes weeks, & not even expected to make up missed work, just to slot back into wherever the class had got to in her absence. Ditz at least is not missing anything. We pick up where we left off & go on. I can only think God endowed Ditz with an extra dose of self confidence to cope with this madness. I know I'm mad for lugging her round the countryside so she can sing like a canary.