Building a Medieval Harp – Part 1
by Alyssa Cowell, The Catoctin School of Music
Folklore Village is a folk craft school near Dodgeville, WI that offers a variety of classes covering many art mediums. The “Build a Small Harp in a Weekend” course gave me an opportunity to learn some hand carving skills while building a small medieval harp whose design is based on a depiction of a harp dated from the 9th or 10th century. The instructor, Alice Margerum has trained in Europe with instrument makers and now offers classes around the Midwest for building a variety of instruments.
The first day of my class with Alice was a little bit stressful – my plane was delayed for 4 hours, and I arrived onsite with only about 30 minutes left in the first session. I received a packet of instructions, and the roughed-out pieces of my instrument-to-be: a double strung Pictish-style harp in walnut. So exciting! The first step was to read my instruction packet and inspect the parts of my harp: The arm (or neck), the pillar, the soundbox, and the soundbox back.
Each piece had been initially shaped on a bandsaw and needed fitting before the harp could be assembled, finished, and strung for playing. Class was almost finished for the evening – so I had to determine which item on my long task list to tackle before I ran out of time. I chose to drill out the tuning pin holes on the harp arm using a drill press. Because my finished harp will have two rows of strings, I needed to drill 30 holes along the arm of the harp – 15 on each side – to a carefully-set depth. Luckily, I have experience using a drill press and it only took a few minutes to find the tuning pin markings and drill them out.
The final task for the evening was to work on thinning the sides of the pre-hollowed sound box to increase the sound volume of the final instrument. This requires carving away the sides with a hand tool to a thickness of approximately 4 mm. The thinner the sides, the louder the harp will be – but too thin can cause the harp soundbox to crack or collapse under the tension of the strings….this is a task that requires attention and skill. Skill that I did not possess yet. Alice gave me a quick demonstration of how to use the large curved chisel (called a gouge), and I observed a few students using the tool on their own sound boxes. Then it was time for me to try. I marked the sides of my soundbox with a pencil line to know where to stop carving, then I clamped my soundbox to the workbench and slowly started to carve away at the inside :
Initially carving seemed to be going well –
I shaved off thin curls of wood and made good progress on the first side. Then it was time to start the second side and the trouble started. Did I mention I don’t have any experience with hand tools, and this was the first time I’d ever used a gouge? Any woodworkers reading this will know that a single piece of wood may have areas of higher and lower density, depending on how the tree grew, and those areas of different density will behave in unexpected ways. Even though I tried my best, tragedy struck – and I found that after a few minutes of carving the second side of my soundbox I had broken through the side. Duh DUH DUUUUUUUH! Hope was not lost – tune in next time for the solution to this mistake, and follow me on the next part of my medieval harp making journey!
