Building a Medieval Harp Part 3

by Alyssa Cowell, Catoctin School of Music

Welcome back, readers! It’s time for the next installment of Building a Medieval Harp. When we last left off, we had finished patching up the unfortunate soundbox blowout:

Now what? There are still many steps to go, and not much time left in the weekend to finish the build. Bright and early Sunday morning, I arrived on sight to try to catch up with my classmates – I still had some important pillar and arm shaping, to do before we could glue the back of the soundbox on and start with final sanding and applying finish. The clock was ticking, for sure!

After assessing everyone’s progress from the day before, the class participants decided we would take on a divide-and-conquer approach. We would make a point to work together to get everyone’s harps to the point where we could complete our soundbox glue-up first thing after lunch, which meant sharing the workload for those of us that were a little behind (ahem, ME). Below you can see Alic and members of the class observing the drilling of an angled hole to accommodate an alignment bolt in my harp’s neck:

Once the alignment hole was drilled, I could assemble the harp and see what final shaping needed to happen before I could start on finishing – this was probably the most exciting part of the day; I finally got to see what the final harp shape would look like! There are some fit issues that I would need to work on with hand tools and sanding before it is really ready, but it looks like a harp!

I was still running behind most of my classmates, but I felt confident at this point I could finish the project on my own if I needed to finish the harp home (spoiler alert, I did). Now it was all hands-on deck for soundbox glue ups – we were using hide glue, which requires heat and a very small window of working time. Everyone stopped working on their harps and started cutting small strips of tape while Alice checked on the temperature of the hide glue. Once it was heated through, we did a dry run on how the glue up should proceed – everyone would take a wood clamp and some tape strips to hold the pieces of the soundboxes together once the glue had been applied. We had about 60 seconds before the glue began to set up, so moving quickly was paramount.

We glued up 5 of our 6 harp soundboxes successfully! I went back to work on shaping my harp pieces, and my classmates continued to the finish work; hand sanding with several grits of sandpaper and application of a few coats of a fast-drying shellac finish. It was now early evening, and class was just about over. Because my harp was behind schedule, I decided to take some detailed notes and pictures of the installation of the harp hardware and strings so that I could continue to work on my harp at home.

Here’s pictures of the brass staples being installed into a student’s soundboard:

The staples keep the strings from cutting into the wooden soundboard once the harp is under tension – these staples are a precursor to the brass eyelets that are used in harps today. By the time a few of the students got their harps strung and we had a quick lesson on tuning, it was quite late – time for me to head to my hotel and get ready to fly home. I snapped one last picture of my harp pieces before I packed them up safely in my suitcase using the bubble wrap and extra airbags, I packed to keep it safe on the flight home:

This concludes my summer harp-making adventure – I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to learn about historic instrument building at Folklore Village! My harp isn’t complete, but I have plans to do the final touches soon.