A hub for musicians of Montana, Great Falls has been the epicenter of music for decades. Many string players and pianists gather here in our city to celebrate the joys of sound. Last year even saw the addition of a principal harpist to the Great Falls Symphony. But focusing on two instruments in particular, the piano and the harp; Ones specifically designed to bring out the emotion and ambiance of a wide variety of repertoire.
Did you know that a piano and harp aren’t that different? These two instruments have been around for centuries bringing pleasure to people’s ears and joy to their hearts. Despite their shape, the piano and the harp are surprisingly quite similar! For instance, much like a piano, the harp has strings and pedals designed to produce sounds of multiple notes all at once. While a piano’s sound is produced by hammers pounding on the strings, a harp’s musicality comes from different hand techniques used when plucking a note with your fingers.
In order to make a note flat or sharp on the piano you simply press the black keys. On the harp, this is the pedals’ job. There are seven pedals at the bottom located beneath the sound box that can change the notes’ pitch. Each pedal has its own designated note (C, D, E, F, G, A, B) that it makes sharp or flat. What does that mean? The pedals can alter the voice of the harp to produce a higher or lower sound per each individual note; sometimes allowing for a celestial resonation of notes which continues in a softening fashion until the harpists chooses to externally dampen the vibrations with their hands. Thus producing that “heavenly” sound typically associated with harps.
When you press on a concert harp’s pedals, the internal gears shift the long wires that run up the instrument’s column. These wires then rotate the tuning disks which result in shortening or lengthening the individual strings and cause the harp strings to vibrate at different pitches. This allows harpists a “harmonics privilege” that no other instrument offers, which is to play a “doubling” of the exact same note at a single time. These are known as double or even triple harmonics. Not even its exalted cousin, the piano can reproduce this type of poetic sound.
In both piano and harp, the strings are attached by tuning pins. A tuning pin is a small metal rod with a hole running through the center. Each string is threaded through the whole, tied to the rod, and then cranked to make the pitch increase. Fancy mechanisms for fancy sound. The difference is that a piano’s resonance of pitch will stop unless you hold down the sustain pedal. A harp, on the other hand, will continue to resonate until you physically stop the strings from continuing to vibrate.
If you look on the inside of a piano, you’ll notice the strings lay flat with a brass or gold colored plate underneath it. This is called the sound board. On top of the soundboard is where you locate the tuning pins. In a harp, the strings are strung starting in their version of a sound board which is on the rear of a harp and then are stretched upwards to the top of the harp. Therefore, if you took the inside of a grand piano and turned it upright, you would see something pretty close to a regular harp.
Even though they seem very unalike to the human eye, they have more in common than one would think. These similarities allow for exchanges of musical repertoire and complementary performances. Each of these instruments produces a marvelous sound calling one’s ear to listen. While the pianos adorn many households and theaters, the harps might be rarer to find in this area. But if you can catch a harpist in action, it is worth the pause. Through their strings that glisten, the adaptation in playing pedals, and the resonation of their sound boards, harps create an extra emphasis on the ringing tone that many describe as bringing “peace to their souls.”
To hear some of these instruments played, the Great Falls Symphony and the CMR High orchestras are believed to be featuring harps this upcoming year.
By Victoria Zender, age 14 (Victoria will be starting freshman year at CMR High. She has been playing both the harp and the piano for some time now and has won awards for her harp playing.)
Author: Staff
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