HARP PERSPECTIVES JUNE EDITION now online

Our June edition of HARP PERSPECTIVES is now online.

In our June edition, Dr Siobhán Armstrong addresses the question of the supposedly lost art of the early Irish harpers: how they accompanied their melodies. Working only from transcriptions made live in the field from Irish harpers in the 1790s, she argues that vernacular Irish harpers didn’t operate within an 18th-century European context, with a separate ‘bass line’ or ‘chords’ supporting the melody, but rather that Irish-harp performance practice was quite different, operating within its own distinct, non-European aesthetic.

Read it now at https://www.harpireland.ie/resources-online-journal/