People
in many parts of the world need access to Gildas Jaffrennou's
work on the small harps, especially the model which is called
by so many names - Celtic harp, Irish harp, Scots harp, clarsach,
or as he himself called it, the Bardic harp.
His book has
long been out of print, though there are usually some copies in antiquarian bookshops - you can try the Advanced Book Exchange UK or US, or Amazon UK or US for example; and some libraries
have a copy. It has also been republished and is available from
Robinson's Harp Shop of P.O. Box 161, Mt. Laguna, CA 91948
- when I last looked I couldn't find it on their web-site, www.robinsonharp.com,
but they wrote "The book titled Folk Harps costs
$12.50 and can be ordered via e-mail,
fax (619) 473-8212, or phone (619) 473-8556.
So for anyone who can't get
hold of it, this
web presentation contains the general material and the detail
about Glidas' 'Bardic' model.
It's
evident that the book was put together at different times,
and you have to dig around a bit in different places to get
the details you need: in particular the chapter on what Gildas
calls the 'Bardic' model seems have been added after the rest
-
in one place the text still reads 'Three types of Folk harps
are described: the Celtic harp, the Minstrel harp and the
harp of Paraguay'
and
it often refers to what was already written about the other
harps.
I've
tried to tidy things up a bit, and I've added a few comments,
inset
in italics like this
and
in this colour, which is lighter than what I have used for
Gildas' original text.
My
own Gildas harp was made shortly before he died: there
are photos and sounds at A Harp at every Hearth, a site to help people get started playing, and DavidTheHarper which focuses more on my own playing; and there are pictures of some of the historical
models here.
Let
me know, too, if anything looks wrong - there can be odd
scanning mistakes that have escaped checking ...
You
can of course download a picture from a web-page by dragging it to
your desktop, or right-click with a two-button mouse and
select 'save as'.
