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AIM: Tell us the story of the Celtic harp. How far back does it go?

Habinski: Much further back than when it was first Celtic. Once you pluck the string on a hunting bow and notice that it makes a musical note, you have the physical basis for the construction of a harp. Triangular frame harps have existed for at least 4,000 years. The very first records are from hieroglyphs in Egyptian pyramids. No one is entirely certain when harps first arrived in Ireland, but they feature in myths of CuChullain, which were part of an oral tradition dating back to about 50 BC. So Irish mythological tradition would suggest that they've been there at least 2,000 years.

AIM: Celtic harps have been carried in battle, been used to entertained the royals, and been said to possess magical properties. How did the harp get to be so important in Irish culture?

Habinski: The bardic class was critical to the survival of the Irish way of life. It was by and large an oral culture with a minimal system of written language. Oral history and the telling of stories was vitally important to the community. Bards held a much higher social status in Celtic communities than musicians or storytellers in other societies. The harp was the bardic instrument. It was used for pure music too, but it became important because it was used to accompany the recitation or the singing of stories and thus to preserve the oral history.

AIM: Then we get down to the harp festival in Belfast in 1792 where all of eight or nine people showed up. From primacy to disuse - what happened?

Habinski: A lot of things changed drastically in Ireland during the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth in Britain. In the early portion of her reign, Ireland was a reasonably strong nation in its own right. Irish music was very popular throughout the British Isles. In fact, Elizabeth had a court harpist imported from Ireland to play for her and she was known to be quite fond of Irish jigs and reels. However, part way through her reign, she began expanding England's authority throughout the British Isles and invaded Ireland. Because the harp was such a significant symbol of Irish culture and Irish nationalism, she set about to squash it, quite deliberately. In 1576, the British Privy Council officially banned Irish harpists from playing anywhere in territory under British authority. That pretty much stamped out the Irish bardic tradition.

AIM: Music as weapon. To weaken a people, cut their cultural ties and make them forget their history. The modern example of Tibet comes to mind, where the Chinese made up Maoist lyrics to go with old folk tunes so the Tibetans would forget who they were and young Tibetans would never know the difference.

Habinski: From the latter half of Elizabeth's reign right through to the 1700s, Ireland was in perpetual turmoil. If you're always struggling just to keep your family fed and to deal with the next battle or uprising, it's hard to focus all that much on maintaining musical traditions. By the end of her reign, Ireland was a subjugated state. What Elizabeth did to the harp, she also tried to do to the bagpipes in Scotland. They were so intrinsically tied to the national culture she wanted them suppressed, so she made them illegal as well.

AIM: Where does O'Carolan fit in this story?

Habinski: He's generally considered the last of the great Irish harp composers. He was born in about 1670 and by the age of 18 was completely blind. If you were blind in that era and your family had the means, they would try to have you learn an instrument. It was one of the few ways that people who were visually impaired could hope to support themselves. His family got him apprenticed and he wound up becoming a very famous and successful harpist and composer. He left more than a hundred pieces he composed. Functioning as a latter-day bard, he moved from one noble estate to another. The family would feed him and treat him as an honored guest for a month and he would perform for them. While he was there, he would also write a song for that family to make them famous when he moved on. He left a trail of songs written for families all across Ireland. He died in 1738, leaving a fantastic wealth of beautiful tunes. He only wrote down the melody line, because that was the only part that was innovative. He was working within a musical tradition that was so well known that he didn't have to bother writing out the accompaniment. He certainly played with a full accompaniment but, when harpists today play an O'Carolan tune, they make up the accompaniment themselves.

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AIM: My introduction to O'Carolan was through the recordings of Patrick Ball [Amazon links below]. Are they a good representation of O'Carolan's music?

Habinski: When you're hearing someone like Patrick Ball play it, your hearing it played exactly as it should be, which is to say, the composer left individual musicians the space to put their own flavor into the song they're performing. It's one of the reasons I think that the harp tradition is so rich and so varied. It isn't as prescriptive as the classical music world. The tune is supposed to change very slightly from player to player. That's why you can have a full library of harp CDs and derive a lot of pleasure from listening to the different variations.

AIM: So there's room for improvisation.

Habinski: Absolutely.

AIM: That's the way classical music used to be and some people are trying to make it that way again. Are there any Irish folktales involving the harp and its magical properties?

Habinski: The Dagda, one of the old Irish gods, is often depicted with a harp. Irish bards were supposed to be able to play three different types of tunes with magical properties on the harp - tunes that would move their listeners to tears, laughter, or sleep.

The harp figures prominently in the myth of Oisin who is the last hero of the Golden Age of Ireland. He played the harp so beautifully that Niamh, one of the fairies or one of the Sidhe, steals him away and takes him to the land of the fairies. Yeats, hundreds of years later, wrote a beautiful epic poem called 'The Wanderings of Oisin'.

AIM: So they live happily ever after?

Habinski: No, it doesn't work out quite that well, unfortunately. Eventually he longs for home. She doesn't want him to leave but says, 'alright, if you want to see your family one last time, you may.' She gives him a horse and tells him to stay on the horse and never set foot on Irish soil. He goes back to Ireland and finds that a hundred years have passed. Ireland has become a Christian country, making him the last remnant of heroic Ireland. He sees two laborers struggling with a rock, one that any heroic Irish person could have lifted with one hand. He leans from the saddle to help them. The saddle breaks and he touches the ground. The moment he does, all the years he's been away fall upon him and he becomes a very old man.

AIM: No good deed goes unpunished, eh? What went into your training?

Habinski: A lot of accidents, initially. I wanted to play the harp myself and couldn't afford to purchase one. However, I was a reasonably competent woodworker, I had access to a shop, and I started to research and look for a design. When I built the first instrument, something remarkable happened: people started to offer to buy it from me. As a broke university student paying my way through my first degree, a light bulb went off and I realized I could pay my tuition making a couple of harps a year. I found an American company that would permit me to build their design and I paid them a royalty fee on each one. I got more and more fascinated by how harps actually worked and continued to research. I borrowed an oscilloscope from the university science department to do acoustic tests and figure out how sound moves through wood and what variations in sound board design and bracing structures made a difference in how a harp actually performs. Once I became comfortable with what I had learned, I designed a completely fresh set of harps and have been refining them ever since. I've been building harps for 17 years. I've made about 320, all original designs for the last 11 or 12 years. My wife laughs at me because, every time I build a harp, I'll spend several evenings before it leaves listening to it, walking around it in a circle, examining it from every angle. I'm always trying to tweak them. I figure Stradivarius was able to make better and better violins until the day he died and it's possible to do the exact same thing with harps.

AIM: Do you take on repair work? Has it taught you anything about making good harps?

Habinski: Yes. You can see where things have gone wrong. One of the most common things that will happen that's a harp-killer is a broken neck. Celtic harps are under a lot of tension, from eight- or nine-hundred pounds all the way up to sixteen hundred pounds. That's much more than a guitar. It really stresses the frame. There's a spot on the neck of a harp where you can see both ends of the grain, it's vulnerable to snapping completely through. Twelve or thirteen years ago, I did a couple of repairs for that and the harps promptly broke again in the same spot even though I thought I had been very careful. It really made me take a close look in how the physics were impacting the wood in that spot. We have lined the underside of the necks of our harps ever since with carbon fiber. Which is a very modern thing to be doing to a very traditional instrument, but it's stronger than steel and guarantees we'll never break a neck.

AIM: How does being a performer and composer help you make better harps?

Habinski: My experience as a performer and recording artist is really critical to how I build. I know exactly what I want a harp to do on a stage and in a recording studio. I know what it's like to pack and unpack it from a car over and over again. Or how to get it up the back stairs in dusty old theaters. The average harpist is 5'4". To lug around a 45-pound beast of a harp is prohibitively difficult. The issue of transporting harps, that's why all my harps are very compact, weigh no more than 27 lbs (even our largest 40 string model), and will fit in a hatchback car.

If you're playing on stage, you want the sound even from the bass to the treble - no 'wolf' notes that bark louder than everything else on the harp. You want it to be easy to mic, amplify, and record.

We don't do a lot of ornamentation. The most important thing about a harp is how it sounds. It needs to sound luscious and incredible in a variety of venues.

AIM: I was walking past a storefront in Chicago one time and there was this gorgeous Celtic harp in the window - absolutely stunning. It had all this wood inlay, I was transfixed.

Habinski: If a customer requests that, I'll send the harp out to inlay artists and master carvers I know who do unbelievable work. But, for my purposes, I'd much rather have a plain harp that sounds brilliant than a highly ornamented harp that isn't playable.

AIM: How would you compare harp-making to violin-making?

Habinski: The first North American harpmakers were hippie types investigating odd folk instruments out in California in the late '60s and early '70s. They fumbled their separate ways towards how harps should sound and look. So the harp was never standardized, unlike violins and guitars.

If you're a violin maker selling instruments to professional performers, your scale length and string tension are set for you. Certain basic widths and measurements are all the same. The variation from one builder to another consists primarily of exceedingly subtle differences of set up, joinery, and finishing techniques. They'll use calipers and measure every surface of the violin to within two-thousandths of an inch in order to get them to the tolerances they want .

Harps, by contrast, vary wildly from one builder to another. You'll have a company like Sandpiper in New Mexico build a very tall, very low-tension harp that's almost Paraguayan in how it plays. You can compare them to Heartland Harps in North Carolina that has a curved soundbox and a distinctive tone. They're nothing alike. My harps have a more traditional Irish shape - low-headed, broad soundboard. The three instruments don't even look like the same instrument at all.

Another difference with violin-making, the tolerances are not as fine in harp building because you're working with much, much higher tension. It's an engineering feat to get a structure of wood to hold 1,500 pounds of tension day in and day out. It's a balance - you want it to be delicate enough to have a warm rich tone but it has to be strong enough to handle that kind of load for years. A well-made violin can still be playable centuries later. Even the best built of harps will probably need a new soundboard every 30 years. Like a bridge, every harp will eventually pull itself apart. That's why we have so few historical harps in playing condition.

AIM: What's the oldest Celtic harp in existence?

Habinski: In something like playable condition, there's the Trinity College harp that dates to the 15th century. About concurrent with that would be the Queen Mary and the Lamont harps in Scotland. It's believed the Lamont harp is the oldest of the three, but it's difficult to pin down the dates precisely.

AIM: I assume it's like with old Stradivarius violins, they're always putting on new strings, moving the soundpost, repairing cracks. Not all the pieces date from the beginning.

Habinski: That's right. These old harps are carefully preserved.

AIM: What's a typical day for you?

Habinski: My shop is right on my property. Generally, I'll go out to the shop first thing in the morning and make a list of the various jobs that are going to be done during the day. I usually have more than one harp going simultaneously. The first job in building a harp is to rough out the lumber into the right dimensions. Actually, sometimes it starts with selecting the actual tree, helping to have that wood milled, then drying it properly for several years. After roughing out, you cut parts and start to do basic bits of the assembly for the base, siderails and bracing structures. All the way through to final finish, set-up, and installation of hardware. I'll never have two days back-to-back where I'm doing the same tasks, which is nice.

Habinski: It's the beast of my shop, my big double-drum sander. It weighs about half a ton and it has two spinning rubber-coated drums to which you attach sandpaper. Then you can sand anything perfectly in a single pass up to three feet in width - virtually an entire tabletop. One drum has 80-grit sandpaper and the other is equipped with 150-grit [finer] sandpaper.

I'm certain if I hadn't had this tool, there would be years taken off my life expectancy. Hand-sanding is masochistic work - long, tiring, and sweaty. There's some final sanding after the harp is put together, but that tool saves me at least five hours per instrument.

AIM: What distinguishes a great Celtic harp from the also-rans?

Habinski: To a certain extent, it's a subjective question because the harp isn't standardized. One of the highlights of the annual Somerset Folk Harp Festival in New Jersey is the 'blind harp tasting'. They'll place instruments by every builder in attendance on a stage - there's usually 20 or 30 of us there - and the audience is asked to sit backwards. The harps are identified by number only. Two professional harpists will play the exact same piece on every single harp. The audience hears the harp without reference to what it looks like or brand loyalty and decides on the basis of sound alone which they like best. There is some consistency as to which harps will score well year after year, but only to a certain extent. Power, clarity, richness and warmth always score high, but you will find that virtually every harp on the stage gets at least one nomination as the best-sounding instrument there.

Richness and warmth are hard to achieve; brilliance is easy. For me as a builder, I have particular ideals that I'm striving towards. I like power in a harp, a strong voice that will fill a church or concert hall even if the harp is not amplified. You've got to balance that power with clarity. You don't want the bass to be muddy or the high treble to be too shrill or brittle-sounding. String tension needs to feel even all the way through. Personally, I favor a higher tension design because it lets the musician be much more expressive with the dynamics - you can make the harp purr or make it roar, and everything in between. You can really coax the last subtle nuances of emotion out of the composition that you are playing.

But part of it is cultural. There's a company in Japan called Aoyama Harps. They're very well-made harps but, to me, they sound terrible. Their sound is exceedingly brittle and dry. But I had a revelation when I was listening to one a couple of years ago. I realized the dominant cultural instrument in Japan is the koto, whereas we have the piano, guitar, and violin in the West. Our ears are trained from the time we're small children to consider sounds that resemble those instruments to be euphonious. But if you were raised in Japan and the best instruments to you were the koto and shamisen, you would be listening for sounds like that in any string instrument.

AIM: Have any experimental harps been made?

Habinski: There's a harp builder in Oregon named Glen Hill who has done some really wild experiments. His 'laser harps' don't have strings. They're full MIDI instruments [Musical Instrument Digital Interface] and you play them by interrupting beams of laser light with your fingertips.

AIM: I saw a video of Jean Michel Jarre doing something like that in concert some years ago.

Habinski: I've also seen a very interesting experimental harp from a shipbuilder in Toronto. If you're making a racing yacht, carbon fiber is your material of choice. He built an entire harp out of carbon fiber, no wood whatsoever. This harp was very large and it only weighed ten pounds, maybe a third of what it would have weighed if he had built it with traditional materials. It was a very space age-looking glossy black, probably the loudest harp I've every heard in my life. Just unbelievable volume because the whole harp resonates. But because there's no cell structure in carbon fiber like there is in wood, to me the sound was very inorganic. It wasn't a sound I particularly liked. However, I loved it that he was being so creative and attempting some different things.

AIM: Cheap Yamaha pianos put a lot of older piano companies out of business. Is mass-production a threat to the livelihood of individual harpmakers such as yourself?

Habinski: Mass production has already started. The first company to do it well is Dusty Strings in Seattle. Mass production won't go as far as it did with pianos because there's definitely a division in the market between entry-level harps and premium quality harps.

Entry-level harps have traditionally been built with plywood as opposed to solid wood, zither pins instead of tapered tuning pins, and various shortcuts in order to make them very inexpensive. Companies building entry-level harps that way will suffer the most from the mass production that's coming in.

It's a different story for premium harp builders. We're much more like independent guitar or violin makers. When Ovation came on the scene, they produced very inexpensive, fiberglass-backed guitars that sounded reasonably good. But that didn't hurt companies like Avalon Guitars in Ireland which sells to an entirely different market. Avalon sells premium-quality, professional hand-made guitars generally to professional musicians. Nothing that's mass-manufactured can ever compete at that level. That's what will happen with harps.

I do have friends in the harp community who were building entry-level harps and they have definitely been badly hurt by this. They were still using all wood and traditional joinery methods that require trained people. Dusty Strings [Seattle] and Triplett [San Luis Obispo, California] have figured out how to make an entire soundbox out of vinyl lamination or fiberglass. They use robotic positioning and drilling systems, so they can produce an entire harp with very minimal human interaction. Once you get set up, you can have lower prices and more consistent quality than a shop of 15 guys assembling plywood harps. The mid-size companies making entry-level harps the old-fashioned way can't compete.

We're just at the beginning of this. It didn't used to be worth anyone's while to set up mass production, but the harp community has grown so enormously fast. When I started 17 years ago, there were maybe 20 harp builders in all of North America. It's easily quadrupled in size. It can continue to grow at an exponential rate for a long, long time before we get anywhere close to saturation for the market. In the world of music, we're still a tiny little flyspeck.

AIM: What other trends are you seeing?

Habinski: Three-quarters of the people I sell harps to - and it will be their first harp - are adults, not children. That's really distinctive. People begin other instruments as children and learn them through their childhood and adolescence. But harps weren't commercially available up until about 25 years ago. The only harps you could consistently get in North America were pedal [concert] harps, which is like buying a Steinway piano, they're so expensive. Only the very wealthy could ever consider having a pedal harp in their homes. Celtic harps started to be produced in the late '60s and early '70s for about the same price as a good quality handmade guitar or cello. Suddenly, they were within striking distance for average folks. I think there's a whole generation of children - primarily girls - who grew up desperately wanting a harp but could never get one. They're all making good on that dream now and, to me, that's a sociological trend and a really fascinating thing. I sold a harp to a lady who was 81 and gave her her first lessons. I got a postcard from her later telling me she had just done her first live performance of any instrument in her life at age 85. That's unique to the harp community and I've got to say, it's an absolute pleasure to be involved in stories like that.

AIM: So Celtic harps are the Harley Hogs of the music world, fulfilling the dreams of many an aging baby boomer.

Habinski: [laughs] Exactly. The community is also fascinating because of how interconnected it is. The early West Coast builders made harps for a small community of musicians. Those musicians moved across the country and started their own harp schools, but maintained their first connections. Globally, the harp community is really connected. I get emails from people in Finland saying 'I've been hearing wonderful things about your harps' and I wonder, from whom?!! I don't have any harps in Finland but all these folks seem to know each other one way or another.

AIM: How well do you get along with your fellow builders?

Habinski: Harpmakers enjoy an unparalleled sense of community. We tend to view one another as colleagues, not as competitors, and regularly share tips and information back and forth with a sort of mutual goodwill that is really rare in any area of business.

AIM: That's not the answer I expected. Why don't you all hate each other? I was talking to an artist friend one time who was having a gallery opening. I asked her if all her artist friends were going to be there. She looked at me and said, "Are you kidding? Artists don't have other artists as friends. We're all too jealous of each other's work."

Habinski: [laughs] That really is a remarkable thing about the harp community. We harp builders have been in a golden age because it's growing so fast and there isn't any particular limit on its growth potential.

AIM: Nobody's really a threat.

Habinski: There's space for all of us to splash around in the same pool. I regularly refer clients to my competitors. I'll have somebody here, they like my harps, and I figure I could probably push them through to a sale if I were so inclined. But I can tell that somebody else's harp would fit them better than mine, and I send them to that person. A lot of those companies will reciprocate. At harp festivals, the builders all hang out together. We go out to dinner and trade stories. We give each other patterns for jigs that we're working on and ask for opinions on what we're doing. Boy, to be in a field that is that free of politicking and that warm and welcoming to newcomers, it's just an absolute delight.

AIM: Who might you refer elsewhere?

Habinski: A woman came to me who was in the early stages of multiple sclerosis. I knew right away ours was the wrong harp for her because we have a high tension design. If she was going to play for the longest period of time her degenerative condition would permit, she needed a low-tension harp. I sent her to a different builder who built her a harp that was very lightweight and had very low tension that I thought she could probably use for several years longer than she could have used one of mine.

AIM: Your name is Habinski. How come you're not named O'Shaughnessy?

Habinski: [laughs] Well, I do have a have a drop of Irish blood in me. My mum's side of the family was English and Irish. There's a Gallagher lurking back in there somewhere. I find that you can actually supplement that if you drink Guinness once in a while - pump up that Irish quotient.

Our house didn't really have much music in it, other than church music, when I was growing up. I never even heard any Irish folk music until I was in my late teens. But I was already mad about Irish mythology and Irish poetry. I did a master's in English literature with a specialty in Irish poetry and was working on a Ph.D. before I decided to do harp-building and music full-time. So I'd always been attracted to Irish culture and Irish myth and, once I discovered Irish music as well, I was completely hooked.

I don't perform as Timothy Habinski. My stage name is Timothy Harper. I used to send out press releases as Timothy Habinski and, when I would call the paper or radio station a week later, nobody would have any idea who I was. The moment it was Timothy Harper, I was remembered every time.

Visit Timothy's Websites
Harp-Making - www.timothyharps.ca/, www.timothyharps.ca/harpshop
Recording Artist and Performer - www.timothyharper.ca/

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 © 2007 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved - This material may not be republished, rebroadcast, rewritten, redistributed, resold, or manipulated in any form.

Timothy's music -

   


The First Forest and Timothy's second album Dark Blue are available through his website - www.timothyharper.ca/store.htm

Selected Recordings of Patrick Ball on Amazon -

Celtic Harp 1: Music of Turlough O'Carolan
             CD                            MP3

Celtic Harp 4: O'Carolan's Dream
             CD                            MP3


For more on Celtic myth -
  

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