The Harp is a stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicular to the soundboard.
All harps have a neck, resonator and strings. Some, known as frame harps, also have a forepillar; those lacking the forepillar are referred to as open harps.
Harp strings can be made of nylon (sometimes wound around copper), gut (more commonly used than nylon), wire, or silk. A person who plays the harp is called a harpist or a harper.
Various types of harps are found in Africa, Europe, North, and South America, and a few parts of Asia. In antiquity harps and the closely related lyres were very prominent in nearly all musical cultures, but they lost popularity in the early 19th century with Western music composers, being thought of primarily as a woman's instrument after Marie Antoinette popularised it as a lady's pastime.
The aeolian harp (wind harp) and autoharp are technically zithers, not harps, because their strings are not perpendicular to the soundboard.
The harp's origins may lie in the sound of a plucked hunter's bow string. The oldest documented references to the harp are from 4000 BC in Egypt (see Music of Egypt) and 3000 BC in Mesopotamia.
While the harp is mentioned in most translations of the Bible, King David being the most prominent musician, the Biblical "harp" was actually a kinnor, a type of lyre with 10 strings.
Harps also appear in ancient epics, and in Egyptian wall paintings. This kind of harp, now known as the folk harp, continued to evolve in many different cultures all over the world.
It may have developed independently in some places.
The lever harp came about in the second half of the 17th century to enable key changes while playing.
The player manually turned a hook or lever against an individual string to raise the string's pitch by a half step.
In the 1700s, a link mechanism was developed connecting these hooks with pedals, leading to the invention of the single-action pedal harp.
Later, a second row of hooks was installed along the neck to allow for the double-action pedal harp, capable of raising the pitch of a string by either one or two half steps.
With this final enhancement, the modern concert harp was born. Some pedal harps have rods in the column, but the latest harps have cables which makes for better pedal action.
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