Harps and Harpists, Revised Edition - Hardcover

Rensch, Roslyn

4.28

18 ratings by Goodreads

9780253348937: Harps and Harpists, Revised Edition

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253348935 ISBN 13: 9780253348937

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2007

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Revising her classic 1989 book Harps and Harpists, Roslyn Rensch expands her authoritative history of this timeless instrument. This lavishly illustrated edition, with 137 black-and-white images and 24 color plates, surveys the progress of the harp from antiquity to the present day. The new edition includes two new chapters; an extensive bibliography and index; personal anecdotes of the author’s studies under Alberto Salvi; an appendix on the Roslyn Rensch Papers and Harp Collection, which are housed at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign; and an hour-long CD of harp music.

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Review:

This book could well be subtitled "everything you ever wanted to know about the harp, but didn't know enough to ask." It's all here, from the birth of the harp in ancient times (harps, generally shaped more or less like a J, with one side open, are pictured in artworks dating back several millennia) through its development--acquiring the column, or "forepillar" that makes it three-sided--in medieval Europe; from the first pedal harps to the computerized Camac "memory" harp. Roslyn Rensch, a professor of harp, addresses everything from Welsh bards and that aristocratic harpist Marie Antoinette to the late-20th-century return to interest in various small folk harps and Andreas Vollenweider and his electronically enhanced instruments.

This is the paperback edition of a book originally published in 1989. It is lavishly illustrated (the picture credits run to five pages) and exhaustively footnoted. Although Harps and Harpists is certainly written with a rather narrow core audience in mind--readers who are involved personally or professionally with harps--it is quite readable. It should also interest readers who are curious about the social history of ethnic Celtic societies in which the harp played a significant cultural part, and of 18th-century France. --Sarah Bryan Miller

From the Publisher:

Praise for the first edition: "The harp world is deeply indebted to Roslyn Rensch and her tireless scholarly efforts to publish informative documentation about the harp....This book is a must for the library of anyone interested in the harp and certainly of every harpist." --American String Teacher

"Rensch's literary style is lucid and purposelyy unadorned in order to make her text readily comprehensible to both the scholar and the general reader. For her clear elucidation of the many details of her subject she is to be commended. Moreover, being an art historian as well as a musician, she has produced a scholarly and humanistic work." --Notes

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