Lyon & Healy: the American Harp

Ian Mcvoy

The design of the pedal harp underwent a series of dramatic changes at the turn of the century, most of them attributable to the inventive minds at a Chicago-based musical instrument manufacturer and music publisher, Lyon & Healy. Of the many innovations of the Lyon & Healy company, three of the utmost importance to the development of the instrument: the “adjustable fourchette,” allowing simple regulation of the harp’s tuning in the natural and sharp positions, the “single-link mechanism,” an internal change to the mechanism greatly simplifying both function and manufacture, and lastly the “extended soundboard,” an extension of the soundbox of the instrument allowing for greater volume. Each of these improvements has since been adopted by every modern-day harp maker. This paper endeavors to combine original patents, miscellaneous historical documents, and evidence gathered from extant historical instruments by Lyon & Healy to identify each of the above and other specific changes, their inventors, the time of their introduction, as well as the overall motivation behind each of these important changes.

The eternal problem of the harp, one which persists to this day, is its essential diatonic nature. The simple, small diatonic harps of the early renaissance were perfectly sufficient for their role in the music of that time. These harps, familiar to us from medieval art, would typically have possessed only 20 strings or fewer. Each string would have been secured by an L-shaped pin, which, touching the string ever so slightly, produced a characteristic buzzing sound from which these “bray pins” take their name, due to the sound’s resemblance to the braying of a donkey. These harps were typically used to accompany monophonic instruments or vocal music. They were incapable of modulation, and would have to be re-tuned to suit each individual piece played. By the late renaissance, as the chromatic demands of new music increased, harp makers began to seek out ways to expand the chromatic ability and sounding range of the instrument. Some examples of early renaissance “chromatic” harps include the Italian arpa doppia, possessing two parallel courses of strings and the Spanish arpa de dos órdenes, similar in concept. By the 1600s, the arpa doppia had evolved a third course of strings, the two outer courses both tuned to the diatonic scale and the central course tuned to the intermediary chromatic pitches. This type of harp was widely popular in the late Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods and is even featured in Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo, and was the ancestor of the folk harps played still today in Wales.1

While certainly more flexible chromatically than simple diatonic harps, the multi-course harps came with their own problems. The finger-work necessary to access the chromatic strings was quite difficult, the multiple courses of strings were visually disorienting, and the sheer number of strings required considerable expense and labour to maintain. By the early 18^th century, harpists and luthiers began to experiment with simpler methods of producing semitones. Harp makers in Southern Germany and Tyrol began to fit metal hooks to the necks of otherwise diatonic harps, which, when rotated manually, raised the pitch of the string by a semitone (in a similar manner to today’s lever harps). This allowed the harpist to play in a small range of keys without re-tuning the string, but was far from ideal, as the left hand was not free to play while operating the “hooks” (see Figure 1).

Figure 1-An Austrian hook harp, 18^th century, in the Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments, Metropolitan Museum, New York City

Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque harps

A Brief History of European Harps

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