A woman wired for sound

It seems rather obvious that Siobhán Armstrong should be promoting the cause of the wire-strung Irish harp. She is, after all, not only one of Ireland's leading harpists, but also the one most active in early music and period performances. But the route that led to her new CD, Cláirseach na hÉireann, The Harp of Ireland, was anything but direct or obvious, writes Michael Dervan

She began the piano at the age of four, and a couple of years later the barrier of small hands led to a recommendation she take up a second instrument. She chose the harp simply because she liked the idea of being able to sing and play at the same time.

Studying music at university seems almost to have been an accident. She sat for Trinity exams purely to get time off school, but gladly accepted the place she was offered in Trinity's music school. She conducted College Singers, and it was at Trinity that she had her first major encounter with the Renaissance and Baroque music that was ultimately to become her main concern.

She already knew from experience that the modern concert harp was not for her, but she was fired by enthusiasm for lute-songs (which she explored with guitarist Ben Dwyer), and was thrilled to encounter contemporary pieces for Irish harp (or "modern Irish harp" as she is always careful to call it) by Brian Boydell and Gerard Victory in the tutor by Sheila Larchet-Cuthbert.

It was on a German tour with the Irish-American mezzo soprano Ailish Kerrigan that, at a post-concert reception in the "stunningly gorgeous" music school in well-heeled Sindelfingen, she found herself agreeing to learn German in order to become the school's harp teacher. From her new base near Stuttgart she developed a concert career, "doing solo programmes of traditional Irish music in south Germany and beyond, where I sang and played my modern Irish lever harp".

She had, however, already had a fleeting contact with the leading exponent of early harps, Andrew Lawrence-King, during one of Dublin's early music festivals. "I remember thinking, 'There's the missing link. Here's the music I love, which I sing, and there's that dexterity that I need with my fingers.' " The Irish harps that she knew and played had a semitone lever for each string, so for the music she wanted to play, she would have had "to be a whizz" with the left hand.

It was years later before she came across Lawrence-King again, when he was playing in a concert of choral music by Gesualdo in Stuttgart. They wound up having "a seven-hour lunch. He was starting to play wire-strung Irish harp a little bit, and was desperately keen to talk to somebody Irish. I was desperately keen to talk to Mr Early Harp.

"He invited me up to Bremen, where he taught at what was then the Akademie für alte Musik, for a combined course on Irish music and medieval music. For a period of about a year or a year-and-a-half I used to drive up and take lessons with him. The journey was about 800 kilometres but, boy, was I keen!"

A double-booking by Lawrence-King led to her standing in for him at a Monteverdi festival in Japan - he went instead to the 1992 Belfast Harp Festival. It was a baptism of fire, but she triumphed over all the hurdles, and even impressed the tenor, John Elwes, whose perfectionism she had been warned about in advance. She obviously impressed him in more ways than one. They are now married, and have settled outside Carrick-on-Suir, from where they both now manage busy international careers.

"Andrew very kindly gave me lots of gigs, and after there was a bit of a bust-up in Tragicomedia, his group with Erin Headley and Stephen Stubbs, they asked me to join. That was my apprenticeship in playing continuo. I got to sit beside Steve for four or five years, learning on the job." Continuo playing, the art of improvising an accompaniment by extrapolating the harmony from a single bass line, is the major outlet for improvisation in classical music. "That was completely invaluable. It's the only way to learn continuo."

She acquired early harps from a range of countries, "but I still had this Irish lever harp sitting up in the middle of the pile at home, a modern construction, laminated wood, plastic levers. It was starting to look embarrassing among all the others. And still I didn't twig." The turning point came through meeting a dead-end while working on a Carolan arrangement for that embarrassing harp. "I realised that the vertical harmony, the chords in the bass hand, were not appropriate to the music. The light bulb went on. This is not the instrument. And this is not the way to arrange the music."

She chased up a Scottish colleague, Bill Taylor, who sourced her a wire-strung instrument. "Once I started, that kind of took over from everything else. And it has crystallised itself in the past two or three years that that's the thing I'm supposed to be doing.

"The main person on the planet who plays wire harps is Ann Heymann, an American who lives in deepest, darkest Minnesota, way out in the sticks, about two hours out from St Paul's, in the middle of the flat prairies. She was surprised and honoured that an Irishwoman would come knocking on her door, asking about the Irish harp. Nobody had ever bothered to talk to Ann very much. She was thrilled. For me she was a fount of information. Obviously, it tied in with all my early harp stuff anyway. It was a hop, skip and a jump to play wire harp. It's the same technique, you just need to grow your nails, or if you've played Spanish harp, you've grown your nails already."

The crusader in Armstrong comes to the fore when she talks about her passion. "Only in Ireland could you have a nation which has this harp as its national emblem, and nobody knows it, nobody's aware of it, nobody's interested in it, nobody plays it, nobody knows what it looks like, nobody knows what it sounds like. There's just this big, empty hole, where this instrument should be. It's not only frustrating, it's a big national embarrassment."

Of course, there's no shortage of harps and harpers in Ireland. It's just that, the pioneering work of Gráinne Yeats notwithstanding, the focus is on a version of the instrument which was invented in the early 19th century by John Egan. Derek Bell played wire harp on recordings by the Chieftains, but apparently refused to play it in public. "It's a bit of a beast," admits Armstrong. "It's got its own personality, this harp, more than others. It will sometimes decide it doesn't want to tune. And that's it. It won't tune. It's quite temperamental."

But it's a beast worth taming. "Not for nothing was it famous all over Europe." She instances how it won the praise of "the biggest snob ever," the 12th-century Norman ecclesiastic, Giraldus Cambrensis, who generally regarded the Irish as barbarians. And Francis Bacon wrote "No harper hath a sound so melting and prolonged as the Irish harp."

The beauty of the sound is well evidenced on her new CD, recorded on her copy of the famous medieval harp in Trinity College, the very instrument which provides the national emblem. The tone is silvery bright, and does, as Bacon observed, linger appealingly and unmuddyingly in the air. It's also capable of an incisive rhythmic snap and spring that you won't associate with the rounder tone of more modern harps.

The gaps in our knowledge of the wire-strung Irish harp are great. The tradition was an oral one. The kind of tutors you might have expected to have been written don't exist. And the body of actual surviving music is small. Yet as Armstrong points out, "we have more information about Irish harping than we have about any harping on the continent, from the Middle Ages onwards."

She's now involved in actively transmitting that information through an annual summer school, Scoil an Cláirsigh, presented in August in Kilkenny by the Historical Harp Society of Ireland. She would happily - and fascinatingly - talk the hind leg off the proverbial donkey once she gets into her stride about the minutiae of her instrument, its repertoire, challenges and opportunities. If the commitment she exudes is anything to go by, the new CD is but another single step in what's going to be a life-long crusade.

Siobhán Armstrong's Cláirseach na hÉireann, The Harp of Ireland, with guest, sean-nós singer Bríd Ní Mhaoilchiaráin (Maya Recordings MCD 0401), is distributed by Claddagh Records, and can be purchased at www.irishharp.org. See also www.siobhanarmstrong.com