> I don't know why strathspeys were not played on the harp 200 years > ago.
They were. Look at the title page of almost any of the standard "fiddle" collections from the Gows' time on. Most of them mention the harp as an intended instrument, sometimes listing it ahead of the fiddle. I do not believe the editors of these collections were kidding - particularly as the bass parts are often quite similar to those in sheet music published explicitly for the harp and *nothing* else. If you get away from the book literature and dive into the world of ephemeral music sheets, the harp looks much more important. The use of this music at the time is nearly invisible to history, as it was mostly by women wealthy enough to have access to a harp, which meant domestic performance. But it's obvious that women were the major market for instrumental sheet music, and the harp was their central instrument. What they played was in the same forms as the rest of the Scottish repertoire, and so was what they composed (though some of them were obsessed with marches to the exclusion of anything else; my theory is they had a thing about men in uniform). I've been accumulating pointers to music by the Scottish women of 200 years ago for quite a while now, intending to produce a sizable collection of it. There is far more than any existing catalogue would suggest and it's going to take years. (If anybody knows of sheet music repositories that have some of this stuff and already have useful indexes, please let me know). One reason why it's so damn difficult to track Scottish women's compositions down and get an overall picture of who wrote what is simply that they changed their names so often during their lives. Look at the stuff on music relating to the Baird family on my CDROM to see how confusing it can get; that took days of trawling through aristocratic-genealogical references and the DNB. (Hint for anyone else doing this sort of thing: Burke's Peerage is a bodged-up pile of crap). A common pointer to the harp as an intended instrument is flat keys. Like "The Moss House, Logiealmond" by Miss Macdonald of St Martins, in Daniel McLaren's "A Collection of Strathspey Reels" c.1805; it's in E flat with a section in E flat minor. Obviously there are many pieces where the intention was to get a specific tone colour on the fiddle, but if there's no evidence that the composer ever played it we might look for other explanations. Piano is the other option - most harpists played the piano too and a lot of music is explicitly intended for either, almost always in flat keys. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
