Image: Queen Mary Harp, in the National Museum of Scotland, photograph by David Monniaux, CC BY-SA 3.0
The clarsach, or Gaelic wire-strung harp, has been central to the organology of “traditional” Scottish music since 19th century Romantic-era ‘bardic’ narratives of imagined ancient times. Research in the past couple of decades has revisited the written evidence for this narrative, and archaeology has been opening up new angles about the nature of harping in pre-historic Scotland. This is the first of 3 posts on the place of the harp in Scottish culture. This post will highlight Keith Sanger’s research on Gaelic wire-strung harp in both Highland and Lowland use. The second post will look at the two Rory Dalls – Irish and Scottish – who feature in the end-story of the older traditions; and the third post will go further back in time to archaeology on the prehistory of harping in the Scottish western isles.
“A Harper’s Perspective”: the contemporary “trad” clarsach player
For the novice reader, here’s a quick recap: where are we today with wire-strung harping? Published in Dublin in 2023, a recent team-authored article usefully summarises this familiar ground, describing how the 20th century ‘harp revival’ was essentially a ‘synthesized tradition” that cleared a pathway for contemporary clarsach players to perform within a revival ‘traditional music’ scene (Wood, Dickson, et al., p.215). The authors argue that contemporary clarsairs should understand that they sit within a ‘revival’ practice that is necessarily not simply the same as the ancient practice. Their overview of the rise of the ‘revival’ practice is as follows.
- The ‘bardic’ profiling of ancient Scottish musical identity by Macpherson’s Ossian publication fed into Romantic ideas ancient ‘bardic’ performance;
- The Highland Society of Scotland’s acquisition in 1805 of the Queen Mary and Lamont harps (now at the National Museum of Scotland), dating from the renaissance period, suggested design principles for wire-strung instruments which began to be produced as part of this age of Romantic ‘revival’;
- in Ireland, there was rather more sustained attention to building harps that sounded “good”, responding to the capabilities of pedal harps. These ideas eventually fed new designs back to Scotland featuring chromatic stringing, birthing an essentially hybrid instrument that reflected 19th century musical taste.
- By the 20th century, the clarsach was part of a new ‘tradition’ of Celtic music. The formation of the Comunn na Clàrsach (Clarsach Society) in 1931 encouraged both playing and making, using the harp to accompany song, which now formed one strand of performance feeding the mid-century folk ‘revival’.
- In the 1970s, the work of Alison Kinnaird began to draw attention to the discontinuities in harp “tradition”, suggesting that harpists – like any other “traditional” musician – needed to engage with wider musical aspects of what needs to be seen as a changing, living, tradition.
So, what do we know about wire-strung harps before the revival and the disruption of the early modern period? To answer that, we move to an overview of research carried out by Keith Sanger.
- Historical harping before the disruption of tradition: mapping the wire-strung harp
Keith Sanger is known for wire-strung harp research that attempts to separate factual data-driven history from commonplace legends. His article ‘Mapping the Clarsach in Scotland’ (Sanger 2017) critiqued the harp revivalists’ assumption that there was a clear cultural division between gut-strung Lowland harps and wire-strung Highland or Gaelic harps (a view that Sanger had himself laid out in his 1992 book Tree of Strings). This had assumed that the ‘revival’ was essentially reviving a Highland, Gaelic practice – rather than reviving an instrument which had once been in high-status use throughout Scotland.
Revisiting the evidence and describing his earlier book as a ‘work in progress’, Sanger’s 2017 article found evidence for wire-strung harping in both highland and lowland society, although in the lowlands, a slightly earlier pattern of decline due to a) new musical influences from continental Europe and b) the absence of royal court patronage after 1603.
Sanger acknowledges that it can be hard to know what instrument is meant in early textual references. The Gaelic words for harp playing were ambiguous in the medieval period, and show evidence of multi-lingual influence. The Gaelic “Cruit” might be found alongside Latinate terms such as “Cithara” and “Lyre”, and none of these show whether an instrument might be wire- or gut-strung. Notwithstanding this challenge, Sanger lays out the evidence for wire-strung harps in the high middle-ages, suggesting that a wire-strung harp most likely was played in Scone in 1249 for the inauguration of Alexander III. Other examples can be found in this period for suggesting that a “cruit” was a wire-strung instrument which was widely encountered both in Lowland royal and aristocratic circles as well as in the Highlands.
As time moved on, the article finds more reliable documentary evidence that places this wire-strung instrument in the 15th century Renaissance royal court of Scotland, with other aristocratic patrons scattered throughout both the Lowlands and the Gaelic west. Julie Holder’s research into the Mary Queen of Scots harp concurs that harping was a popular amateur as well as professional practice in the royal renaissance court (Holder, 2020). Some harpers were associated with particular patrons; others (Sanger, p.6) may have been more itinerant. Many are named in account records of payment. However, by the mid-17th century, the fashion for viols seems to have replaced the harp in Lowland Scotland (Sanger, p.8). Although evidence persists for groups of musicians travelling between noble houses seeking opportunities, these records are surprisingly distributed more in the east and north than the far west. Sanger puzzled over the gap in the early modern map in the far west; was this because the area had been settled from Scandinavia in the medieval period and possibly by the 17th century had a different kind of instrumental culture? The MacDonald Lords of the Isles had specific connections to Irish harping and Ulster, but that may not have been typical for all of Gaelic Scotland (Sanger, p.13).
The early modern period seems to have been the period when the great Highland bagpipe was also rising in status, but Sanger suggests that rather than see the two in direct competition, the decline of the clarsach in the Gaelic north could equally well be attributed to the same factors as had already impacted the Lowlands: the rise of the fiddle and viol, and the changing structures for supporting harpists patronage and training (Sanger, p.13-14).
Sanger concludes that the harp tunes known as ‘ports’ might have come from the Renaissance period, when both the wire-strung and gut-strong harps, along with the lute, were all employed in the cultural circles associated with the Royal court, and that the instrument declined gradually after the court shifted its locus in 1603 and new fashions arrived from Europe. His mapping suggests no hard-line cultural division between wire-strung harps in Lowland and Highland culture moving back before 1603.
The end of that article left Sanger pondering; given the relative scarcity of evidence for Irish harping in the Gaelic west in early modern Scotland, what evidence was there for the life of Ulster-born, Rory Dall O’ Cathain, in legend, the greatest of the Gaelic harpists? The next Soundyngs post will look at the problem of the two Rorys, the Irish Ó Catháin and the Scottish Dall Mac Mhuirich or Morrison.
Further Reading
- Neil Wood, Joshua Dickson et al., ‘A Harper’s Perspective on the Revival (or re-invention?) of the Scottish Harp, in Joyce and Lawlor (eds.), Harp Studies II: World Harp Traditions (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2023), pp.215-235
- Julie Holder ‘The Multiple Meanings of the Queen Mary Harp’, in (ed.) Stephen Reid, Blog for the Mary Queen of Scots Project, University of Glasgow, August 18 2020
- Keith Sanger, ‘Mapping the Clarsach in Scotland’, (2017), in wirestrungharp.com accessed 31 March 2025