The Autoharp in Irish Traditional Music

My interests in the autoharp and Irish traditional music (ITM) should be apparent from the topics of the most recent dozen or so posts on this blog. I’ve approached them separately as a musicologist specializing in the history of musical instruments. This post marks a shift toward their intersection in performance from the perspective of a musician whose journey started on the autoharp in 1952 and found its way into Celtic music a decade later via the Highland bagpipes. I’ve since become comfortably conversant with the Irish idiom on the tin whistle and would like to be able to say the same about the autoharp.

Irish dance tunes and airs figure prominently in its repertoire but the instrument is not among those normally associated with ITM in its home country. The first visible appearance of the autoharp in a traditional Irish context that I’ve identified so far was at the National Festival of Traditional Irish Music and Song (Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann) in Kilrush, County Clare, in 1967. A documentary film of this event shows several musicians with autoharps gathering for it. One of them participates in a performance of the air, The Mountains Of Pomeroy, first heard in the background in the following snippet and then brought into view.

This short film, Fléa Ceoil, received awards at several international film festivals and can be viewed in its entirety here. The concentrated scene with autoharps suggests that its director, Louis Marcus (Oscar nominated for two subsequent productions), took particular notice of them. If the resemblance between his brother, David Marcus (photo) and the featured autoharper is not merely coincidental, it might explain the focus on that instrument.

This would still not account for the number of them present at the event. This also suggests that the autoharp was more commonly encountered in such contexts than it subsequently became. In any case, the film was intended to introduce an appreciable portion of its audience to ITM and the autoharp was part of that experience.

The one shown in use is well known in the autoharp community as the Rosen model, so called for the large rose decal on its soundboard. It was made in East Germany and readily available in most European countries. The tune is played in D major but the corresponding autoharp chord bars are not in their factory positions. Their labels have also been removed, corroborating a reconfiguration. The cloth cover over the hitch pins is another non-standard detail.

The instrument is held against the player’s chest, cradled in the left arm. This position had become customary in the US. However, rather than plucking the strings between the bar housing and tuning pins, as is part of that style, they are plucked here toward the lower string support. This was the initial practice in the US (discussed here) and remains characteristic of autoharp playing in some European countries (exemplified in a Latvian performance here).

The hybrid position seen in the Irish film therefore hints at an influence of more than solely US practice. Whatever its extent may have been, the thought that apparently went into setting up this autoharp and the player’s intent facial expression, indicate that he took it quite seriously. If his playing technique was informed by observing other players, the question about where they were located becomes all the more interesting.

The film does not show how the other autoharpers at the fleadh held or used them, nor how far they had traveled. The only exception is the one wearing a jacket with a hand-embroidered “Birmingham GB,” corroborating the attendance from the neighboring island that might otherwise be expected. The Rosen model appears consistently where detail permits a manufacturer to be identified, suggesting their owners were European. Visitors from the US would be expected to have Oscar Schmidt models and, if shown using them, plucked the strings between the bar housing and tuning pins.

It is not clear whether the active player is straddling the border between accompaniment and melodic playing or is simply a lively accompanist. Either way, his style differs from those presented in the following examples. He is clearly a non-casual participant and unlikely to be making a debut appearance.

In 1972, the Irish fiddler Kevin Burke recorded the album Sweeney’s Dream in the US. At the unanticipated suggestion of the producer, he was backed by a local group of what the liner notes (available here) call “old-timey musicians.” The set beginning with Tuttle’s Reel is accompanied by Henry Saposnik on the autoharp without any attempt at harnessing the instrument’s melodic potential, with which he was doubtless familiar.

Burke plays eighth notes with a clear rhythmic swing that is one of the fundamental attributes of native Irish style. Although such rhythmic inequality is also commonplace in the performance of American old-time music there is nothing noteworthy about its absence. The regular use of patterned melodic ornaments — “cuts,” “rolls,” “slides,” ”tips,” “triplets,” etc. — is another hallmark of Irish playing. American recordings of traditional fiddle and dance tunes where the autoharp plays the melody include little comparable embellishment, instead adding rhythmic “fill” to the self accompaniment.

In 1974, the American folk group Pumpkinhead, which had relocated to Ireland a few years earlier, appeared on national television. A significant part of their repertoire consisted of ITM, using an autoharp for chordal accompaniment. In the following year, the same group released a CD titled Pumpkinhead (produced by Donal Lunny who also joined the group on it, as did Kevin Burke).

The Galway-based singer and multi-instrumentalist, Chris Twomey, began playing the autoharp in 1967 as part of his activity with the Irish group Stoker’s Lodge. They recorded their first album, The Boys of Fairhill, in 1977. One of the tracks is the song, When I FIrst Came unto this Country, sung by Crowley and paralleled melodically on the autoharp (beginning at 1m 20s) by Twomey.

He adds a bit of countermelodic embellishment but does not strum any chords. In contrast to the chromatic instruments heard thus far, a diatonic autoharp was used for this recording.

Technical digression: The autoharps seen and heard here, of both types, have the same body design and 36 or 37 strings. The difference lies in the way they are tuned. The chromatic variant is intended to provide as many chords as possible and typically has between 12 and 21 bars. Diatonic models may have as few as three bars and the strings not needed for the chords they produce are retuned in unison with an adjacent string.

This increases the instrument’s sonority and allows the bars to be positioned to minimize the extraneous but audible high harmonics that beset the sound of an autoharp, caused by dampers touching muted strings at nodal points. Additionally, when chords are broadly strummed, the ostensibly silent strings make a stuttered contribution to the aggregate sound. Double-strings offset that effect when playing melody and the diatonic design also more readily sustains a playing technique where passing tones are plucked by raising the bar that damps them, rather than fleetingly changing the chord.

I’m going to return to the main topic via Scotland. The autoharp is heard on recordings made there during the 1930s, used for accompaniment in a manner comparable to the Irish examples. I’ll be detailing them in a separate post about autoharp recordings from that decade, noting for now that the earliest recording of melodic autoharp playing that has thus far come to light was made in the US in 1937.

Keeping with the present chronology, Billy Connolly plays melodic autoharp in a video recording of the fiddle tune My Own House, made in 1985. He uses a three-key diatonic model released commercially in 1983 specifically to facilitate melodic playing.

This tune can be traced back to a collection published by Patrick McDonald in 1784, as the jig John Bain’s Sister’s Wedding. It is notated in what remains the conventional manner, which does not indicate the rhythmic swing that characterizes Connolly’s rendition and, as already noted, Irish and Scottish styles more generally. The trills in the 1784 version foreshadow the more elaborate ornamentation that is now also part of that idiom, manifested by the slides and slurred tips (discussed further here) heard in the video.

A chromatic autoharp was again used for accompaniment on several tracks of the album An Buachaill Dreoite, recorded in Drogheda, Co. Clare, in 1992 by the Irish fiddler Joe Ryan. The reel Trip to Durrow provides another good illustration of intricate melodic ornamentation. The autoharp is played by Ryan’s compatriot Jim MacArdle (who describes the genesis of the album in a podcast).

In the following year, the American autoharper Karen Mueller released the album Clarity. This juxtaposes American and Irish tradition with a diatonic autoharp at center stage. Uilleann pipes are also on this recording, as heard in the set Blarney Pilgrim—Humours of Ennistymon, which she also plays solo in a live concert.

In 2004, Twomey recorded a solo CD, Midnight on the Water, using a chromatic autoharp and three different diatonic instruments. Its title signals the presence of American material but three of the 13 tracks are Irish tunes, performed in their native style. Here is a snippet from one where he plays The Bells of Shandon.

Twomey’s use of ornamentation was not as spartan as it would seem from this segment. He restricts it to slides into the main notes of the melody from below, but augments this with the ever-so-important Irish ornament — the triplet — on the two other tracks. (I don’t have reproduction rights and am keeping to a single truncated example here.)

Twomey was a left-handed autoharper who consistently played instruments built for right-handed use. As such, his ornamentation has a somewhat idiosyncratic effect. Nonetheless, it provides a benchmark for the melodic use of an autoharp in ITM, based on the approach taken to it by an Irish musician.

Kevin Burke devoted a tutorial video to the question, “How could an American fiddler sound more like an Irish fiddler?” This could reasonably be rephrased as, “How could an autoharper who plays Irish tunes American style sound more like an Irish traditional musician?” I’ll be pursuing it in coming posts, including one that delves further into Twomey’s work.