I ran into Phillip King and his harp at the Virginia Park Farmers' Market in Santa Monica today. He's playing tomorrow (Sunday January 13, 2013) at Core Church (Washington and Overland) 8:30am, 10:30am, and 12:30pm services. So I'm getting this up quickly.
This is not your every day harp music. The International Harp Museum site says:
"The harp is one of the oldest musical instruments in the world. The earliest harps were developed from the hunting bow. The wall paintings of ancient Egyptian tombs dating from as early as 3000 B.C. show an instrument that closely resembles the hunter's bow, without the pillar that we find in modern harps.
The angled harp came to Egypt from Asia in about 1500 B.C. It was built from a hollow sound-box joined to a straight string-arm at an angle. The strings, possibly made of hair or plant fibre, were attached to the sound-box at one end and tied to the string-arm at the other. The strings were tuned by rotating the knots that held them.
Celtic harp
During the Middle Ages the pillar was added to support the tension of extra strings. Stiffer string materials like copper and brass were used and these changes enabled the instrument to produce greater volume and a longer-sustaining tone. Paintings of these harps appear in many early manuscripts and their shapes hardly differ from those of the Celtic harps that are still played today."Phillip said his harp is a Celtic harp. You can hear him playing on this video I took.
He's got a CD too which you can get at his website universalharp.com.
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