torek, 26. marec 2019

35. Wind harph


Nobody knows who was the first inventor of wind harph, but we can be quite sure they were already known in ancient times in Greece and East. The first exact description of the "modern" aeolian harp was made by the Jesuit and scientist Athanasius Kircher born in 1602 near Fulda in Germany. Although the instrument is 'officially' known for almost four centuries, it's still very rare and not many people know how it sounds.

After several years of research and many useless prototypes I finally managed to make the first fully functional wind harph. As the basic design of a harph is quite simple, the secret of its sound lies in proper tuning and orientation regarding general direction of the wind. During the process I often felt like a sailor learning about the wind on an unknown sea.





It's hard to explain overwhelming feelings when I put the harph outside on a windy day for the first time and it started to play immediately. I felt like I create a rare living being, finally awake to life. Its mysterious and harmonically rich sound unexpectedly comes and goes with the wind, varying in pitch and loudness. There's no way to force wind harph to sing. One should be patient waiting for the right wind to excite its strings with proper frequency and wake up the harph like a sleeping beauty. So its song is always a kind of a gift, caused by nature in accordance with skillful hands.