Pedals turn one harp string into three pitches
A concert harp’s seven foot pedals do not just decorate the column. Each one retunes every string of one pitch class, so a single course of strings can sound flat, natural, or sharp—chromatic reach built from a diatonic frame. That double-action trick, patented by Sébastien Erard in 1811, crowns a design story older than writing.
Harps are plucked chordophones whose strings meet the soundboard at an angle. Wood frames are usually triangular; some hold several string rows or pedals. Depictions reach Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, India, and China, and by medieval centuries the instrument had spread across Europe and into colonial Americas. Distinct African bow and angle harps never needed the European forepillar that joins neck to body.
Archaeology pushes the timeline deep. Sumerian harps and lyres from Ur date to about 2500 BCE; Cycladic marble harpists sit near 2800–2700 BCE; Egyptian tomb paintings of the mid-third millennium show arched harps shaped like hunters’ bows. Persia’s Chang tradition is traced from roughly 4000 BCE into the seventeenth century CE. Around 1900 BCE, arched forms in the Iraq–Iran zone yielded to angular harps. Europe favoured a three-part frame—neck, soundbox, pillar—visible on eighth-century Pictish stones and in the early ninth-century Utrecht Psalter.
Chromatic appetite drove later engineering. Baroque Italy and Spain added strings; seventeenth-century German hooks raised pitch by a semitone; eighteenth-century linkages joined those hooks to pedals. Jacob Hochbrucker improved an Austrian Tyrol pedal idea around 1720; Erard’s double mechanism then let each string rise one or two half-steps. Latin American folk harps—Paraguay’s national instrument with roughly thirty-six nail-plucked strings, Venezuela’s thirty-two-string arpa llanera, Andean resonator boxes—descend from Spanish Baroque imports, while Myanmar’s saung-gauk preserves an ancient Asian lineage as a national emblem. Strings historically ran from sinew and gut to silk, nylon, and wire.
Source: Harp
