Harp strings the heart

Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings. 

-- John Muir

Source

The harp requires care and patient treatment. Like life. And if we are so impatient with daily life, we will never be patient with the harp. If we made a habit of avoiding television, tuning a harp would not seem a chore.

The harp, or even the bassoon, will bring us closer to life than television or the habit of indoors.

And then the quotation above will resonate within. I tell myself while consoling my spirit.

I focus today on a composition that is much loved, but little heard. A strange contradiction! In fact, online links to this music are few.

Harp and the Harpsichord

Bach: Johann Sebastian Bach. German Composer. Among the bosses of Western Classical Music.

Harpsichord: A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed. The harpsichord had fallen out of popularity during the mid 18th century in favour of the fortepiano and keyboard. This is what it looks like:

Harp: The harp is a hand-plucked string instrument, usually triangular in shape, in which the plane of the strings is perpendicular to the soundboard. This is how it appears:

There are several compositions by Bach that I feel would do better without the use of the Harpsichord. Let us see

The queen played the harp

The much-maligned queen of France, Marie Antoinette loved her clothes, hunts, privacy, scandals, affairs, bitchiness and the harp.

She was a harpist and a simple woman, thrust into the French court and it's compulsory political pettiness.

Yet, we have been taught in schools, probably to bite monarchy in favour of our democracy, that Marie was a villain