Could you say a little more about this? What language(s) are you talking about?
I had always just assumed that "harper" was Germanic and "harpist" was Romance,
but I never actually looked into it.
> In general though, harpists are pedal-harp
>proponents of the classical and art music repertoire while harpers
>are more likely to be advocates of the older traditions and less
>developed instruments.
My impressions are slightly different. "Harpist" does seem to be favored by
pedal harp players who play classical music, "harper" seems to me to be most
prevalent among people playing modern folk harps and people playing celtic music
on either folk harps or celtic harps. Among the folks I know who are most
interested in older traditions and older harp types (say, 17thC and
before),
what to call the harp player seems to be less of an issue. Speaking for myself,
the approach to harp playing that one finds in, for example, the Sylvia Woods
books or the Kim Robertson books, is much closer to the modern pedal harp
approach than it is to, for example, baroque approaches (art music or
otherwise),
so the harpist/harper distinction doesn't seem very useful. If we had a term
for players of every harp type, it would be closer, but what a pain! It seems to
me we're "suffering" for the fact that the harp didn't change it's name enough,
like the fretted, plucked strings did. Look at the variety!: vihuela, guitar,
lute, theorbo, ukelele, mandolin. The various harps are just as different as
these, but we still just call them harp, for the most part. I personally like
the idea of taking our cue from that and not sweating the terms. They're too
vague to be of any real use. Since this is supposedly an international list,
I'd love to hear from players in other countries on this question. Do other
Anglophones feel the need to have this distinction? What about other languages
besides English?
for wholistic harping,
Becky Root
rroot@indra.com