Introduction

The Irish harp has occupied a place in the Irish psyche for centuries, both musically and ideologically. An identifiably Irish instrument, its repertoire and style have provenance in Ireland since at least the ninth century AD, thus bolstering its import in terms of cultural and ideological associations. Its high status in early Gaelic Ireland dissipated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although harpers found employment by travelling to the houses of the gentry performing and composing music. Several attempts to revive the harp tradition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries failed to instigate a popular revival and the harp’s impact in Irish musical spheres was minimal until later in the twentieth century. The twentieth-century revival has led to widespread growth in harping in Ireland and abroad, particularly over the past twenty years. Today there are more harpers than at any time in the past two hundred years active as performers, teachers and students. Irish harping throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century (particularly in the form of the (‘neo’)-Irish harp) has been a predominantly female pursuit. The most publicly visible harpers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been women, save for a small proportion of well-known male harpers. This manifestation of the tradition is vastly different to that of the earlier centuries when the harp, while not exclusively a male tradition, was heavily dominated by men. The present gender imbalance is much at odds with the earlier history of the harp and shows a disparity with other instruments in the Irish musical tradition. This chapter traces the changing gender trajectory of the harp, beginning with the role of the instrument in Irish mythology. The chapter appraises myth, poetry, visual art and contemporary musical artistic practice, and considers the implications of the modern-day gender imbalance for the development of the tradition into the future.

Myth and Folklore

The origin of the harp is told in mythology by Marbhan and recounted in Eugene O’Curry’s On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873). The harp has an almost ethereal origin in this folk tale and is credited with sleep-inducing abilities: