Aeolian harp

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Aeolian harp

An aeolian harp (æolian harp or wind harp) is a musical instrument

Musical instrument

A musical instrument is an object constructed or used for the purpose of making music. In principle, anything that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument....
that is "played" by the wind.

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Aeolian Harp in the Old Castle of Baden Baden Project Gutenberg Etext 14097

An aeolian harp (æolian harp or wind harp) is a musical instrument

Musical instrument

Aeolus

Aeolus , Latinized as ?olus was the ruler of the winds in Greek mythology. In fact this name was shared by three mythic characters. These three personages are often difficult to tell apart, and even the ancient mythographers appear to have been perplexed about which Aeolus was which....
, the ancient Greek god of the wind.

History

Aeolian harps were very popular as household instruments during the Romantic Era

Romanticism

Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution....
, and are still hand-crafted today. Some are now made in the form of monumental metal sound sculpture

Sound sculpture

Sound sculpture is an intermedia and time based artform in which sculpture or any kind of art object produces sound, or the reverse . Most often sound sculpture artists were primarily either Visual arts or composers, not having started out directly making sound sculpture....
s located on the roof of a building or a windy hilltop.

Description

The traditional aeolian harp is essentially a wooden box including a sounding board

Sounding board

The sounding board or soundboard is the part of a string instrument that transmits the vibrations of the strings to the air, greatly increasing the loudness of sound over that of the string alone....
, with strings stretched lengthwise across two bridges. It is placed in a slightly opened window where the wind can blow across the strings to produce sounds. The strings can be made of different materials (or thicknesses) and all be tuned to the same note, or identical strings can be tuned to different notes.

Sound

The sound is random, depending on the strength of the wind passing over the strings, and can range from a barely audible hum to a loud scream. If the strings are tuned to different notes, sometimes only one tone is heard and sometimes chord

Chord (music)

In music and music theory a chord is a set of two or more different note that sound simultaneously. Most often, in European-influenced music, chords are tertian Sonority that can be constructed as stacks of thirds relative to some underlying musical scale....
s.

Operation

The harp is driven by von Karman vortex street

Von Kármán vortex street

A K?rm?n vortex street is a term used in fluid dynamics for a repeating pattern of swirling vortex caused by the unsteady flow separation of a fluid over bluff bodies....
effect. The motion of the wind across a string causes perioding vortex downstream and this alternating vortex cause the string to vibrate. Lord Rayleigh first solved the mystery of aeolin harp in a paper published in the Philosophy Magazine.The effect can sometimes be observed in overhead utility lines, fast enough to be heard or slow enough to be seen. A stiff rod will perform; a non-telescoping automobile radio antenna can be a dramatic exhibitor. And of course the effect can happen in other media; in the anchor line of a ship in a river, for example.

Aeolian harps in literature and music

Aeolian harps are featured in at least two Romantic-era poems, "The Aeolian Harp" and "Dejection, an Ode", both by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an England poet, critic and Philosophy who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romanticism in England and one of the Lake Poets....
. In William Heinesen

William Heinesen

Andreas William Heinesen is the most famous writer from the Faroe Islands. He was also a poet, a composer and a painter....
's novel The Lost Musicians set in Tórshavn

Tórshavn

T?rshavn is the Capital and largest city of the Faroe Islands. It is located in the southern part on the east coast of Streymoy. To the north west of the town lies the high mountain H?sareyn, and to the southwest, the high Kirkjub?reyn....
, Kornelius Isaksen takes his three sons to a little church where, in the tower, they sit listening to the 'capriciously varying sounds of an Aeolian harp', which leads the boys into a lifelong passion for music. Aeolian harps are mentioned in Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Multilingualism Russian-American novelist and short story writer.Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian language, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist....
's classic Lolita

LOLITA

LOLITA is a natural language processing system developed by Durham University between 1986 and 2000. The name is an acronym for "Large-scale, Object-based, Linguistics Interactor, Machine translation and Analyzer"....
. A lyre

Lyre

The lyre is a string instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greece were accompanied by lyre playing....
is mentioned in Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major England Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest Lyric poetry in the English language....
's "Ode to the West Wind

Ode to the West Wind

Percy Bysshe Shelley composed the poem Ode to the West Wind in 1819 near Florence, Italy; it was Publishing in 1820. Some have interpreted the poem as an expression of the speaker lamenting his current geolocation inasmuch as he felt helpless to do much about the events happening in England while he was in Italy; at the same time, the po...
" which is another name for an Aeolian Harp. Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell was an United States composer, music theory, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...
's Aeolian Harp (1923) was one of the first piano pieces ever to feature extended technique

Extended technique

Extended techniques are performance techniques used in music to describe unconventional, unorthodox or "improper" wiktionary:techniques of singing, or of playing musical instruments....
s on the piano

Piano

The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard instrument. Widely used in Western music for solo performance, ensemble use, chamber music, and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to musical composition and rehearsal....
which included plucking and sweeping the pianist's hands directly across the strings of the piano. The Etude

Étude

An ?tude , is an instrumental musical composition, most commonly of considerable difficulty, usually designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular technical skill....
in A flat major for piano

Piano

Frédéric Chopin

Fr?d?ric Chopin was a composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic music period. He is widely regarded as the greatest Polish composer, and one of music's greatest tone poets....
(Étude Op. 25, No. 1 (Chopin)

Étude Op. 25, No. 1 (Chopin)

?tude Op. 25, No. 1 is a solo piano work composed by Fr?d?ric Chopin in 1836, and published in 1837. Its romanticized names are "Aeolian Harp," for Schumann's description of it, and "The Shepherd Boy," for Chopin's advice to a pupil to picture a shepherd boy refuging in a grotto to avoid a storm playing the melody on his flute....
) is sometimes called the "Aeolian Harp" etude, a nickname given it by Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann, sometimes given as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is one of the most famous Romantic music composers of the 19th century....
. The piece features a delicate, tender, and flowing melody in the fifth finger of the pianist's right hand, over a background of rapid pedaled arpeggios. One of Sergei Lyapunov

Sergei Lyapunov

Sergei Mikhailovich Lyapunov was a Russian composer and pianist....
's 12 études d'exécution transcendante, Op.11 No.9, is named by the author "Harpes éoliennes" (aeolian harps). In this virtuoso piece, written between 1897 and 1905, the tremolo accompaniment seems to imitate the sounding of the instrument.

In 1972, Chuck Hancock and Harry Bee recorded a giant 30 foot tall Aeolian harp designed and built by 22 year-old Thomas Ward McCain on a hilltop in Chelsea, Vermont. United released their double LP entitled The Wind Harp - Song From The Hill. (An excerpt of this recording appears in the movie The Exorcist

The Exorcist (film)

The Exorcist is a 1973 in film United States horror film, adapted from the 1971 The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, dealing with the demonic possession of a young girl, and her mother?s desperate attempts to win back her daughter through an exorcism conducted by two priests....
.) In the spirit of this, in 2003 an Aeolian harp was constructed at Burning Man

Burning Man

Burning Man is an annual event held in the Black Rock Desert, in Northern Nevada. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy on Saturday evening....
. Australian artist, composer and sound sculptor Alan Lamb

Alan Lamb

Alan Lamb is an Australian artist, composer, and sound sculptor.He is best known for installations of large scale Aeolian harps, such as his album Primal Image, which consists of contact microphone recordings of kilometre long spans of telegraph wire on in rural Baldivis, Western Australia south of Perth, Western Australia purchased fo...
has created and recorded several very large scale aeolian harps.

On his album Dis (1976), Jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek

Jan Garbarek

Jan Garbarek a Norway tenor and soprano saxophone, active in the jazz, european classical music, and world music genres. Garbarek was the only child of a former Polish prisoner of war Czeslaw Garbarek and a Norwegian farmer's daughter....
used recordings of an Aeolian harp which was situated at a Norwegian fjord as a background sound.

Builders of pipe organs

Pipe organ

The pipe organ is a keyboard musical instrument that produces sound by venting mechanically compressed air through resonant Organ pipe. Each pipe produces sound at one fixed pitch, so they are provided in sets or "ranks" with one pipe or more per note, each rank having a common timbre and loudness throughout....
have included stops

Organ stop

An organ stop is a component of a pipe organ which admits pressurized air to a set of organ pipes. Its name comes from the fact that stops can be used selectively by the organist; some can be "on" , while other can be "off" ....
intended to imitate the sound and timbre of the aeolian harp. German builders were the first to include such a stop from the 1820s. The Aeolian Harp stop is not a harp- it is simply a rank of pipes

Organ pipe

An organ pipe is a sound-producing element of the pipe organ that resonator at a specific pitch when pressurized air is driven through it. Each pipe is tuned to a specific note of the musical scale....
using a low wind pressure and voiced to imitate the sound of the real instrument. It is therefore classified as a 'string' stop. These stops are amongst the softest found on pipe organs