Quickly becoming one of the premier harp makers in the US, Lyon & Healy has continued to create master craft harps, both pedal, and lever, for harpists the world over. What a big sound," said Julia Richardson, the harpist helping Meyer.Lyon & Healy has been making harps in Chicago, Illinois since 1864. Her hands rolled pentatonic scales up all the octaves, then stung the air with a few minor chords that struck like hammer blows. In his daughter's hands, the harps commanded attention, and Lynn Meyer's eyes welled with pride.Īs her confidence grew, Maryanne Meyer sat behind the middle harp more often. But the jokes were short, always interrupted by the harps' music. Her father, Lynn, was about to unload $21,500 before taxes, and tried to tell jokes to Fritzmann. "The Style 30s always sound great in the bass," Meyer said. They moved through each octave, the chords twinkling in the highs and thrumming in the lows. Thin fingers found the chords, playing a simple I-IV-V-I chord progression at first. Her guests, who had come from Indiana, waited expectantly as she approached each harp. She had come from Pennsylvania to buy a second instrument. Her father, along with a harpist friend and 150 empty chairs, watched her circle the black concert harps as creaking floorboards echoed with each hesitant step. The flurry results in dozens of wood pieces that arc and reverberate, support and interlock.
On the third floor, master woodcarvers peck like birds at the designs on columns and bases. Others bring feminine curves out of blocky columns turning on lathes. When finished, workers hang the bodies like sides of beef from overhead hooks. They permit a thinner spruce body, which reverberates more, and thus is louder. The four aluminum ribs hidden inside each harp make it exceptionally strong. When the worker finishes, he has created the backing for a rib. Upstairs from the drama playing out on Valadez's desk, another worker picks up a block, measures and marks it into a thin, 4-inch piece, then sands it to size on a motorized belt. To resist the forces as it was improved, the body of the modern harp underwent a vivid evolution. When tightened, the 47 strings of a concert harp create 2,000 pounds of tension between the neck and body, the 80-pound instrument straining against a ton of potential energy eager to destroy it. The entire body of a harp wants to implode. It is everywhere, even in the sturdiest pieces. A tiny wrench to loosen each screw, a screwdriver to continue the work. She reversed direction, taking it apart just as slowly. It had taken a day to assemble this single package of moving parts. Sandwiching the workings between curving brass plates one day this week, Valadez tightened dozens of tiny black screws to finish one assembly-only to find a scratch on one brass plate. Harps hide far more moving parts than meet the eye.įor 18 years, Maria Valadez has worked assembling the harps' invisible metal musculature, fitting long strings of moving joints into the harp's neck, each built by dozens of workers to smoothly convert a harpist's pedal movements into a command for a harp to switch keys. They tried using machines to assemble parts once, Fritzmann said. A modern harp's 1,400 moving pieces are glued, clamped, spun, trimmed, bent, rasped, sanded, fit, finished, gilded, assembled, strung and tuned-all by hand.Īt Lyon & Healy, 129 people do this. It is wood chosen for strength and resonance, and perfection supplied by human hands. But the heart of the harp remains the same as in the first Lyon & Healy instruments. In the 21st Century, lasers cut harp parts, brass plates are stamped by computer-guided machines, and power tools do the roughest, earliest work on them. City noise intruded on the halls, the harps grew louder still in a co-evolution still proceeding, said Steve Fritzmann, a master harpmaker and Lyon & Healy's national sales manager. While concert halls grew, harps grew louder. As people grew taller, harps grew larger. From then on, their evolution came largely at the hands of Chicago harpmakers.īecause harpists wanted to travel, materials grew sturdier.
Lyon and Healy replaced fragile French plaster parts with rugged wood construction-a decided advantage-and Chicago harps quickly supplanted their dainty European cousins. The first took 10 years and was finished in 1889. Lyon-young Boston instrument dealers who had come to Chicago in 1864-that they decided to build their own.
The ocean crossing was bad enough, but North America's weather extremes posed a still harsher challenge for the harps.