There are few instruments onstage during an orchestral performance more complex than a pedal harp, but thankfully, SFCM's Jennifer Ellis is here to help.

Ellis teaches harp, community engagement and pedagogy at SFCM, and this summer held the annual weeklong harp immersive for Summer@SFCM. Here, in her own words,* she gives a guided tour of the intricacies of the pedal harp, the history of her harp in particular, and how she built a harp in her high school woodshop to get into college, along with some of the extended techniques she teaches and uses in performance.

"The harp has over 2,000 moving parts. From the bottom, you can see that a lot of those originate from the pedal–which is how we get sharps and flats on the instrument. The harp is known for having this really big range, but if we have a different string for every sharp and flat, and it's all in one row, the instrument will just be ridiculously long. So, we've tried other things during the years, over the centuries, but eventually this idea developed that we would control the sharps and flats all with these foot pedals."

"There's one foot pedal for each note of the scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, si. The pedals connect to springs, and then the springs connect to rods. Each pedal has these three notches that each pedal can sort of lock into: You move a pedal, it bends the spring, which is attached to a rod, which goes up into that iconic column harps have. The pedal rods then connect to the linkage, which is inside the neck of the harp.  All the C's, D's, and so forth get moved together.  So when you use the C pedal, it impacts the linkage, which turns a series of discs to rotate and fret all the C strings of the harp in a new position, kind of like the frets on a guitar. The lowest two strings, however, don't typically have this, and so we typically tune those manually to what we need for a given piece."

Ellis uses an electric hand-fan, one of the many extended techniques she employs on harp.

"For contemporary music, I have this whole roster of tools I use on the harp, similar to how pianos get 'prepared' for certain sounds. You can take paper and thread it in between the strings so a certain register will have a muted timbre, which can sound kind of like slap bass guitar on the lower strings. You can use all sorts of alternate things to sound the strings, like this screwdriver: I also use rubber mallets not just to hit the strings, but to drag them up and down the length for these really eerie sliding tones. And I have this portable fan with cloth blades that I can plug in onstage and use to sound multiple strings at once by feathering them with the blades."

Ellis uses alligator clamps, craft putty, and pieces of paper on her strings to achieve different timbres.

"This harp is a Lyon & Healy: The factory's in Chicago and they take about two years to build. My first harp teacher, Jessica Siegel was gearing up to open a harp store in Walnut Creek, Harps Etc. Before she'd even opened her doors, this was one of the first harps that she'd ordered to stock. I remember playing this harp at her house, just trying it out a little bit and being like, 'Oh, that's a beautiful sound.' It's birdseye maple and was built around the year 2000. I'd rented for years and years, but when I knew I wanted to pursue harps in college, it just made sense to finally get one. And I tried out a bunch at her shop, but I couldn't get over this one: It was the right sound for me. I knew I could trust it to see me through my career, and it's been my partner in crime ever since. It meant a lot that I was able to buy my first from my first teacher's shop; there's a lineage there and it's very special."

A close-up of how a concert harp's pedals are anchored in the column.

"And it's seen some things: I had a really unfortunate accident with it when I was an undergraduate: We were packing up after a rehearsal, and hadn't finished clearing the stage when someone started raising the soundwall, so the harp was lifted, fell, and bounced across the stage three times on its column. Once I got over the shock and of the disaster of it all, we had to work to detune the harp and bring it out of tension so the quick change in that tension wouldn't cause it to split: All the strings put just under 2,000 pounds of pressure on the instrument."

A close-up of the linkage of a concert pedal harp.

"So it went back to the factory in Chicago for repairs. But they did an amazing job, and I was so lucky the soundboard was totally fine, because that's really where the heart of the sound is on a harp. It did need a new neck, but every harp is going to have its neck replaced a few times during its life. When that happened it was approaching my senior recital, so it was unfortunate timing—not that there's ever a fortunate time for a harp repair!"

A close-up of the lower-register strings on a concert harp.

"Speaking of undergrad, this smaller harp sort of got me into music school in the first place. I didn't go to a high school with an orchestra, and when I started looking up music school requirements, one big one was four years of orchestra. So I didn't really know how to get around that, and I was brainstorming other ways to show a college that I was serious about playing the harp, so I thought… why not just build one? I had taken woodshop in middle school and loved it, so I continued woodshop in high school, and lthis is what I worked on my whole senior year of high school. I found a kit modeled after a classic Celtic or Scottish harp and then spent months constructing, sanding, finishing, refining and eventually stringing it so that it got the sound I wanted. At the end of the day, it obviously worked in lieu of four years of orchestra, because here I am all these years later."

Jennifer Ellis' handmade harp.

"One thing that's wonderful about SFCM is that we have so many school harps. We're so lucky: We have lever harps, we have semi-grands, we have concert grands, and it's just not that common. When I was going to a conservatory, if you didn't bring your own instrument, chances were you were going to have to share that instrument with multiple other people in the studio. It restricted how much practice time you'd have with it, and that's just not true here. That's really important."

*Text has been condensed and edited. Learn more about studying harp at SFCM.