The Dilling Model Single-Action Harp: A Short Version of the Long Backstory

by Joyce Rice

with invaluable assistance from Arsalaan Fay, Nancy Hurrell and Mike Parker

Have you ever seen a harp with a mohawk? Here’s one -

What the heck are those spiky things, you ask? Settle back and I’ll tell you a story….

Once upon a time there was a famous harpist named Mildred Dilling (1894-1982). She had a vast collection of harps (estimates range from 65 to 120) and drove herself around the United States in a station wagon, giving concerts (watch a video here)  in places large and small. She mainly concertized on a large pedal harp, although she also had a couple of smaller harps with her on which she would play a piece or two.  For her travels overseas (even Afghanistan, says harper/singer and former student Erik Berglund) however, she wished for a more portable harp that worked something like the six-foot pedal harp but was half its size. She found one that had been made by John Egan in the early 19^th century, called the Royal Portable Irish Harp, but she didn’t find it very easy to play, so she set out to get one made that she liked. Let’s look back a few centuries to follow the road to the harp Miss Dilling eventually got.

Essentially, the Western harp of the past millennium has been a triangular-shaped instrument with one rank of strings perpendicular to the soundbox and tuned in the diatonic scale like the white keys on the piano – C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, etc. Early on, an occasional accidental (a temporary sharp or flat) could be made by fretting a string; that is, the player used the thumb or a tuning key to push the top of the string against the neck (top of the string) of the harp or where the string joins the soundbox (bottom of the string), a practice that did not always produce an in-tune note or one with a good tone. If a sharp or flat was wanted throughout the piece a string could be re-tuned.

In the European Renaissance (1300s-1600s) music gradually became more chromatic. By the early 1400s organs had met the challenge with a chromatic keyboard, and in the 1500s harpists wanted to keep up with the times and play more sharps and flats, too, at a faster pace than fretting allowed.

At left: Judy Kadar and her 15^th c. reproduction gothic-style harp with brays.¹

Harps gradually became larger: in Italy they developed double harps and triple harps (which eventually became adopted by the Welsh), and in Spain cross-strung harps, all made by adding extra rows of strings tuned to the “black keys” (and adding difficulty, as well).

At left is historical harpist and musicologist Hannelore Devaere at her reproduction Italian triple harp. Read her H.S article on the Spanish Double Harp.            

Here Hannelore holds a reproduction
cross-strung harp. ²

Looking for a better way to make accidentals on a simpler single-row harp, in the late 1600s the Austrians came up with U-shaped devices called “hooks” on a few (and eventually most) strings that, when turned into or away from the string, raised or lowered the pitch one-half step from natural to sharp or flat, keeping it there until the hook was changed. (Below is a 19^th century version of the hook harp.) When the harp was tuned in Eb, three flat keys, (F, Bb and Eb) and four sharp keys (G, D, A, E) and the key of C were available without retuning.³

Late 19^th century German hook harp⁴

According to Roslyn Rensch in Harps and Harpists, “Some time before 1720 (perhaps as early as the 1690s) a link mechanism was developed for the hook harp connecting its hooks, in octaves, with [seven] pedals,”⁵ one for each note of the scale, freeing the harpist from having to stop playing with one hand to change the hooks. This was called the single-action pedal harp, and is the harp for which Mozart wrote his Concerto for Flute and Harp.

By 1782 there was a double-action harp allowing each string to sound at the three pitches of sharp-natural-flat, but you needed 14 pedals!⁶ A combination of the turmoil of the French Revolution (the harps were being developed in Paris) and the difficulty of navigating so many pedals doomed (fortunately!) this experiment.

By 1811, however, after a couple of decades more of tinkering with the mechanism and trying to find the best way to raise and lower the pitch, all the while staying in tune and not dulling the tone, harpmaker Sebastien Erard, now in quieter London, developed the “fourchette” or disc double-action mechanism that was operated by only seven pedals.  (See Pedal Harp 101 in the Pedal Harp section of the Harp Spectrum website for more details on the pedals.) Today the two rows of discs look like this⁷:

Meanwhile in Ireland, for centuries another center of harp playing, the harp, a symbol of Irish nationalism, had fallen on hard times. Tastes in music were changing and the pedal harp had become more popular, making it harder for traditional harpers to find work. By 1792, when a Belfast Harp Festival was held, only about ten harpers came, many were very old, and only one played in the old style with his fingernails. (See Denis O'Hampsey, His Style and Technique for more about the Belfast Festival).

Egan's Royal Portable Irish Harp¹⁰

There were attempts to revive Irish harping over the next few decades by the new Belfast Harp Society, and Dublin harpmaker John Egan stepped in to help out, from 1804 to 1841 making harps in a more European style, lighter and with a rounded soundbox, from small Irish harps with sharping blade-like apparatuses called “ring-stops” to double-action pedal harps.

According to harp historian Nancy Hurrell, “Egan is perhaps best known for his ‘Royal Portable Irish Harps’, small gut-strung harps, about three feet in height, which were fitted with ivory knobs or “stops” or “ditals” on the column. The Royal Portable Irish Harp (at left) was designed to revive the ancient Irish harp tradition while incorporating the new building techniques used at the time to manufacture single-action pedal harps. The Royal Portable Irish Harps had elaborate inscriptions on the brass plates: the royal warrant and coat of arms of King George IV and Egan’s business address, 30 Dawson Street. He manufactured harps at this address from 1815 to 1835.”⁹

Skip forward nearly a century and we return to a young Mildred Dilling wanting a portable harp. Actually, she owned several Egan Royal Portable Harps but found, as had many others, that the ditals were a bit unwieldy and hard to reach, and took a while to learn how to use efficiently. So she contacted a harpmaker where she lived in New York City named James F. Buckwell and asked him to make a small harp shaped like the Egan but with a mechanism that she could reach quickly and easily, and together they worked out a new system. In the drawing from Buckwell’s March 21, 1919 patent application¹² you can see seven little ditals, or rockers, as he calls them in his patent description, or levers, as we call them today. Either hand could pull the lever to either side, changing the pitch a half-tone.

James Buckwell at work in his harp shop. The small harp bottom right is the single-action harp with the upright levers barely visible across the curve of the neck.¹³

Melville Clark was also making harps that looked like the Egan harps, and for decades his small harps were used throughout the U.S. for children and, made higher by fastening on a little bench, for adults. I am pictured to the right sitting on the bench behind a Clark, my first harp.

Now we hop several decades again to around 1980, about which Erik Berglund recollects: “In the last years of [Mildred Dilling’s] life, I was one of her students [and I] was also a singer.  She loved how I sang with the autoharp, and even had me perform with it at her recitals that she organized for her harp students. It was her idea to have me sing with the harp, [but that] was harder to do with the big pedal harp that I was renting from her. So she remembered the model that she had had made for her all those years ago.” Her interest in the portable harp was re-ignited but she apparently wanted someone to make a larger and stronger harp [her secretary Geraldine Ruegg told me that the Buckwell harp was a lot lighter than later models; Arsalaan Fay says it was smaller than the Clark harps -JR]. Erik continues, “I suggested a carpenter friend of mine, Shawn Herman.  He and Miss Dilling got together and spent a lot of time crafting and fine-tuning what would become the Dilling harp, today known as the Douglas harp.”

Shawn Herman was then living in Amherst, MA, and he enlisted the help of Jody Nishman, who had his own nearby business making folk harps, marimbas and mbiras. Jody says, “Miss Dilling, as I knew her, loaned us one of her Clark harps [and her two Buckwells], and as I recall we literally took them apart, and measured and or traced various pieces, and then reassembled the original. Miss Dilling also loaned us some real museum quality harps [probably the Egans] to examine, so that we could try to discern why they sounded so beautiful. I worked for Shawn designing and building the prototype, and then building subsequent harps on a part-time basis. Neither of us had made a harp linkage before, and I walked into the project without even knowing how a concert or a single action harp worked. It was indeed quite a challenge for us. The linkages for the mechanisms were made of steel stock that we cut, bent in jigs that we made, and drilled. We assembled the mechanisms ourselves as well. Shawn visited Miss Dilling fairly regularly, but once she drove up from New York. I remember distinctly that she was in her late eighties and drove up by herself to visit the shop (a four-hour drive). Together they introduced the Dilling Model Harp.”

Here is the mechanism for the Dilling/Douglas Harp. You can see that the discs are like those on a pedal harp and the levers are like those invented by Buckwell, except they follow the curve of the neck.

The levers go in scale order – C,D,E,F,G,A,B. In the setting above they are in the key of C (if the harp is tuned in Eb) with the E, A and B levers down, thus engaging the discs and raising these pitches. To make them flat you move the lever to the upright position which releases the disc from the string, thus increasing the vibrating length and making a lower pitch, or flat. The upright levers would be moved down to engage the string and raise the pitch, making a sharp on the C, D, F and G strings. Like the pedal harp, a Dilling lever changes all of a pitch's strings in every octave: all the Cs become C#, for example. Unlike most lever harps, sharping or flatting a single string is not possible.
 

Jody worked with Shawn for a few months before returning to his own business, and Arsalaan Fay, a highly skilled woodworker, was hired. He recalls that the brass parts were machined rather than cast, although at present they are cast from moulds made from those first parts. After the first few harps, an inch was added to the Clark dimensions, and Arsalaan assumes that Shawn and Miss Dilling made the change to enlarge the sound. In 1984, after three years and 35 harps, Shawn left the business and the harps have been made since by Fay, who calls them the Douglas Single-Action Harps. Now living in Florida, Arsalaan unfortunately lost all his tools in Hurricane Charley and had to re-group. He has made as many as 70 harps, some of which have found their way to England, Japan and Australia.

The late harpist Jocelyn Chang championed the Dilling harp and commissioned many works for it. Two of her favorites were Michael Leese's "Dilling Fantasy” and David Taddie's "Convergences" for harp and electronic sounds.  She left her music to Julia Kay Jamieson who is compiling a complete listing that will be available on this site.

                                                Arsalaan Fay and one of his Douglas Harps¹⁵

Here is a video of Arsalaan as he demonstrates how the levers operate.

What’s in the works? Fay has a patent for a double-action mechanism, which can give it the same capabilities as the pedal harp! He’s still experimenting with the mechanism and the shape. Who knows what will turn up next in this long saga?

Arsalaan can be reached for questions and comments at dharps@juno.com.

 Footnotes

1. Judy Kadar specialized in historical harp music especially of the 14^th and 15^th centuries. Her harp was made by David Brown, and is a gothic style harp with brays, as frequently depicted in 15th century images and loosely based on the harp in the Deutsches Germanisches Museum in Nurnberg. Regrettably, Judy passed away in 2021.

2. Photos used with permission.  www.hanneloredevaere.be

3. Disengage all the hooks and tune to the Eb major scale: Eb, F, G, Ab, Bb, C, D, Eb.  If you then want to play in C, raise the B, E, and A hooks which will raise those strings ½ step to natural. To play in one flat, lower the B hooks, two flats lower the E hook, etc.. To play in one sharp, raise the F hooks, etc.

4. Late 19^th century German hook harp from

www.vintage-instruments.com Used with permission.

5. Harps and Harpists by Roslyn Rensch, 1989, p. 153.

6. Ibid, p. 157.

7. Thanks to www.music4musicians.com/harp.htm. Used with permission.

8. Trinity College Harp. Used by permission. The photo appears at http://www.harpcenter.com/product/brian-boru-harp-postcards/harp-greeting-cards

9. The Royal Portable Harp by Nancy Hurrell. Used by permission.

10. Arsalaan Fay rehabilitated this harp for harp historian Mike Parker. Photo by Arsalaan Fay. Used by permission.

11. Harp historian Mike Parker: “The single actions cost about £30. For that, you could hire a manservant for 3 years, or a housemaid for 4 or a small cottage somewhere rural … and you could buy a piano for £15.... They were toys for the rich and were about status, novelty and charm. If you wanted a harp for serious study, you could buy an Erat or a Dodd for about £10 more, and have a pedal instrument.” Perhaps for that reason there is little repertoire for that harp.

12. Thanks to Arsalaan Fay for the Buckwell patent drawings and text.

13. Photo from Arsalaan Fay, courtesy of the Buckwell family.

14. Mike Parker says, “With that close timing, I can't help wondering if Clark wasn't staking an intellectual property claim on an idea that surfaces from time to time.”

15. Photos of the Dilling Model Harp are by Arsalaan Fay and used with permission.