Path of the Wind

December's Wire magazine included an interesting 'Aeolian Harp Music 15' chart compiled by Irish experimental musician Natalia Beylis. There is no explanatory text, just the list, but a bit more info on a Dublin Digital Radio mixcloud site: 'I went to buy a theremin off a retired plumber in Clare. He toured me through his workshop of trinkets & said "I'm building an aeolian harp inspired by this fellow" & showed me a copy of an lp by Sverre Larssen. Back at home, I fell down a windharp rabbit hole & put this show together...' You can listen to the Sverre Larssen album shown above on Spotify. Here's what his Bandcamp page says:

In the early 1970s the Norwegian businessman Sverre Larssen decided to construct a wind harp at his cabin at Sele, Jæren on the west coast of Norway. Using his free imagination and amateur engineering skills, Larssen constructed a harp with 12-strings, which was brought to vibrate by the wind. Based on the principle of the electrical guitar, Larssen amplified the strings using four contact microphones and then recorded the sounds direct to tape. Word about Sverre Larssen’s instrument began to spread and during the 1970s notable artists such as Liv Dommersnes, Åse-Marie Nesse, Ketil Bjørnstad, Kjell Bækkelund and Jan Garbarek utilized the sounds of Larssen’s wind harp.

The next one on her list is The Wind Harp, an LP released by United Artists. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it: 

In 1972, Chuck Hancock and Harry Bee recorded a giant 30-foot-tall (9.1 m) Aeolian harp designed and built by 22-year-old Thomas Ward McCain on a hilltop in Chelsea, Vermont. United released their double LP titled The Wind Harp: Song from the Hill. An excerpt of this recording appears in the movie The Exorcist. The harp was destroyed in a hurricane, but it was rebuilt and now resides in Hopkinton, New Hampshire.

There isn't a huge amount about this online and I get 'this content isn't avilable in your region' when I try one link. Nevertheless, if you go back more than a decade, when for example I wrote here about the wind resonating wires of Alan Lamb in New Zealand, it was a lot harder to find out about modern Aeolian harps. Now it really is possible via Discogs, YouTube and Google to just click away and head down a "windharp rabbit hole", even if you are often left with incomplete information. Another American wind harp Natalia Beylis lists is a case in point. 

Ron Konzak came up with the idea for his Aeolian harp in 1982 and, as his article on the Harp Spectrum website relates, he began building it at a location on Bainbridge Island, Puget Sound. Sadly a few years later it had become 'a forlorn sight: a two-story harp, perilously close to an eroding cliff, surrounded by young alder trees that screen it from the very breezes that could bring it to life.' He said there were plans to rebuild it, but did this ever happen? I found a recent blog post on a sailing site that describes seeing the harp's building but not the harp itself. The author tried to get in contact with Konzak but learned he had died in 2008. 'Other efforts to find more information, including asking a harp-playing friend who lives on Bainbridge Island were also unsuccessful.'  

I've mentioned the environmental recordings put out by Gruenrekorder before (see for example a post I did back in 2009) and they are very good at providing background information on what they release. One of their albums included on this list is Path of the Wind by Eisuke Yanagisawa - music made on a small home-made Aeolian harp. The landscapes he took it to include 'Kehi no Matsubara, a quiet and scenic beach with many pine trees', Mt. Oeyama where 'nature and objects on the mountainside fade in and out as the place where the sunlight shines gradually changes' and Yosano-cho, where he placed the harp near a 1,200-year-old Camellia tree. You can read reviews and commentary on the Greunrekorder website.

Drift by Mark Garry and Sean Carpio began with a site-specific performance. As explained on the Kerlin Gallery site, this

took place in a natural amphitheater called “Horseshoe Bay” on Sherkin Island, located off the coast of West Cork. This one-off performance took place in and around the bay, with audience members arriving on two passenger ferries, moored next to a traditional Irish wooden sail boat which bore an Aeolian harp (a harp played by the wind). On land, a brass quartet performed a series of short musical pieces based on Sumerian Hymns, which were controlled by a form of improvised conducting.

A subsequent record was made with two saxophonists, an accordionist and three Aeolian harps positioned in a small forest in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. 

Of course Aeolian harps were all the rage in the Romantic period and this list includes some recordings made by Mins Minssen using an instrument built in 1837 by Wilhelm Peter Melhop (1802-68). Melhop is quite an interesting figure from a landscape perspective - he wrote poems, stories and descriptions of his walks. According to German Wikipedia he 'kept a diary from 1816 to 1844, which he provided with his own illustrations. The entries show that he was often in nature, especially in the Wandsbeker wood, where he was impressed by the “magical abundance of nightingale song”'. In addition to building Aeolian harps he constructed a telescope and discovered a comet.

Another historical recording with a link to nature writing is Kenneth Turkington's Walden Winds, an attempt to recreate the sound of the kind of harp Thoreau built for himself (see sleeve notes from Discogs below). I looked into getting a window harp myself a few years ago (they were available on EBay) but decided it wouldn't be worthwhile as any subtle wind-plucked notes would be drowned out by the noise of children in surrounding gardens, delivery vans trundling down the road and police sirens heading up our local high street. 

If you want to continue down the rabbit hole, here are the other wind harps mentioned on Natalia Beylis's list...

• Mario Bertoncini was an Italian avant garde composer whose music for Aeolian harps can be found on a CD and accompanying book.
  
• Nature's Dream-Harp: Aeolian Music, Played by the Summer Wind on Devaharp I is a 1979 private pressing album by Robert Archer, about whom I can find no further information. 
• Aeolica was recorded in 1988 by Pier Luigi Andreoni and Francesco Paladino and features them improvising on synthesisers to the sound of a wind harp created by the artist Mario Ciccioli.
• Voices of the Wind is a set of recordings of his Aeolian harps made in the nineties by Roger Winfield.
• There are some field recordings of wind made in 1996 in France by Toy Bizarre (Cédric Peyronnet) - the ep cover shows the harp used for this purpose.
  
• Rick Tarquinio's experiments using fishing string and natural forces to create soundscapes are available on his Bandcamp page - they're pretty good.
• Something more recent from Tara Baoth Mooney is hard to envisage from a description - I'm not sure whether this genuinely used an Aeolian harp??
• And finally there's Rhodri Davies, a much more familiar name from his own harp recordings and collaborations (including the mighty Hen Ogledd). He is in the list for Five Knots from 2008, made with an electric harp: 'left channel: harp facing Anglesey', 'right channel: harp facing Lochtyn island'.