Looking Deep Inside Antique Harp Guitars

A host of rare Harp guitars were x-rayed this week at Quinnipiac University's North Haven campus in anticipation of this weekend's 9th Annual Harp Guitar Gathering in Milford.

Scans of the antique guitars, whose body shapes, number of strings and tonal properties vary tremendously, were done by Quinnipiac's Department of Diagnostic Imaging. 

Organized by the Harp Guitar Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation and perpetuation of the instruments' legacies, today's screenings showcased in extreme detail the methods and materials used in the construction of these century-old artifacts. 

"In total, we've scanned nearly sixty instruments built from around 1820 to World War II," explained John Thomas, a Professor of Law at Quinnipiac and member of the Foundation. "We're looking at the structures of the guitars to see how they evolved over time and the kinds of sounds they produce."

Central to today's project was the collection of Robert Carl Hartman, whose grandfather, Carl Larson, designed a wide array of harp guitars with his brother in the early 1900s after immigrating to the United States from Sweden.

Although the pair's work went uncredited at the time, with individual instruments sold through other manufacturers and retailers, Hartman documented his family's unsung history in The Larsons' Creations, a book detailing the history of the enterprise and foregrounding the unique qualities of the guitars, whose prices today can reach up to $20,000. 

Beautiful to look at yet exceedingly difficult to play due to their unconventional shape, harp guitars are experiencing a resurgence in the eyes of musicians and the public, noted Gregg Miner, a leading expert in the instruments' history.

That resurgence will be on full display at this weekend's Gathering, where master musicians such as James Kline, Muriel Anderson and Stephen Bennett will perform on the instrument and conduct workshops.

For information on purchasing tickets to the public performance scheduled for this Saturday and Sunday, visit this website.