The bell harp in the 18th century
The first known, formal, description of a bell harp is in John Grassineau’s Musical Dictionary of 1740, reputedly the first musical dictionary in English.
The title page declares, ‘The whole carefully abstracted from the best Authors’, suggesting that the material in the Musical Dictionary has been derived from earlier sources so it is possible that this is not actually the earliest description of the bell harp.
Some of the material in the Musical Dictionary is based on Brossard’s Dictionnaire de musique (1701), but the bell harp entry does not come from there or, so far as is known, anywhere else.
Grassineau's definition of the bell harp, 1740.
There is no illustration of a bell harp. Grassineau’s entry and its wording, was repeated in later works of reference, sometimes verbatim, and sometimes with some changes and omissions (see later).
‘Bell on its biass’
Grassineau begins by saying that the bell harp ‘is of the string kind’ and named either because it is shaped like a bell or swung like a bell or (or possibly both). The phrase, ‘the common players…swing it about as a Bell on its biass’ was repeated in later descriptions based on Grassineau’s. But what does, ‘on its bias’ mean? Does it mean anything more than ‘swung like a bell’? A guess would be that it means that the instrument is swung from a fixed position like a bell in a tower rather than like a handbell that is simply waved around.
‘The common players’ is probably a way of saying that this is the way the instrument is usually played, but not by everyone, leaving open the possibility that some people played the instrument in a more conventional way. Playing the instrument on a table is very different from swinging it. On the one hand, this more conventional way of playing loses both the peculiar sound of the instrument in motion and the theatrical aspect of swinging it. On the other hand, with the instrument on a table the player is not grasping the instrument and playing at the same time so both arms/hands/thumbs are free to move around. This latter way of playing offers more musical possibilities but makes the instrument more like a plucked dulcimer or a psaltery and loses the uniqueness of the instrument.
‘Hung on a string’
The last part of the paragraph, ‘it being hung on a string, and rested against them for that purpose’ is the most difficult part of the whole description to understand. Almost all of the later descriptions of the bell harp that are derived from Grassineau omit this detail.
Records of a 1737 court case in the Old Bailey archive (see References) describe a man who dealt in stolen property. He was not the defendant (‘prisoner’, in the jargon of that time) but portrayed as a rather dubious man who, ‘goes about with a bell harp’. An obvious way of ‘going about with’, or carrying around, an instrument is to have it on a cord, or ‘string'. The instrument could be carried around rather like a satchel. But this explanation doesn’t really fit with Grassineau’s words. Grassineau seems to be saying that the instrument is swung on a string. All other evidence about the bell harp shows that it was grasped directly with both hands.
Size and scale
Grassineau says that the length of the instrument is about three feet, and all the later descriptions repeat this measurement. The compass is three or four octaves and some later descriptions specify four octaves. An instrument of about three feet and with a range of three or even four octaves is very puzzling. For a start, none of the surviving bell harps are as long as this and they have a range of about two octaves and secondly there are serious practical problems of playing an instrument as Grassineau describes. The instrument would seem to be too long for a person of average height and three or four octaves, even if diatonic, would mean implausibly wide stretches for each thumb.
The soundboard
According to Grassineau's definition, the bell harp has a soundboard. Several surviving instruments do not have a soundboard, they are simply built on a baseboard. The second instrument shown in the Introduction (Edinburgh 1591) is simply built on a baseboard. (See also the English harp).
The strings are ‘fixed at one end, and stretched across the soundboard by screws fixed at the other end next the player’. Grassineau’s ‘screws’ must mean what now would be called wrest pins or tuning pins. The fact that the wrest pins are ‘next [to] the player’ indicates that this instrument is quite different from a dulcimer or psaltery where the wrest pins are either to the right or to the left of the player.
It is important to repeat that Grassineau's description, and the later descriptions based on it, fail to match the few surviving bell harps (i.e. instruments today classified as bell harps) in two important respects. Grassineau's bell harp is significantly larger and with a larger range of notes.