A type of harp, limited to West Africa, with four to 21 strings. Made with a calabash resonator and straight or slightly curved neck spiked through the resonator, the instrument has a profile similar to that of a lute. For this reason, bridge harps were classified by Hornbostel and Sachs as ‘harp-lutes’ (see Chordophone). The plane of the strings, however, is not parallel to the soundtable like on a lute, but perpendicular to it: one of the defining characteristics of a harp as specified by Hornbostel and Sachs (see Harp, §I). In performance, the neck is pointed away from the performer's body (not across it like a lute). The performer plucks the strings with fingers of both hands, one on either side of the strings, again like most harpists of the world. A rectangular, vertical bridge stands on the soundtable and is perpendicular to it. Rather than having notches on the top of the bridge, as is true of the lute family, the bridge is either notched on both sides of its length or drilled with two rows of holes, both types thus accommodating two ranks of strings. The strings, which are fastened to the neck usually via braided leather rings, run from the neck and pass over or through the bridge before being tied, usually, to a metal ring or a small metal arch nailed to the protruding end of the neck.
Because these instruments are far more harp-like than lute-like, both in structure and performing practice, they were re-classified by DeVale as a sub-class of a new category of African harp: ‘harps with vertical string holders or bridges: spike harps: bridge harps’. The term ‘bridge harp’ was first used by Knight. The best known bridge harp, and the largest, is the Kora of the Mande people of The Gambia.
For further discussion of its organology, description and illustration, see Harp, §III.
R. Knight: ‘Toward a Notation and Tablature for the Kora’, African Music, v/1 (1971), 23–6
S.G. Pevar: ‘The Construction of a Kora’, African Arts, xi/4 (1978), 66–72
R. Knight: ‘The Style of Mandinka Music: a Study in Extracting Theory from Practice’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, v (1984), 3–66
S.C. DeVale: ‘African Harps: Construction, Decoration and Sound’, Sounding Forms: African Musical Instruments, ed. M.-T. Brincard (New York, 1989), 53–62
E.S. Charry: ‘West African Harps’, JAMIS, xx (1994), 5–53
SUE CAROLE DeVALE