How it began
Present-day Paraguayan harps are local adaptations of the diatonic harps that Jesuit missionaries brought from Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The instrument took its particular shape and design in the first half of the 20th century. The harpist and composer Felix Perez Cardozo (1908 to 1952), from the Guaira area, is credited with running the strings from the middle of the neck and with adding two strings to reach the now usual 36. Epifanio Lopez (1912 to 2001) set up the first guitar and harp workshop in Asuncion.
Before it existed
In the Jesuit missions the harp accompanied liturgical singing as a continuo instrument. Father Anton Sepp, a Tyrolean missionary who died in 1733, ran a music school and instrument workshop at Yapeyu, in what is now northeastern Argentina, where harps were built from local wood on European models. After the Jesuits were expelled, some mission-trained Guarani worked in colonial towns as instrument makers. Little is recorded about harp making in the 18th and 19th centuries.
How it works
The harp is diatonic, tuned to a simple scale like the white keys of a piano. Because the strings leave the center of the neck, the neck does not tend to roll to one side under string tension, so the pillar and soundbox can be lighter. A harp without sharping levers weighs about 12 pounds. It is lightly strung, with a strong bass and a bright upper register. Players use fingernails and finger pads, with a rapid tremolo in thirds, a walking bass called bordoneado, and long glissandi.
How it spread
Perez Cardozo won international renown between the 1930s and the mid-1940s. Paraguayan folk ensembles toured Latin America, Europe, North Africa and Asia between the 1940s and the 1980s, and Luis Bordon's 1959 recording helped establish the harp as a solo instrument. Later makers extended it: Abel Sanchez Jimenez raised it to 38 strings and added small wooden rods for making sharps, and some harps now carry sharping levers.
Where it stands today
The harp is the national instrument of Paraguay. It is taught in conservatories, schools and private lessons, and traditional music festivals have promoted it since the 1960s. Smithsonian Folkways notes that hundreds of professional Paraguayan harpists perform across the Americas, Europe and Japan, and that thousands of non-Paraguayans have taken up the instrument. Its core repertoire is the polca paraguaya and the guarania.
