Can men play the harp?
Ridiculous! Of course men can play harp. I’ve been playing Irish harp for seventeen years now. It is true that more women play harp than men, a result of the Victorian drawing-room revival of the later nineteenth century, which gave us the image of the little woman in the flowing white dress and the great big harp. But believe me, there are plenty of men playing harp, especially in the Celtic traditions. Look up Patrick Ball, Derek Bell, Alan Stivell; my name is Thomas “Doc” Grauzer, and you can certainly find lots of references to me with a bit of websearching. How about Harper Tasche, Simon Chadwick, Dennis Doyle; or, if you want to look at the classical genre, there are some greats in (of course) Harpo Marx, Marcel Grandjany, Carlos Salzedo. In the earlier Celtic tradition, harpers were all men; one of the last and greatest of the Irish harper-composers, Turlough O’Carolan, was a man, as was William Connellan. By the way, “harpist” usually refers to a harp player of the classical ge
