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Original Harp Compo Moulds
In General Discussions
p.poulopoulos
Mar 04, 2019
Dear colleagues, many thanks for sharing this information. I have been in contact with the George Jackson company since 2015 regarding the Erard moulds. In April 2016 I personally visited the company's premises for research related to my current harp project at the Deutsches Museum, Munich (the German museum Jon mentioned in his comment). Back then I had an interesting talk with the director, David Serra, who kindly showed me around the workshop and explained to me the process of making composition ornaments. I also took some photos of the large board, which includes a set of ornaments for Erard's Grecian model. According to David Serra, the Erard moulds are mostly boxwood moulds; the company owns thousands of such moulds, with samples mounted on boards like this at their premises. I also managed to locate some generic moulds for ornaments used on harps, such as lines of beads applied on the bottom of the capital or the soundbox. I have presented and discussed these moulds in my conference papers: Panagiotis Poulopoulos, ‘Shedding New Light on the Production Strategies of Erard’. Joint Conference of the Galpin Society and the American Musical Instrument Society (AMIS), Musical Instrument Museums (MIMEd), Edinburgh, 1 to 4 June 2017. Panagiotis Poulopoulos, ‘Composition Ornaments on Historic Harps: From Research to Exhibition’. Annual Conference of CIMCIM ‘Presentation, Preservation, Interpretation – The Challenges of Musical Instrument Collections in the 21st Century’, co-organized by various institutions in Basel and Bern, 22 to 25 February 2017. I have also discussed briefly Jackson's work for Erard in the following articles: Panagiotis Poulopoulos and Julin Lee, ‘A Synergy of Form, Function and Fashion in the Manufacture of the Erard Harp’ in Marco A. Pérez and Emanuele Marconi (eds.), Wooden Musical Instruments: Different Forms of Knowledge (Paris: Cité de la Musique - Philharmonie de Paris, 2018), pp. 367-398. Panagiotis Poulopoulos, Marisa Pamplona, Luise Richter, and Elke Cwiertnia, ‘Technological Study of the Decoration on an Erard Harp from 1818’, Studies in Conservation (to be published in 2019). I hope that further research will enhance our knowledge about the moulds themselves as well as about aspects of subcontracting in the instrument-making business. Please keep us informed in case you arrange a visit to Jackson's. Best wishes Panos
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