Harp Trivia
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59 free Harp trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This harp trivia quiz spans the instrument from the royal tombs of Ur to Joanna Newsom. The easy questions are for anyone who has stood near an orchestra: how the strings are played, why some are red and some black, roughly how many a concert harp has, which country puts a harp on its coins and which stout puts one on its cans. From there it moves into the mechanics of the pedal harp, the difference between a harper and a harpist, and why an autoharp, a Jew's harp and a blues harp are not harps at all. The harder end covers the history and the players: Hochbrucker's first pedals, Sebastien Erard's double action, the Trinity College harp and the coat of arms of Ireland, Turlough O'Carolan, the Welsh triple harp, the Paraguayan and Venezuelan harps, the West African kora, the Chinese konghou, the Aeolian harp, Ravel's Introduction and Allegro, Salzedo's Curtis department, Zabaleta, Harpo Marx and the twelve harp notes that open Danse macabre. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the harp, its variants and its players before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our musical instruments, classical music and Ireland quizzes next.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 'Waltz of the Flowers', which begins with a famous harp cadenza, comes from which ballet?
The Nutcracker
The Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky thought the ballet 'infinitely worse than Sleeping Beauty' and its first staging disappointed; the concert suite that ends with this waltz was the instant hit.
Q 02Which electronic musician made the laser harp a concert trademark?
Jean-Michel Jarre
Jean-Michel Jarre. He has played one at most of his concerts since 1981, but the harp he made famous was built by another Frenchman, Bernard Szajner.
Q 03Which composer's String Quartet No. 10 is nicknamed the 'Harp'?
Beethoven
Beethoven. No harp plays in it: the nickname comes from the first movement, where the players pass plucked notes back and forth in imitation of one.
Q 04On a pedal harp, what colour are the C strings?
Red
Red. A harp has no keyboard or frets to guide the hand, so the coloured strings are landmarks from which the player finds every other note.
Q 05Roughly what total tension do the strings exert on a pedal harp's soundboard?
About a ton
About a ton. All of that pull bears on a soundboard usually made of spruce, a wood chosen because it is light yet strong and pliable.
Q 06Despite Ireland's green image, its coat of arms sets a gold harp on a field of which colour?
Blue
Blue. The gold harp on blue is also the Irish president's flag, while the well-known green flag with a gold harp belongs to the province of Leinster.
Q 07Which Irish brewer's harp trademark faces the opposite way to the harp on Ireland's state emblem?
Guinness
Guinness. It put the harp on its labels in 1862 and trademarked it in 1876, decades before the Irish state adopted the same harp in 1922, facing the other way.
Q 08Both the Irish state emblem and a famous stout's trademark are modelled on which medieval instrument?
The Trinity College harp
The Trinity College harp was taken apart and rebuilt by the British Museum in 1961, so the real one is wider than the slim harp on Irish coins, which copies its earlier, badly repaired shape.
Q 09The medieval Irish harp used as the model for the state emblem is popularly named after which High King?
Brian Boru
Brian Boru died in 1014, centuries before the harp that carries his name was made, so the story that the High King owned it is only a legend.
Q 10Which English king adopted the harp arms when he declared Ireland a kingdom in 1541?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII raised Ireland from a lordship to a kingdom and took the gold harp as its arms; it joined the British royal arms in 1603 and stayed there even after Ireland was partitioned.
Q 11Which Irish airline features a stylised harp in its logo?
Ryanair
Ryanair. Named after co-founder Tony Ryan, it began in 1985 with one 15-seat turboprop flying between Waterford and London Gatwick.
Q 12Which Scottish football club, founded by Irish emigrants, has a harp in its badge?
Hibernian
Hibernian. Irish immigrants founded the club in 1875 and named it with the Roman word for Ireland; the harp was dropped from the badge in the 1950s and restored in 2000.
Q 13In which fairy tale does a boy steal a golden harp that sings on command?
Jack and the Beanstalk
Jack and the Beanstalk. The harp is the last thing Jack takes from the ogre, after a bag of gold and a hen that lays golden eggs, and it nearly gets him caught by calling out to its master.
Q 21A player of a folk harp is traditionally called what, as opposed to the pedal-harp's harpist?
A harper
A harper. The trade gave English the surname Harper as early as the 12th century, though today the line is loose and folk players are often called harpists too.
Q 22Lyres and harps some 4,500 years old, among the oldest stringed instruments ever found, came from royal tombs in which city?
Ur
Ur. Leonard Woolley excavated the city from 1922 for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, which is why the instruments are now shared between Baghdad, London and Philadelphia.
Q 23Mid-3rd-millennium BCE tomb paintings from which civilisation show arched harps like a hunter's bow?
Egyptian
Q 14Who patented the double-action pedal mechanism still used on modern concert harps?
Sébastien Érard
Sébastien Érard's double movement of 1810 lets each string be shortened by one or two semitones, so a harpist can play in any key.
Q 15Which composer wrote a Concerto for Flute and Harp in 1778 for a French duke and his daughter?
Mozart
Mozart wrote it in Paris for the flute-playing Duc de Guînes and his daughter, whose harp playing he called magnificent even though he found her hopeless as a composition pupil.
Q 16Rather than C major, a modern concert harp with no pedals pressed is tuned to which scale?
C flat major
C flat major. Each pedal can raise its strings twice, first to natural and then to sharp, so the open strings start a semitone low and pressing every pedal once gives C major.
Q 17What is the term for a harpist's rapid sweep up or down across many strings?
Glissando
Glissando. On a pedal harp the player can first set the pedals so that neighbouring strings sound the same note, turning one sweep of the hand into a chord with no wrong notes.
Q 18Which future king of Israel is said to have soothed King Saul by playing the harp?
David
David. Older Bibles gave him a harp, but the Hebrew word is kinnor, a kind of lyre that medieval writers mistook for one, which is why painters still show him with a harp.
Q 19What is the longest side of a harp, which supports the neck against the strings' pull, called?
The pillar
The pillar, also called the column, is hollow on a pedal harp so that the rods linking each pedal to the mechanism in the neck can run up inside it.
Q 20Which of these so-called harps is really a zither, because its strings run parallel to the soundboard?
The autoharp
The autoharp, named in an 1882 American patent, has padded bars that mute every string outside the chosen chord, so a single strum always sounds a clean chord.
Egyptian. Arched harps later fell out of use across the Middle East, but bow-shaped harps of the same kind are still played in parts of Africa today.
Q 24The triple harp originated in Italy but became the traditional instrument of which nation?
Wales
Wales. The Italian instrument reached London in the 1600s, and Welsh players kept it after the rest of Europe gave it up for pedal harps, so the triple harp became known as the Welsh harp.
Q 25Which South American country counts the harp as its national instrument?
Paraguay
Paraguay. Its folk harp descends from the harps brought from Spain in colonial times, a plain European design that survives in Latin America though Europe itself moved on to pedals.
Q 26The 'harp of the plains' leads joropo, the national dance of which country?
Venezuela
Venezuela. The harp arrived with Spanish colonists and took root on the Llanos, the cattle plains shared with Colombia, where it is played alongside the small cuatro guitar and maracas.
Q 27Which Southeast Asian country regards the arched saung-gauk harp as its national instrument?
Myanmar
Myanmar. The saung-gauk is thought to have come from India, where arched harps all but died out, while in Myanmar it has been played without a break for over a thousand years, mostly at the royal court.
Q 28The kora, West Africa's 21-string harp-lute, has a body made from what?
A large gourd
A large gourd. The calabash is cut in half and covered with cowhide, and the kora is traditionally played by griots, hereditary musicians who sing the praises and histories of their patrons.
Q 29A harp riff drives the hit 'Dog Days Are Over' by which British band?
Florence and the Machine
Florence and the Machine. The band has had its own harpist, Tom Monger, since it formed in 2007, so the harp is part of its sound rather than a studio extra.
Q 30An Aeolian harp is played by what?
The wind
The wind. It is named after Aeolus, keeper of the winds in Greek myth, and in the Romantic era people left one in an open window to hear it sing by itself.