Harspiel

The Harspiel (フェシュピール Feshupiiru) is a musical string instrument popular all over Yurgenschmidt.

There are children-sized harspiels, which have fewer strings and are smaller in general. The tone-range is about half as large as the adult-sized harspiel. Practice instruments may have a different coloured string, that marks the fundamental note.

The harspiel is shaped like a cut-open pear, the body being the round part and the neck looking like a fingerboard, the long part. The neck is long and straight and ends with a wooden decoration shaped like a horse's head. There is a hole on the front side resembling that of an accoustic guitar, which is ornamentally arranged. The harspiel has around fifty to sixty strings, which are strung onto pins, that are located near the horse decoration. Each string represents a half-tone and are arranged like a piano's keyboard.

The harspiel is played with the player sitting. The instrument is put on one's lap with the instrument's neck resting on the upper part of one's non-dominant arm (e.g. left). The dominant hand (e.g. right) plugs the higher sounding strings around the sound hole, producing the melody part, while the non-dominant hand plugs the deeper sounding strings to create a bass line around the neck. The player only strumms the string they desire, much like Earth harps.

The harspiel is the most popular instrument among nobles because it provides a musical base for learning other instruments. Nobles are required to learn the harspiel. It is quite expensive, so normally no other people besides nobles can play the harspiel.

In Ehrenfest, it is tradition for freshly baptised nobles to perform a song at their winter debut before all the gathered nobles of the duchy. For this they are expected to both play on the harspiel and sing the lyrics all on their own, while their music teacher stands behind them.

Generally, the children of higher ranking nobles tend to perform better, due to their parents having better access to highly skilled tutors and higher quality instruments. Among laynobles, it is not uncommon for the family to lack the finances to hire tutors at all, forcing the parents to teach their children themselves, but naturally they can't afford to devote as much time to this as a professional music teacher.

To perform significantly worse than what is seen as normal for the rank of a young noble is considered a great shame and embarrassment and can even negatively impact the entire family in extreme cases.


 * The harspiel looks like a combination of a lute and a harp, and most similar to the Eastern European instrument, the Bandura.
 * In Ascendance of a Bookworm, we only see right-handed harspiel (player). There may be no left-handed version.
 * The instrument gets heavier the more diagonally it is held.