The thirty-piece collection Lawes composed ‘For the Harpe, Base Violl, Violin and Theorbo’ is best known today as the Harp Consorts. This titling may be somewhat anachronistic; the earliest source referring to the collection as the ‘Harp Consort’ is Henry Playford’s Sale Catalogue of 1690. The Harp Consorts are unique in the English consort music repertoire. They are the only (relatively) complete extant consort music with a part specifically composed for the harp. Despite containing some of his finest instrumental writing, Lawes’s harp consorts remain in relative obscurity. This situation arises from two main issues: the partially incomplete harp parts; and the contentious issue of whether Lawes composed for gut-strung triple harp or wire-strung Irish harp. The latter issue is compounded by the problems surrounding the stringing of an Irish harp with a suitable range for a modern performance.

The harp consorts survive complete, except that there are no harp parts for HC21–5. The violin, bass viol and theorbo parts survive in Lawes’s autograph partbooks, GB-Ob, MSS Mus. Sch. D.238–40. HC26–30 are also in full score in GB-Ob, MS Mus. Sch. B.3. There are three sources for the harp parts (Table 7.1). The first eight pieces (in Tr–B score) are in Lawes’s organ scorebook (GB-Ob, MS Mus. Sch. D.229: e.g. Chapter 2, Fig. 2.18). In addition, twenty-one pieces from the collection, mostly in Tr–B score, are preserved in GB-Och, Mus. MS 5.

The issue of ‘Lawes’s harp’ is one of the most contentious areas of debate surrounding the collection. When Murray Lefkowitz published the first indepth survey of the collection, he concluded that Lawes composed for the triple harp. This view was broadly accepted by scholars and performers such as Joan Rimmer and Cheryl Ann Fulton. Indeed, Rimmer asserted that ‘Close examination shows that they are playable only on a triple or double harp’. There matters largely rested until Peter Holman approached the issue in 1987. By using a range of archival and musical sources, Holman was able to suggest convincingly that the Irish harp was the likely candidate for original performances of Lawes’s collection.