…completing this marquee competition with an international slate of competitors and jury members felt like a huge victory for our entire community.
We’re only a third of the way through 2022, but this year is already shaping up to be a big one for the harp—both within our community and out in the wider world. Coming off two years of restrictions and uncertainty, it seems that the abundance of creative energy that’s been pent up during two years of pandemic living has exploded with a flood of premieres, awards, competitions, and new musical endeavors. You need only to turn the page to our news section on pg. 6 in this issue to see how much is happening after many months of canceled events and postponed plans. When you are in the harp news business, as Harp Column is, seeing this flurry of activity is heartening, especially after covering the struggles harpists have faced over the last two years.
California harpist Gracie Sprout kicked off the year with a stellar performance with singer Jhené Aiko at the Super Bowl pregame festivities on February 13. In what is likely the largest combined live and broadcast audience ever for a harp performance, an estimated 112 million watched on television and another 70,000 fans packed into SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. Not only was the audience for this gig larger by orders of magnitude than any other harp performance in history, it was not your run-of-the-mill harp crowd. Jhené Aiko is a popular R&B artist, and, while the millions of football fans watching might have been familiar with her, they almost certainly weren’t used to hearing a harp back up the singer. You can read our Q&A with Sprout to get the behind-the-scenes details (including what kind of harp shoes work on a football field) on harpcolumn.com.
At the end of March, the International Harp Contest in Israel held its final two rounds of its 21st competition in person to crown a winner. After multiple pandemic delays and in the shadow of the war in Ukraine and new unrest in Israel, completing this marquee competition with an international slate of competitors and jury members felt like a huge victory for our entire community. You can read our interviews with the winner, Italian harpist Claudia Lamanna, as well as the other two finalists, Lea Maria Löffler of Germany and Beatriz Cortesão of Portugal, in “Worth the Wait”.
A few days after the Israel final, New York harpist Brandee Younger walked the red carpet at the 64th Grammy Awards in Las Vegas as the first harpist and the first Black woman to be nominated in the category of Best Instrumental Composition. While Younger didn’t take the Grammy home (it went to the late jazz pianist Lyle Mays), it was, nonetheless, a landmark nomination. Younger shares her experience in “Glitz, Glamour, and Grammys” .
The high-level harp happenings continue full steam ahead over the next several months. The Dutch Harp Festival and World Harp Competition are slated for early May. The prestigious USA International Harp Competition is scheduled to begin in June with 48 of the world’s top harpists performing. The American Harp Society is set to gather for its first National Conference (see the preview) since 2018, and the World Harp Congress is expected to convene in Wales this summer for the first time since the pandemic began.
More harp music is filling the air than has in a long time. And that’s something we can all celebrate. •
