From the outset of her creative education, Jacinta Dennett has intrinsically entwined movement and music. The responsive nature of the harp and its unique capacity to continue resounding after it has been played have led Jacinta to research the essence of gesture in harp playing and develop her idiosyncratic performance style.
Inspired by Carlos Salzedo’s fundamental harpistic gesture and Rudolf Steiner’s eurythmy, Jacinta has continued to develop her style bringing a deeper authenticity and sense of belonging to her work. Jacinta describes this interactive experience of playing the harp as the sensation of swimming with sound. Her work is recognised for its rare fusion of poetry—through her heartfelt and intuitive embodiment of music—and physicality. Media reviews have described Jacinta’s performance as “athletically virtuosic” and “beyond reproach”.
Jacinta leads harp pedagogy at Australia’s most distinguished musical institutions: the Australian National Academy of Music, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School and Monash University, and during Summer and Winter breaks she facilitates Harp Masterclasses. With formal teaching qualifications and a background in Steiner education and Suzuki methods, teaching both adults and children is an important extension of Jacinta’s dedication to harp. Drawing upon her Feldenkrais, eurythmy, dance, yoga and martial arts knowledge, and delivered in a style her students describe as joyful, she encourages musicians to seek improvements and solutions to their own performances by tuning into their bodies as a way to cultivate their own continued self-learning.
In 2022, Jacinta was awarded The Melbourne Conservatorium Director’s Prize for Exceptional Doctoral Research, and Move Records released her compact disc recording, Fable, featuring harp solos by eight Australian composers.