What’s your favorite lever harp music?

[unknown-user]

I second Laura Zaerr’s music. I find it to be rhythmically and harmonically

[helen-rudd]

I love mitch landy’s spooky tunes they are intermediate and rhythmically challenging (so much so that it is taking a while for me to get the first one polished).

[helen-rudd]

I actually got the book from Amazon.com based on your rec. Le Onde is beautiful and very simple to play. Thanks!

[HBrock25]

Kim Robertson and Barbara Brundage are my favorites.

[Susan Hawkins]

The specific books:

[liath-hollins]

I’ve got those, including vol 3 of Classics on Request. Brilliant, and have saved me at weddings many times 🙂

If you want challenging stuff, look for the advanced books by Catriona McKay and Charlotte Petersen (you can get them from Crieghton’s Collection), gorgeous traditional Scottish/Irish tunes arranged by the best in the business (imho!)
Also stuff published by Beartramka, which is mostly interesting modern classical music for lever harp, up to grade 8 standard.
Savourna Stevenson also has some good pieces which you can buy from her website. I really recommend ‘Eilean Mo Chridh’, which is really good fun, and the Dowie Dens of Yarrow, which is just gorgeous. Her site is http://www.savournastevenson.com
I’m also enjoying Deborah Henson Conant’s ‘Natalia’ – really beautiful and interesting piece, especially the opening chords, which are really rich 🙂

My next book on the list is Ray Pool’s ‘Blazing Levers’ – I’ve had the pedal version highly recommended. Sadly, whoever distributes it for him keeps sending my music supplier multiple copies of the pedal version… so far I’ve been waiting for about six months for them to send the correct one… fingers crossed it arrives soon, as it sounds like a fantastic book and I can’t wait to get stuck in – I think it will really give me some new ideas and inspiration for my own arrangements.

Happy harping!

Liath

[barbara-brundage]

>My next book on the list is Ray Pool’s ‘Blazing Levers’ – I’ve had the pedal version highly recommended. Sadly, whoever distributes it for him keeps sending my music supplier multiple copies of the pedal version

That’s because it’s “Clever Levers”. Only pedals blaze. 🙂

Glad you’re enjoying the books.

[tony-morosco]

As Barbara said, it’s Clever Levers and Blazing Pedals. I have many of Ray’s books and they are all well worth the money and even more worth the time and effort of working through them. His are the kinds of books that after you read them you say to yourself, “Gee, I really should have understood all this before, but I didn’t until I just read that.”

Clever levers is one of my favorite books for lever harp and really explains harmonic structure in a way that, to me, was such a revelation. That along with Verlene Shermer’s Cool Chords and Groovy Rhythms are the two books that have helped me get the most out of playing lever harp.

The two Blazing Pedals books are probably the only two of Rays I don’t have, but I have them on my short list of books to acquire soon.

[liath-hollins]

Cheers! Though I assume the music supplier knows the correct title, perhaps they have been trying to order the wrong thing… I’ll look out for the Verlene Schermer books!

Barbara, I think your books are great – really clever arrangements which don’t compromise on the character of the pieces. They’ve been absolutely invaluable for my wedding repertoire 🙂

[tony-morosco]

[helen-rudd]

I love Angie Bemiss’s transcriptions. They are very harpy and somehow seem very easy to play although a few are somewhat complex. She indicates they are intermediate level but I would say they are lower intermediate although the sound is full and rich. The fingers just seem to naturally fall where they are supposed to. Some of my favorites are Tachobel (play on Pachebel’s Canon), Breath of Heaven, Beautiful Dreamer, Moon River, Feed the Birds, Greensleeves (lovely version with a number of variations), Over the Rainbow (best version I’ve found, I like it much better than the S.Woods versions), Praeludium, Dances with Wolves, Charlotte’s Web, and the Kiss book for Weddings.

I did not care for her book of classical transcriptions. She tries to keep lever changes to a minium and in many cases, especially with classical music you really need to keep true to the original as much as possible because so many

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