Scottish harpist will have Lichfield buzzing at the Festival!
A medieval harp with its own built-in amplification device will feature in a concert at Lichfield Festival on Thursday, 17 July. Described as a ‘one-woman harp festival’, Karen Marshalsay is one of Scotland’s leading harp players and her concert at The Hub at St Mary’s will feature the lever harp, the Gaelic clarsach and the bray harp.
The modern lever harp is the most popular harp among traditional musicians and folk bands, while the clarsach is wire-strung from the Gaelic tradition. The bray harp – ‘the beast’ – often takes audiences by surprise, with its buzzing, sitar-like tone. It was designed to cut through the hubbub of dances and gatherings in castles during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
“When people think of the harp, they probably imagine this sweet-sounding instrument, and that’s what I’ll be playing mostly,” says Karen. “The bray, on the other hand, was designed to cut through the surrounding noise, when harp players were the ceilidh band leaders of the day. Each string has a bray pin – a small piece of wood – that gives this buzzing effect and makes the instrument louder. If you put that together with a crumhorn and a tabor, or hand drum, that would have been the band that people danced to back then.”
“I’m really looking forward to playing in Lichfield because it’ll be my first visit to the town and the festival,” she says. “I’ll be playing music from both of my albums and I’ll also be talking a bit about the tunes and the harps because people seem fascinated by the instrument. It has associations with angels, of course, although the bray isn’t quite so angelic. It often comes as quite a surprise because it looks as you might expect a harp to look but sounds quite a bit different from the other harps.”
Karen’s harp playing has literally taken her around the world. She has toured in America, Australia and Europe and has worked with Indian, African and Paraguayan musicians in addition to Scottish and Irish musicians including the founder of Ireland’s legendary Boys of the Lough, singer and flautist Cathal McConnell and piper and Gaelic singer Allan MacDonald. In 2018 and 2019 Karen was a featured soloist, playing her own compositions with the Russian String Orchestra at Edinburgh Festival.
She has just finished recording her second album, Eadarainn a’ Chruit : Between Us the Harp, the follow-up to her enthusiastically received debut, The Road to Kennacraig. All of the music on these recordings is either traditional or written by Karen in the traditional style and she’ll be playing tunes from both albums.
“Most of the tunes have stories behind them,” she says. “So I’ll be talking a bit about the background to them and the background to the harps but not too much because I like to let the music do most of the talking.”
For more Festival performances featuring world/folk music or exciting and different instruments, please check out our events with 9-voice group HOWL (Saturday July 12th) and recorder quartet Palisander (Sunday July 20th).
Karen Marshalsay is at Lichfield Festival on Thursday 17 July, 2.30pm, The Hub at St Mary’s. Book online now or call the Festival Box Office on 01543 306271.
Our thanks to John Milne for writing this news post!