Category: Harp

The Prayer

a person in orange shirt with hands together
Photo by Arina Krasnikova on Pexels.com

The Prayer is a beautiful piece of music. I’ve heard it sung by many different artists, and now I get the chance to play it on my harp. Some of my favorite vocal performances are by Celine Dion, Andrea Bodeli, and Josh Groban. It was written by David Foster, Carole Bayer Sager, Tony Renis, and Alberto Renis. While I’d like to say the lyrics are what initially attracted me, I love the Italian version by Bocelli, but I don’t speak or understand Italian so it obviously isn’t just the lyrics. However, the lyrics are quite inspirational, a prayer for faith, justice, hope, peace, and brotherhood.

Jolie hybrid harp

I was excited to find this Late-Beginner version arranged by Christy-Lyn Dose at Learning the Harp. I love how the melody flows and is supported by the left-hand chords. As my harp skills continue to grow I will certainly seek out other arrangements of this piece that are more difficult, and hopefully just as lovely. For the harpists out there, do you have a favorite arrangement? I’ve attached a video of one of my practice sessions with this song. I hope you enjoy it.

Harp Journey

Jolie hybrid harp

I love playing my harp and I wanted to share just a little more about my harp journey. I’ve been playing since March of this year. When I made the decision to play I didn’t realize how much I would really love playing. That doesn’t mean that my journey thus far has been effortless. I did come into it with the advantage of being able to read music and having experience playing and performing on other instruments. I’ve never really been aware that this was a gift and privilege to have learned music at such an early age and continued it throughout my adult life. I’ve come across many new harpists that didn’t have that background and are struggling.

The other advantage I’ve had is that I’m not particularly avoidant or fearful about playing in public. I’m more nervous playing the harp than I am the piano, or singing. It requires a lot more focus when playing harp just because it is new. Therefore, distractions during a performance have a bigger impact on me.

This Christmas season I have a lot of opportunities to play publicly, at church and at Eastern Star meetings. Whenever I play people are just thrilled to get to hear a harp, even if I’m not playing anything particularly stunning. I’m still working on beginner to advanced beginner music so hopefully by next year I’ll be able to play something more elaborate. But even these beginner pieces are fun to play and people seem to like them.

Here is a piece, not Christmas, that I recorded recently. Is it perfect? No. Did I love doing it? Yes.

If you have ever wanted to play the harp – Go For It. I’ve been using both a local teacher for hands-on corrections and online instruction at www.learningtheharp.com. The instructors there are wonderful and I very much enjoy the harp community they have created. I really value all of the encouragement they have given and the constructive feedback.