Harp Ensemble at the Children's Hospital

I had the fantastic opportunity to join 11 other harpists to play in the lobby of the Children's Hospital this past week.  We spent the morning in this small classroom rehearsing from 8:30am til 11:00am, since this was the first time we could manage to get everyone all together for rehearsals.  I had only rehearsed with 2-3 other harpists previously, so it was wonderful to hear us all together finally! 

Rehearsal in a tiny classroom.

After lunch, we moved all our harps and equipment up to the lobby.  It took about 45 minutes to get moved and set up and re-tuned.  Pedal harps weigh about 90 lbs, and the smaller lever harps weigh 20-40 lbs, so it was no small task moving all those harps! We started playing in the lobby around 1:00pm.  We calculated that we had nearly 500 strings among all the harps there, each one needing to be tuned!  We also calculated that we had 93 years of harp experience combined in our group!  Forty-four of those years go to our teacher, Mary!

Getting tuned and set up.

This event was advertised around the hospital, however, no many patients were able to make it to the lobby to hear us.  But the hospital filmed us so they can play our performance over their closed-circuit TV station into patient rooms several times this holiday season.  (I'll think we'll be receiving a DVD copy of that recording as well, so maybe I can share some of our music with you later.)  We did have a decent sized crowd in the lobby to hear us.  Although most of those in attendance were family members and friends, or hospital staff that stopped by to listen.

Justin said it was SO satisfying to finally hear all the different parts together!  For 6 months he has listened to me practice my own parts, totally unaware of how the final songs would sound. He was also my photographer for the day. Justin is so supportive of my music and hobbies!

All set up and ready to play

We had 3 pedal harpists and 9 lever harpists.

We played mostly Christmas songs such as Jingle Bells, Up On the Rooftop, Silent Night, Deck the Halls, etc.  We also played some songs written specifically for harp such as Harvest Hornpipe and Harp's Delight.  Then we also played the classical Cannon in D, and a smaller trio did a First Noel/Cannon in D mashup!  It was awesome!  And how could we perform at the Children's Hospital without some music from Frozen!? Mary wrote an amazing arrangement for us of Let it Go which was a lot of fun.

This is my fabulous harp teacher, Mary.  She is the harpist for the Omaha Symphony and often plays with the Lincoln Symphony as well. She is fantastic, and I know I couldn't have found a better, more qualified teacher!