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2013 Scholarship Recipients Announced!
May 11: Today's Mid-Atlantic Fleadh Cheoil in Parsippany bustled with music in every meeting room in the hotel. The harp competitions were held in Morris 2 and adjudicated by Deidre Danaher. The first place winners in each of the age groups received a scholarship to the Somerset Folk Harp Festival. They are: Emily Safko (under 12), Kristin Ware (12-15) , Kellianne Kornick (15- 18), and Alex Boatright in the senior, over 18. Scholarship Winners: On left: Kristin Ware and Kellianne Kornick.
March 21: The Somerset Folk Harp Festival announces that it will award scholarships to its festival to the winning participants in the harp competition at the Mid-Atlantic Region Fleadh Cheoil, being in held in Parsippany NJ, on May 11. The competition is adjudicated by Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann. "This will be the fifth consecutive year that the festival has offered these awards," says festival director Kathy DeAngelo, "and they're meant to encourage aspiring young harpers to play traditional Irish music." This year the festival is offering a specialty Youth Harp Program, and first place fleadh winners in the 12-15 and 15-18 age groups will be eligible to participate in this program or attend any of its 100+ workshops over the course of its four days. The senior-level harp winner will also be awarded a full-festival admission. The winner of the under 12 competition will be awarded a Saturday festival admission. An accompanying parent/guardian admission is also included in the prize for the juveniles. Louise Trotter recognized for Lifetime Achievement
You can’t pack much more into one professional lifetime than what Louise Trotter has accomplished in her long and distinguished career as a musician and harpist, teacher and performer. She says that she started playing piano when she was 6 years old and knew right away that she wanted to be a musician because she loved performing right from the start. Performing has been her life’s passion. Every time you see her perform she brings such energy to the stage and engages her audience on a very personal level. Even if you’d never seen her before, she finishes her performances and you feel you know her. The wit. The charm. The precise yet sensitive touch on the harp and the beautiful arrangements that speak to the years of maturity and experience. We’re lucky that her father really liked the harp and built her one when she was 9, though she says she didn’t particularly have his passion for it at the beginning. Perhaps picking up on his being a life-long musician, she eventually realized that harp was her ticket to a music career. She felt she could do interesting things with it because of its novelty then. Her first professional gig at 18 was an 8-week stint doing a collegiate variety show, traveling across Texas with the troupe by train, doing 2 solos with the stage band in 4 shows a day. By the end of the summer she had earned $150. What a start! After moving to Houston in 1975 with her husband and 3 children, she found she could get paid for playing the harp. She says “You have to perform as much as possible to develop stage presence and confidence.” And for decades she’s done just that and it shows.
Louise Trotter has performed at many Somerset festivals and it’s good to have her back. She is a beloved figure here and her workshops are always popular. She just has a way of connecting with you at whatever level you’re at. Tap into her experience and enjoy her workshops this weekend. The ISFHC gave her their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. We’re overdue in recognizing her contribution to our harp community. We present Louise with our second Lifetime Achievement Award and recognize her extraordinary career. Please be sure to chat her up while you’re here this weekend and extend your congratulations too.
June 17, 2013: In 2003, Patrice Fisher and Carlos Valladares began the Arpas En Armonia program at El Sitio Cultural Center in Antigua, Guatemala to develop a music and harp program. Since then they have partnered with a local carpenter who has built over 50 harps for their growing school of enthusiastic young harp students. Using Skype, Patrice has developed a resident local teacher in 22-year old Brendy Boj through Saturday morning lessons and the program reaches into 3 cities as well as El Salvador. Click here to see the video about this program and hear them play. The project inspires a spirit of international friendship between North America and Central America. Seven harpists and teachers have travelled, at their own expense, to give volunteer harp lessons and concerts with Arpas students. Over the years Patrice and Carlos, in addition to teaching and doing concerts, have collected used harp strings and music and brought them down for use by their Guatemalan students. We are so lucky in America to be able to come to events like the Somerset Folk Harp Festival and share our love of music and the harp. Many of our attendees come to the festival to revel in the cornucopia of harps and music in the Exhibit Hall. Probably many of you have lots of sheet music and music books at home that you no longer use. Make way for new music on that shelf, and cull through your collection and put it to use! This year Somerset will partner with Arpas En Armonia to collect unused sheet music and music books at the festival, which will be brought to the students in Guatemala to use and enjoy. If anyone has recently replaced levers on the harp, and still has the old ones, they could use those as well! So besides bringing your harp to Somerset, we ask that you bring a few contributions for our Arpas En Armonia music collection box, which will be displayed at the Registration Desk at the festival. |
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