The harp may be one of the oldest instruments in the world, dating back to ancient Mesopotamia, but modern artists have been working to break the instrument free from its stuffy connotations for years. Over the past few decades, the majestic relic’s plinks have turned up in everything from R&B chart-toppers to UK garage classics to Four Tet tunes.
These days, a new raft of classically trained harpists are taking the sound even further. Celebrated U.S. harpist Madison Calley has collaborated with Willow Smith and Usher, and performed at last year’s Grammy Awards with Roddy Ricch. Meanwhile, New Orleans’ Cassie Watson Francillon creates interpretations of Black spirituals to offer a more inclusive vision of the harp in a world where, statistically speaking, only 1.8 percent of American musicians in professional orchestras are Black.
Other contemporary artists shun classical traditions and conjure future-facing stories from the intimidating instrument, playing around with genre and electronic processing, as well as championing subversive new techniques. French harpist and singer-songwriter Laura Perrudin teases unexpected sounds from her chromatic electric harp, while the Portugal-based artist Angélica Salvi combines plucking and programming on her 2019 album Phantone to create spellbinding ambient music.
Below, find 10 more artists pushing the harp into exciting new places.
Since the release of her critically lauded breakthrough album Hundreds of Days in 2018, Los Angeles musician Mary Lattimore has helped to modernize the harp for contemporary tastes, bathing her spectacular Lyon and Healy concert grand in an electronic glow through effects pedals and synthesizers. “I love playing for people who have never seen a harp, who think it’s a museum piece,” she noted last year. “I want people to feel like they can approach it.”
Lattimore’s celebrated 2020 album Silver Ladders enforces this position while evoking the harp’s shape-shifting properties. The record sees her twinkling tones boosted by incandescent guitar courtesy of Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, as nocturnal synths lift the harp away from the concert hall and plonk it down in a rainy metropolis. Her masterful playing aside, Lattimore has helped to knock the harp off its pedestal through live streams for electronic music hub Resident Advisor and associations with tastemaking labels like Ghostly.
The late Alice Coltrane famously taught herself how to play harp following the death of her husband in 1967 and released A Monastic Trio, her first album as a bandleader, the following year. Taking her cue from trailblazing 1950s jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, Coltrane became a figurehead of spiritual jazz, inspiring many 21st century artists. Nala Sinephro is one of them.
In 2021, the London-based composer, producer, and musician steered modular synth and pedal harp through the sonic cosmos of her ambient jazz on Space 1.8, her debut album. Her harp techniques are wildly unconventional. “The real classical harpists would go crazy if they saw a video of me playing,” she told Pitchfork earlier this year. “My thumbs are down, I’m using my pinkie, my knees are all over the place. I’m doing whatever the fuck I want. I am aware that I’m breaking a lot of traditions that went on for centuries.” Though she’s adamant about not being known as just “the harp lady,” her innovations with the instrument are undeniable.
Rhodri Davies doesn’t toy with the harp so as much as take it apart and recast it entirely in his own mold. Working within the sphere of free improvisation, he melds performance art with classical training—going as far as cutting up strings and even setting an old orchestral pedal harp on fire. Once, he strapped a hydrophone inside the instrument’s soundbox and plopped it into the sea. Another time, he construed a way of playing metal harp strings with dry ice.
A childhood spent bracing the elements in the west Wales coastal town of Aberystwyth, coupled with an interest in his horologist grandfather’s jewelry shop, became the catalyst for his creative adventuring. On his blistering third solo album Wound Response, originally available on vinyl in 2012 but finally released digitally last year, you’d be forgiven for thinking the primary instrument is an electric guitar. Using a transducer and contact microphone to wrest speaker-busting distortion from his lap harp, Davies pushes the instrument into the red with such ferocity that it takes on a new life entirely.
Grammy-nominated harpist Brandee Younger has worked with everyone from jazz legends Pharoah Sanders and Ravi Coltrane to A-listers like Drake, Lauryn Hill, and Common. In 2019, her composition “Hortense” was featured in Beyoncé’s Homecoming documentary; a few months later, she dropped Soul Awakening, an album comprising eight tracks of full-bodied, horns-rich jazz, on Blue Note. On the album, the classically trained musician, educator, and leader of the Brandee Younger Quartet sprinkles glissandi throughout her take on overlooked jazz harp pioneer Dorothy Ashby’s 1968 track “Games,” and offers rendition of Alice Coltrane’s “Blue Nile,” paying loving tribute to her heroes.
Her 2021 LP Somewhere Different saw her embrace funk, Latin jazz, soul, R&B, and modish hip-hop, all while retaining the mystical quality of the harp. The album deservedly won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album, and picked up a Grammy nod for the track “Beautiful is Black.”
Nailah Hunter’s meditative fantasies bear the hallmarks of ambient and new age music while being rooted in L.A.’s experimental DIY underground. The harpist’s 2020 debut EP Spells was released on Matthewdavid’s trusted outpost Leaving Records. Inspired by “rune magick” and bolstered by her luscious voice as well as synth-work dipped in vaporwave, Hunter’s bewitching harpscapes emphasize the instrument’s healing properties. Released to commemorate Juneteenth in 2020, a portion of the proceeds for her single “Black Valhalla” were given to the Loveland Foundation, which provides therapy support for Black women. Hunter, who first became interested in the harp as a teenager, has also used her talents to reimagine a song from from The Twilight Zone as well as Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host.”
Severing the harp from its classical music origins and reframing it in a sexier light, the NYC-based duo LEYA released their debut album The Fool in 2018, and soundtracked Brooke Candy’s queer Pornhub-exclusive I Love You later that year. Harpist Marilu Donovan and violinist/vocalist Adam Markiewicz kept up the momentum on collaborations with the experimental artist Eartheater, as well as their sublime 2020 album Flood Dream, with Donovan’s detuned harp taking that angelic album on queasy detours.
The time-honored tradition of depicting angels with harps helps to maintain a virtuous image of the instrument, but stuffy champagne receptions continue to overstate the instrument’s air of refined inaccessibility. Far from soothing her listeners with cascading notes, Donovan’s off-key freewheeling feels like a deliberate unraveling of the harp’s ethereal perfection. It’s hard to imagine the skin-crawling eeriness of LEYA’s “INTP” or “ABBA” going down well with a room of distant relatives at a wedding.
Zeena Parkins has described her instrument as a “sound machine of limitless capacity.” Born in Detroit, the electro-acoustic composer and electric harp maestro moved to New York in the mid-’80s and became a fixture on the city’s storied downtown scene. Predominantly a collaborator, she has worked with a glittering array of legends including Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Hole, and most famously, Björk: Her work on the Icelandic star’s landmark 2001 LP Vespertine led to her playing on the subsequent world tour.
Parkins is known for exploring the possibilities of the harp through non-traditional techniques, performing with random objects like nails, glass jars, and alligator clips, as well as various digital and analog processing formats. Her cacophonous 2018 album Captiva is no easy listen; the dissonance may set your teeth on edge, but the result is an unnerving yet mesmerizing study in the alternative lexicon of the harp.
L.A. harpist, composer, and Royal Academy of Music graduate Lara Somogyi is known for combining the mundane and the fantastical. She’s a go-to harpist for films and TV shows, and has played on scores for everything from Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods to Bridgerton to The Simpsons. She’s an innovator who has incorporated prepared harp sounds played with Blu-Tack and alligator clips; she’s also used a milk frother in her playing, and regularly includes looper, guitar pedals, and electronics into her repertoire. After working as a session musician for huge stars like Anderson. Paak, Ariana Grande, Lauryn Hill, and John Legend, she’s set to release her debut album, !, next month.
Scottish harpist Maeve Gilchrist has collaborated with the likes of jazz explorer Esperanza Spalding and avant-garde cellist Okkyung Lee, contributed to the soundtrack for How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and turned in a trio of talked-about solo albums. 2020’s The Harpweaver marked her first record as a composer, producer and arranger. The following year, she rose to international pop fame for her work on Arooj Aftab’s critically acclaimed 2021 album Vulture Prince, complementing the Pakistan-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s undulating voice with glistening strings.
Born in Edinburgh, Gilchrist was fed a diet of the traditional folk loved by her Scottish father and Irish mother, and soon found an affinity with the clàrsach, or Celtic harp, which is slightly smaller in stature than the classic harp and operated using levers at the top rather than pedals. After moving to America at 17 to study at Berklee College of Music, she eventually became employed as the college’s first-ever lever harp teacher and taught there for five years. Often lending her practice to improvisation, as well as bringing modern music genres into the mix, she has given the traditional instrument a fresh twist.
Originating in ancient Greece, the aeolian harp is played purely by the wind, placing it entirely at the whim of the elements. The result is both eerie and ghostly, like a wordless transmission from Mother Nature herself. For his recent album Houses of the Wind, environmentalist and composer John Luther Adams thrust the aeolian harp into the spotlight, crafting his soul-stirring, bare-bones release from a 10-and-a-half-minute field recording taken in Alaska in 1989.
As he explains in a statement accompanying the album, Houses of the Wind (2021–22) is “composed entirely from that single recording, transposed, layered on itself, and sculpted into five new pieces of the same length,” making for a sobering, weighty voyage. “The world has changed since then, in ways we couldn’t have imagined,” he says of the time that has passed. “The winds rising around us now seem darker, more turbulent and threatening. Yet still, if this music is haunted by feelings of loss and longing, I hope it also offers some measure of consolation, even peace.”
