This is a wonderful article by my friend Paul about "The Butterfly." I've just posted it to the Harplist, where it seems to fit nicely into the context of a discussion about tunes mutating over time and place, but none of the images are viewable there. So here you go!

Paul says: "This harmless lepidopteran is widely derided nowadays, especially in America, as a tune which only the tragically inept will play; it is not subject to quite the same flak in Ireland, but is not…

 Oh, tuning! The bane of every harpist’s existence! Are you sick of spending, as the joke says, half your time tuning and the other half playing out of tune?  Read on!

With the advent of electric tuners our tuning lives have certainly become easier in some ways than those of harpists in days gone by, but they’ve also presented some new problems.

Have you ever assiduously tuned your entire harp with a tuner and discovered that parts of it still did…

There has been an interesting discussion on the Yahoo Harplist lately about the new Kindle ad. It reminded me of this great Jeeves & Wooster clip, in which Hugh Laurie is flummoxed by the "reasonably straightforward syncopated 5/4 time signature." 

The Kindle ad features a song by Bibio called Lovers' Carvings. The middle section of the song has caused almost as much rhythmic…

Hi everyone!

By popular request, I've made a video on sitting at the harp. I have a new roommate who just got a masters in digital media, so I have a camera operator who's able to get bigger shots for me! The sound on her camera is also a lot better than that on my laptop. Yay!

Here are a few extended thoughts on sitting at the harp. In conjunction with the video, hopefully they'll be helpful! You can view the video here:…