International Musician, September 2007Cover Story

Deborah Henson-Conant: Releasing the Harp’s Potential

During her college years, Deborah Henson-Conant gutted her VW Beetle, removing everything but the driver’s seat. It was the only way, after much angling and shifting, to fit her harp inside it that proved to be worth the trouble. No longer would Henson-Conant need to drag her harp to each gig behind her on a rickety trailer, all the while praying it wouldn’t rain.

“I found the whole harp ‘gestalt’ very off-putting,” says the Local 9-535 (Boston, MA) musician, admitting she might have given her instrument more care than it needed. “Its delicacy seemed to hide both the instrument’s abilities and its shortcomings. I found it disturbing that people seemed as impressed with it as a piece of furniture as they were with it as an instrument, and I resented that it seemed built to be coddled and protected, rather than built to get out there and make a voice for itself.”

Range of Emotion

On the other hand, Henson-Conant says, she found that being a harpist has had a palliative effect on her “oversized” personality. She remembers walking to her first orchestral gig—dressed in black, carrying a huge electronic tuner—impressed that she had passed as a real musician, but believing she had to fit into some kind of “harp musician mold.” But Henson-Conant would soon discover that it was the harp that had to fit her.

“I think the harp initially represented an aspect of womanhood that I both longed to embody and needed to challenge,” she observes. “If you can imagine that the harp, as a stereotype, represented one destiny for me as a woman, you can see why I considered the instrument to be both a powerful nemesis and a damsel in distress. I had to fight it as an enemy, ally with it as a partner, and liberate it as a feminine image, all at once.”

Her personal relationship to the harp would develop once she struggled through the stereotype. At first, Henson-Conant had been interested in the physical challenges the instrument offered, in particular the high level of coordination required to deal with both the strings and the pedals. She was also fascinated with the mechanics of the instrument, the thousands of working parts, and the coordination of feet and hands.

“It was once I started doing solo shows that I really began understanding the huge musical vocabulary this instrument has,” she says. “The range of emotion and color, and the instrument’s ability to mimic other members of the pitched percussion family, like steel drums.”

Recently, the jazz harpist took advantage of the instrument’s special catalog of sounds and took first place in the instrumental category in the 2006 International Songwriting Competition. Henson-Conant says her latest album, Invention and Alchemy, allowed her to flex her storytelling muscles more than she has in the past.

Family Tradition

Both sides of her family tree are responsible for her infatuation with music. “On my mother’s side—they are Russian Jewish immigrants—being a professional musician was the highest possible profession. It mixed music, performance, money, and success. What else existed?” she asks. “That side of my family congregated around the piano the way some families congregate around food.”

“On my father’s side—Swedish farmers already with several generations in the US—music was also fundamental, but not as art. Rather, it is seen as a kind of citizenship. Someone who plays an instrument is a useful member of society and provides an essential aspect of community building,” says Henson-Conant. “And what’s more important than being useful?”

A Tactical Error

Useful or not, like any performer, Henson-Conant knows what it’s like to fail, even long into a successful career.

“The first time I wrote for a classical ensemble I made a huge tactical error,” she recalls. “I thought I could rehearse with the classical players and the jazz players separately, then put them together for a single rehearsal and perform the piece.”

Each group alone sounded great, she recalls, but the combined effect was two different groups with two completely different sensibilities, playing the same piece at once. “All the music was there—in two different ways, at the same time!”

Henson-Conant says. “I’m not talking about an edgy Charles Ives effect, but a muddy and confusing Battle of the Bands!”

When the reviews came in, each one was more brutal than the last. Henson-Conant says the experience was so devastating that she completely shut down, boxing the dream of writing for orchestras in a “dark cabinet in my soul.”

Henson-Conant says she didn’t realize then that the idea behind the piece was fine; the flaw was merely a tactical error in its performance. But she didn’t try to fix the piece.

Rekindled Belief

A year later, the Boston Pops offered her a chance to solo and because she didn’t have the time to write a completely new set, Henson-Conant expanded the arrangement of the failed piece. While this rekindled her belief in the music, she was still terrified of getting back on the horse.

“I remember opening the paper to read the review after the show,” she says. “My hands were shaking, but when I read it I burst into tears.” The review was “beautiful,” she remembers, calling the piece “stunning.”

“The review vindicated everything I’d believed about the power and beauty of the piece,” says Henson-Conant, “but this time I’d gotten that power across to the audience. Sometimes you just have to do something again and again, until you get it to really work.”
To this day Henson-Conant remains mindful of the lesson learned, and she believes the moral of her tale is one all musicians should take to heart. “You will make tactical errors,” she says. “You will fall on your face if you have ambitious, creative dreams. It comes with the territory. And no matter how many times or how many people tell you that, it’s still completely devastating when it happens.”

Have the Courage

It is a mistake, Henson-Conant now believes, not to take risks on stage. Musicians should allow the audience to drive them in new creative directions. Freedom and improvisation are at the heart of true artistry and the very things audiences crave.

“Often my greatest regret after a performance is if I didn’t follow the audience or the circumstances,” Henson-Conant explains. She recently played a huge stadium in Paris and had her program planned in advance. At the last minute, after looking at the physical environment, she realized she could bridge her performance with the previous performance by walking to the stage in spotlight and playing as she walked.

“That was a great idea because it connected me with the previous performers, cut out the ‘down-time’ of getting me on stage, and was in keeping with the conceptual bridge,” Henson-Conant explains. “I was hoping to make a link between my performance and the ancient troubadours who wandered the Celtic Isles.”
As she walked to the stage, she played the Celtic marching music—and the audience started clapping in rhythm. “It was thrilling,” Henson-Conant recalls. “But instead of following that train of musical thought to conclusion once I got to the stage, I reverted to my original performance plan. That plan was fine, and the audience response was great, but after the show, I regretted that I hadn’t had the guts to follow where they were going for longer. I didn’t have the courage to let them affect me enough.”

“Bringing music and story alive, whether the story is sung or spoken, narrative or theatrical—this is always a challenge for me,” Henson-Conant concludes. “And it’s what I love to do. Every time I walk on stage, I’m hoping to play so authentically that every nuance of the music’s story comes alive for the audience, and thus for me as well.”

[A NOTE FROM THE WEBMASTER: This article was excerpted from a longer interview Deborah provided to the International Musician magazine. Hi t the BACK button for a link to a transcript of the full article]

PHOTOS: Top: Roberto Cogiolla (Italy) / Bottom: Andrea Engels (Germany)