“Baroque Flamenco” is one of the most exciting pieces in the harp repertoire – but many harpists find it intimidating. And yet last week hundreds of harpists from around the world – of all abilities from fledgling to professional –  completed 2025 5-Day Baroque Flamenco Challenge.  How can this showstopper become accessible to players at so many levels?

Well today, I want to share what happens when one of those harpists takes what they learned and creates meaningful music with it – because that’s exactly what we learn to do in Hip Harp Academy, and one member of the Academy took the Challenge for the second time and did something that blew us all away.

Meet Cherie Maffey. She took the Baroque Flamenco Challenge again last week and transformed what she learned into something extraordinary – a multimedia storytelling piece that had Academy members in tears.

“It feels like I’m consolidating what I’ve learnt in the Academy and making it my own,” Cherie told me. “I’ve done the Baroque Flamenco challenge before but it only dawned on me this time to just use the two chords, creating tension and putting it with this story.”

The story?

For years, Cherie’s been haunted by a World War I tale about an 8-year-old girl in New Zealand who made a handmade scarf for the troops and discovered that, a year later half-way across the world, the scarf miraculously found its way to her soldier brother in France.

She had long loved this story.

She had taken the Baroque Flamenco Challenge before.

But this year something happened that transformed her experience.

This year, the Challenge ended the weekend before New Zealand’s Memorial Day.  Suddenly it all came together and Cherie put together this video story – telling a moving story with just two chords – the chords from the cadenza of Baroque Flamenco.

“Those two chords sounded ‘brooding'” she said. “and the story was brooding.”

This skill of using musical building blocks with improvisation is one of most powerful skills harpists learn in Hip Harp Academy, because it gives them the freedom of self-expression at any level of technical ability – and the opportunity to expand and adapt any type of music.

This story is a perfect example of that.

Here’s what Cherie says about being a member of “Hip Harp Academy”:

” You learn at your level, you don’t need to read music, you can ask Deborah anything. It’s a holistic process of learning music, and finding yourself. I’ve learnt so much more than I could ever have imagined. For example being able to create my own music using snippets, arranging music from structures that DHC teaches – and you also get so much support from the other members in the Academy. Why would anyone NOT join? ”  Cherie Maffey

This is the impact of learning to combine technical skills with creative freedom, to ground your playing,  unleash your creativity, and share that creativity with others.

Wondering how YOU can do this? There are two options:

#1 Self-Paced Classes: 

The “Baroque Flamenco Beyond the Page” class and all the other self-paced courses in the Academy  give you specific skills and techniques – they break it all down into patterns and shapes, so you can see how the puzzle of music fits together when liberated from the fear of playing the wrong notes.  Check out all the Self-Paced Classes or go right to Baroque Flamenco Beyond the Page.

#2 The Community:

In Hip Harp Academy harpists take on this style of learning with many different pieces – or by creating their own music from the training they learn in the weekly live chats, or by watching the replays. They learn to BE CREATIVE with EVERYTHING they do. 

Instead of just memorizing notes on a page, you learn how music actually works – the “bones” of the piece, the mindsets of expansion

This way of learning allows you adapt each piece or improv prompt to YOUR technical level, YOUR expressive desires, and YOUR unique voice.  This is what we call “grounded expansion” – GROUNDING in a foundation of solid skills, that support you to EXPAND creatively in ways that are authentically YOU.

Cherie’s video is an example of what it can look like when that all ‘clicks’ and comes together.

And it’s all about CONNECTION – not perfection

Harpists Who Dare

Ready to liberate yourself from the notes on the page?