One Harp World Conference | Lecture from the Harp

“MY LIFE WITH JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU”

Imagine what it would be like when one piece of music became a kind of guide for a lifetime adventure, taking a young composer and showing her how to expand a single musical idea into a career of playing and teaching improvisation and writing for chamber ensemble and symphony orchestra.

Is it possible that the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the composer of the “Minuet” that started this adventure, had taken this young composer in his hands to show her a world through a melody they both fell in love with?

In “My Life with Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” Deborah Henson-Conant shows you how this single piece began her improv journey and how shen then expanded it and explored the fundamental form and the fundamental concept of contrast that existed in the original piece, adding more and more and more contrast until the piece took on a new life with a new story and how it then spawned other pieces to create an entire repertoire that now gives harpists around the world access to the chamber music stage and the orchestral stage.

When Deborah Henson-Conant first played Ravel’s “Introduction and Allegro”, she thought what a shame it was that there was only a single piece with this ensemble and what a joy it would be to have an entire repertoire of pieces in different styles that she could play with the same ensemble.

So once again, starting with the Jean-Jacques Rousseau “Minuet,” she developed the piece she called “Baroque Flamenco” into a full three-movement suite and then added more and more pieces to create not just one evening but multiple evenings of chamber music with the same ensemble, all with a harp feature.

Once that began, the world of orchestral performance opened up as she was invited to play with more and more orchestras, and she has began with this piece to learn to write for symphony orchestra.

[Describe how I will be performing this with other harpists.]

[This new presentation is created so that I can tour with it, and I can present to a harpist audience or a non-musical audience, so they can see how one piece of music can develop into so many different things. And in each place that I go, I will be able to feature local classical harpists and/or their ensembles. It is a special style of touring presentation. And it will also show harpists how they can play the music themselves and how it is available to them. It will show them how they can build their careers. These are career-building compositions, and this feature also shows them how they can use this adaptable repertoire to build their own careers, whether they want to have a solo career, a solo stage, whether they want to perform it with a chamber ensemble, orchestra or like me t have the opportunity to be able to open up all these different performance stages with the same material because I’ve written it in….]

[Our audience for this are Performing Arts centers who might want to have something special for other non-musician audience but they want to feature artists or harpists who want to have a career like DHC but does not have a material to do it with. Other composers can create one concerto/ one piece, but this can help artists to create multiple programs. I have created children’s programming, classical programming, pop programming, and other programming. This is also gives people an introduction to The Legacy Project].

Now she is, piece by piece, publishing the entire repertoire for chamber ensemble, symphony orchestra, and for the first time, released at the One Harp World conference, the “Sonando en Espanol” concerto, now a suite for solo harp.

Evelyn Huber was one of the first harpists to see the potential in having this repertoire and being able to play it in different ways – solo, ensemble, and orchestral – and became a creative partner with Deborah Henson-Conant in sharing this music with the world.

In this lecture recital, you’ll get to hear from the composer and the primary performer of this piece and find out how you can add this music to your own repertoire, whether you play solo, chamber ensemble, or orchestral, and how you can access simpler versions of the music for students and even lever harp versions for symphony orchestra or chamber ensemble and lever harp.

EVENT INFO & REGISTRATION

REGISTRATION INFO: READ THE INFO AND REGISTER HERE