"Stardust"
Concerts and Background Music with the floor harp

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Professional Notes:

In solo performance, Skye plays and/or accompanies her singing with a 4.5-octave chromatic harp (see Footnotes). Its elegantly simple lines reflect Skye's personal style. The two - instrumentalist and instrument - and their music, provide unique, uplifting entertainment appropriate to the location (home, library, church, meeting hall, restaurant, coffee house, or club) or occasion (Concert, House or Garden Party, Celebrations, Special Events, Business Meetings, or Reunions). (See lising of previous engagements.)

Although the sophisticated harmonies in the songs of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael and the other great songwriters of the 20s, 30s, and 40s are not easy to navigate on harp, Skye eagerly accepts the challenge. She insists that it is the song that matters - much more than its accompaniment.

Footnotes:
Skye's unusual harps are fully-chromatic. They differ from the orchestral pedal harp in size and volume, and from both the pedal harp and lever or Celtic harps in the accessibility of chromatic (half-step) notes. Chromatic harps have the equivalent of both the white and the black keys of a piano at the fingertips, while pedal and lever harps have, essentially, just the white keys of the piano and the harpist must either use feet on pedals or reach a hand up to flip levers, mechanically altering the pitch of each string by a half-step. A detailed article about the evolution of the cross-strung harp can be found at Harp Spectrum. The voice of a hand-crafted chromatic floor harp blends well with the human voice - both of which can be amplified when necessary - and is perfect as an accompanist for the intimate style of Skye's singing.

Personal Notes:

Since changing over to cross-strung chromatic harps, the concern that, as one reporter once wrote in a newspaper article that "Watching Skye play is almost tiring," no longer exists. I think most people find my handiwork fascinating; often, it's something they've never seen before.

Tuning the strings is another kind of handiwork that needs to be done daily. I regularly tune more than 1,000 strings per week; that number was far smaller when I played lever harps. At that time I calculated that I'd tuned more than 700 strings during one week of numerous performances, and mentioned that during a concert. In response, a fellow called out from the back of the room "Then you'll be in great demand when you get to heaven!"

Another time, while giving a concert during a Brunch, I turned to the traditional Irish piece "The Harp That Once Thro Tara's Halls," and though it was unlike the rest of the music from the 20s, 30s, and 40s that I was playing, I decided to sing it. When I was breaking down my equipment at the end of the morning, a gentleman came up and told me that he was 97-years-old, that he had come to this country from Ireland when he was five, and in all those years here, had never heard that song in the U.S. He was in tears.

Joy comes in many forms!

Notes from Others:

"Cordial, Professional, Prompt, Talented - Great Performance."

"I met Skye, the Songstress/Harpist who set up so quickly and efficiently
to reward our love of music
with soft, joyous, lighthearted, memorable, gentle music..."

"I loved watching your hands."

"Excellent voice. Really enjoyed the variety."

"Thank you for an enjoyable evening -- very tastefully done."

"Increasing numbers of musicians are also including the contemporary cross-strung harp among their instruments of choice. A few notable professional artists include Verlene Schermer (San Jose, California), Skye Hurlburt (Harmony, Rhode Island), Cynthia Lynn Douglass (Birmingham, Alabama), and Liz Cifani (Chicago, Illinois)."

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"just traveling along singing a song"