Last Saturday was National Random Acts of Harping Day. I set out with my teeny-weeny little black Fullsicle.
At the Arizona State University Art Museum, I played for about an hour, until they closed at 5pm. That’s such a perfect place to play — the entrance is underground, so nice and cool, with a fountain. The acoustics are great, too. Plenty of people stopped to listen, and after I left, one man stopped to thank me for the music. The management was super nice, too.
| After that, I hit up the Desert Botanical Gardens. It’s hard to find a good spot to play outdoors in June in Phoenix, but I did manage to find a shady spot just off the trail where I could concentrate on my music. It is so nice to be a little off the beaten path – I could see people stopping to listen. One woman stayed for quite a while, and I saw a family hang out for a bit also.
Even better than watching was listening – the birds were out making a racket, even in the heat of the day, and the breeze through the grass is always a soothing sound. There was barely enough breeze to set my harpstrings humming. I had heard Aolean harps in San Francisco years ago, but hadn’t made the connection until that first time I could hear the breeze in my own harp strings. There is nothing like that sound. It’s soothing and otherworldly all at the same time – if you’ve ever heard a bowed piano (Steven Scott‘s music is a good example of this), you know what I mean. On Saturdays, the DBG has an evening flashlight tour. As I packed up to leave, one of the tour volunteers decided to “volunteer” a little information to me. I had been sitting next to a big box (and I mean BIG — this thing was about the size of a small kitchen island) box of snakes. Yikes! I’m glad that the people were easier to spot than those critters! |
A good day!
Shannon Schumann, CTHP, RMT 
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