christendom was a production of international artists in new york city and c n n washington thank you for  welcome to a crescendo this week we are very very fortunate to have a world famous harker with us usually you hear us talk about harpists but in this particular case it is indeed a harbor for two tell us about that his thanks so much here couple and a half octaves above them unlike the big harps an orchestra doesn't have any pedals it has levers for each of these strings so for instance if i want to play a scene i leave the letter where it is so if i want to play this sharp i put up that lever for that string and then use music so for each object i can have the harp tuned differently unlike the pedal harp where if i move a pedal you know c pedal to see sharp all of the c's on the instrument go to see sharp one it's so in one sense it's a little more versatile than another since it's a little more work because you have to move each one individually one of the things that makes a small harp a lot of fun is inspiration for this next tune came from spending some time in a summer afternoon out in a big city park and i was looking around her head for can i have my bottled water everything was fine and i was noticing that there were all these little groups of people and quite a few of them had somebody playing a guitar often i noticed it was just you know a fellow with his guitar and his sweetie and he was serenade her and i thought why don't we see more harps out here doing that we should have at least as many harps in the park on a summer day as we have guitars that should be some some kind of goal for someone the more i thought about it the more i thought there's an opportunity here to even go one further than a guitar can go if i only read piece for just one hand on the harp and my other hand can actually be still like to play one of my own tunes this one has a little bit of an interesting story behind it it grew up on an island in southeast alaska and one of the things i really liked about living on the island is that if you're going to go anywhere you either have to take a boat or you have to fly the west there you're definitely taking a boat when i first moved to this area to puget sound i lived for a number of years on whidbey island one of the things again i enjoyed was being on an island and having water all the way around i was working there at my studio on whidbey island and recording over in port townsend which meant if i was going to the recording studio i was taking a boat back and forth well the keys to one ferry is the name of the ferry crossing from would be island to port townsend and it's a rather treacherous crossing if the weather is rough or if the tides are strong often they'll actually shut down the ferry crossing because the harbors too treacherous to get into and r well like any job recording is sometimes you have really good days and sometimes you really don't and for this particular album i was working on i was having a lot of trouble in the recording studio i was just not able to get the sound  the feeling that i was after i was very frustrated i was on my way home was a very stormy afternoon got into the ferry everyone was kind of how to build in the cabin because the weather was rough and the seas were rough when the tide was strong the wind was strong the boat was kind of shuddering through the crossing and i was out on the bow because when i'm in that kind of that's where i want to be and i'm standing out there and i'm thinking you know this is just not working for me very well this day that i've had and all of a sudden heart sat down and said let's have the storm of the boat in this hand and let's have the bird in this hand and let's see what we can do so i started work and several days of composition work later i had so this is a different kind of car complete this is called a cross strongheart one of the reasons that this kind of car exists is so that you can have half steps without having to use the levers remember talked a little bit about comes from spain from madrid in the last decade of the fifteen hundred fifteen ninety six i believe it was a receipt from her builder for the royal chapel building a harp with two know like an ordinary heart but being all kind of table up together so the the reason the strings cross rather than just having two sets that are like this is that by having them cross you can have both hands play both sets for instance hears or c in the left hand the c string is below the line of cross and here's a line where the strings cross right here the c is down here in the left hand the same string going back to the traditional music repertoire here's a tune that comes from finland it's called tor one one could come it's a love song one of the things that makes this song meaningful is to know a little bit about its historical background for many many years any time there was a very skilled crafts person in finland they would be basically kidnapped and taken to work at the court of the russians are this is a song that is sung by one of the people who sweethearts has been taken to work at the corpus are the woman is singing she calls she calls her beloved her little bird and she says please don't don't take the sound of my little bird from me don't let me be here by myself in the winter alone it's a very beautiful song too on good time it's a gorgeous melody and what i've done to it is to give it a there's another piece that i wrote many years ago i knew somebody who is an accomplished fingerstyle guitar player his name was yard and he discovered as many musicians do that the more skilled you become and the more popular become the less you are at home and after being on the road for quite a while i was talking to him one day and they said so what what do you think you'd like to be doing or five years from now or ten years from now or something you want to be on there of this much  selden so here's a tune that i wrote thinking about my friend john and it's got kind of a little guitar sort of a feeling to it and it's called the sel right thank you so much for being on christendom today it has really been educational and beautiful thanks so much for those of you who would like to hear more of harper's music we ask you to visit his website if you look across the bottom of the screen now and you will see his website address harper is also going to be playing a concert in seattle coming up at the end of october on the twenty sixth sunday evening  at dusty's strains strains our local heart manufacturer and we will certainly be there to see you and we invite the entire television audience to do sign from all over thanks so much thank you thank you for joining us on this episode of crescendo we hope to see you next time