Harp & soul — Musician embraces the joy she finds in playing the Celtic harp

Cynthia Lynn Douglass started out on the violin and clarinet, with 20 years of classical training. After an accident meant she had to give up the clarinet, she moved to the renaissance recorder. Then she found the Celtic harp.

"That was it," she says. "I quit changing instruments. I had found the one that soothes my soul."

It might be more correct to say the Celtic harp found her, she jokes. It had never occurred to her that she might want to play it until she attended a musical festival in Los Angeles, where she was playing her recorder.

"As I was walking to the stage area, I passed a woman who was tuning up on her Celtic harp," she says. I heard that sound, and my feet stuck to the ground. I heard that little voice in my head that said, 'That will be your life someday.' I knew I had to play that instrument."

It took her two years to save enough money to buy a Celtic harp, but once she picked it up, "I never looked at another instrument." She has kept up with her recorder, but she knew she had found her passion and her joy in the Celtic harp.

That was 22 years ago. Since then Douglass has become nationally known as a performer, composer, arranger, teacher, recording artist and instrument designer — a career path that has continued since moving to Salt Lake City 1 1/2 years ago. (Her husband works with Alzheimer's research at the University of Utah.)

Douglass will share her love of the instrument Monday night when her ensemble, Celtic Harpistry, presents a St. Patrick's Day concert at Westminster College. Joining her on stage will be fiddler David Tomer, cellist and tenor Jaron Xochimitl, and Paul Mitchell on the hammered dulcimer.

Celtic music can be hauntingly beautiful and serene, Douglass says, but it can also be fast and lively. The concert will offer a lot of variety. That variety is just one of many things she loves about the harp.

The Celtic harp is one of the oldest instruments in the world, dating back to at least 500 B.C. "But it is thought that it was brought to the Celtic Islands by Norsemen or Spaniards, and it may go back to the area around Iran and Iraq to as early as 4,000 B.C. But the Celts embraced it, and it became their instrument," she says.