00:00 – Where there was traditional music, there was my tribe
01:26 – Meeting Janet Harbison
03:24 – What does an Irish music session mean to you?
04:12 – Fleadhs, friendships and growing up around sessions
06:07 – Father James McDyer and bringing harps to Donegal
12:03 – Finding sessions in Dungloe
15:01 – Music as social connection and belonging
17:03 – Classical and traditional music as different worlds
21:19 – Perfection, nerves and looking for approval
23:17 – Seán Ó Riada, Paddy Moloney and music at home
27:39 – The Belfast Harp Orchestra and being useful through music
28:49 – Rethinking what and how she taught
34:01 – Harper or harpist?
37:53 – Rolls, ornamentation and playing harp in sessions
40:15 – The core tunes that connect everybody
43:17 – Teaching social musicianship instead of competition pieces
46:57 – Janet and “the look”
48:52 – Newcomers, belonging and organic music
50:13 – How many harps should be in a session?
51:32 – Uilleann pipes, Allistrum’s March and tunes Janet loves
Conversational Transcript
*[This is an AI edited conversational transcript, lightly shaped for readability while keeping the spirit of the original conversation. Full transcript generated by Tara is available by clicking on the 3 dots in the bottom left corner on the player above.]
Tara:
Janet Harbison, I am thrilled to be here with you. You’re in Donegal at the moment doing a harp summer school.
You are a long-time professional harper, and you’re going to tell me the difference in a minute between a harper and a harpist.
You’re originally from Dublin. You’ve lived in County Down and Belfast, and you now live in England, but sometimes in Dublin.
Janet:
Yeah. I’m a bit of a wandering mongrel, but definitely bog Irish to the core.
I married an Englishman. I fell madly in lust at some point along the way! He had a son and we now have grandchildren, and this is the most brilliant craic.
I miss them to bits because they’re at home having fun without me, and it’s really annoying.
Tara:
Did you get them to play the harp yet?
Janet:
No, but they’re close, I’ll tell you.
I have the most darling photograph of the five-year-old grandchild. I’m Grandma, right?
I didn’t do the parent thing in the middle. I didn’t have children. I was too busy travelling.
It often happens with musicians. The biological clock passes us by somewhere because we’re too wedded to what we’re doing. We’re having way too much fun to be serious about things like having babies.
It meant that I was always a musician. It never changed.
Along the way I must have been gathering up bits and bobs, thinking, “I’ll have that for the bottom drawer. I’ll have that for the babies.”
I ended up with a trunk full of junk. Now I’ve got the grandchildren to lavish it on, and I have a bright purple little harp for little Amelia to play.
I’ve got myself a van now too. I’m the old lady of the van and a proper itinerant harpy. I can go anywhere and nobody has to make a bed for me. I can sleep in the van and I’m happy out.
Tara:
I have a van too. We’re van ladies together.
What does an Irish music session mean to you?
Tara:
I always start with the question: what does an Irish music session mean to you?
Janet:
Well, it was my social life.
It was my practice time, my social life. All my friends were musicians and it was what gave us a buzz and what we did for enjoyment.
There was always something else. I might have been gigging at weddings or playing in the castle. Somebody made a joke about me recently that I was a “Bunratty bunny”. It’s a long time since I felt like a bunny!
There was always something where there was a bit of money in it, so you did what you had to do for the money, whether you had to look like an eejit as well.
But then there were the lucky times when you had time to yourself and you’d be off at a Fleadh.
I was very lucky coming up. I had very solid friends, people like Mícheál Ó hAlmhain, who lived up the road and around the corner in Dublin.
When Comhaltas moved to Monkstown, we pretty much lived in Comhaltas a couple of nights a week.
Then we were always away at the Fleadhs. Seosaimhín Ní Bheaglaoich was one of our little trio of musketeers and we went everywhere together for a number of years.
She’s from West Dingle and my brothers and my mother lived in Caherdaniel in South Kerry, so I was always moving around the back end of Ireland where there was plenty of music and sessions.
Father James McDyer and Donegal
Janet:
The first summer school I ran in Glencolmcille was in 1986, thanks to Father James McDyer.
Ever since then, Donegal has been my spiritual go-to place.
Tara:
I actually met you in Glencolmcille years ago.
I play the fiddle and there’s the Glencolmcille Fiddle Week, but I think it was even before I knew that existed.
I had made a harp as part of my Leaving Cert and I think I brought it up to you.
Janet:
God, I hope I didn’t tell you it was rubbish!
Tara:
No, it wasn’t too bad. It was lost for ten or fifteen years and then we found it again. It’s in perfect condition. It just needs a few strings.
Janet:
I’ll never forget Father James.
He wrote to me out of the blue. I was very busy being Mrs Amazing, all over the place.
He said he was a priest in West Donegal and that before he died he wanted to see the harp in the hands of Donegal children.
I thought, “This fella needs an Alka-Seltzer or something.”
I forgot about it and I don’t think I ever answered the first letter, although I found it recently.
I had a busy life going on. I was employed in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum as a music curator, flying around recording music, including fiddlers in Donegal, because I was looking after the cultural traditions of the nine counties of Ulster.
Then I got a second letter in December.
He said, “Would you bloody hurry up because I’ve just had a heart attack and I really mean to see this.”
I thought, “Holy smokes.”
I felt morally obliged to do something because this fellow was in imminent danger of going to heaven and leaving me a curse.
So we arranged for me to come to Glencolmcille on the last day of January in 1986.
I was driving my great old Morris Minor. I knew all the AA boys in Ireland because I was always breaking down in potholes or ditches.
That particular day it snowed. What should have been five or six hours took me about ten.
I arrived in Glencolmcille ten minutes late for the concert and thought, “They’re going to think I’m a complete looper.”
There were no mobile phones in those days to say you were on the way.
Then I saw only two sets of footprints in the snow.
I thought, “What kind of a concert am I going to be giving tonight?”
It was just the parish priest and his housekeeper. He had forgotten to mention the concert the previous week.
I had come all the way from Belfast through a snowstorm and had already ended up in one or two ditches.
But we ended up having the best craic.
He was a teetotaller himself but gave me a pint glass filled with sherry. By the time I was halfway through it, we were the best of bosom buddies.
He started cooking up ideas about how I was going to come and turn all the children into brilliant harp players.
He also desperately wanted to introduce me to Jarlath, who ran the fish-processing factory and was apparently looking for a wife.
Father McDyer decided I was going to become part of life in Glencolmcille whether I liked it or not.
And I did like it.
We ran the first summer school in 1986.
It was a God-given place for me. I had students in Northern Ireland and also students from places I had lived in Cork and Dublin.
It gave us somewhere remote and welcoming where people from north and south could come together.
Father McDyer was an amazing motivator.
He even allowed me to stand up on the altar when we were raising money to buy harps.
That’s how we got started.
Janet:
The last few years became difficult because the accommodation we usually used was given over to refugees, who were entitled and welcome to have it, but it meant I was homeless.
So I ended up in Dungloe two years ago and I’m happy out.
I come here in the summers now and run three or four weeks of summer schools.
I only take eight people a week because that is as many as fit in the kitchen.
A lot of them are adults.
Many of my earlier students are turning into mammies now. Some have abandoned the harp because they have jobs, or they’re teachers or civil servants.
But they’ll come back to it.
When the children get to the age where they’re looking for their harping granny again, I’ll be able to advise them.
Tara:
You mentioned Father McDyer. He was actually from Glenties, where I’m from.
Janet:
He was indeed.
Tara:
Another link.
You said earlier that the session meant so much to you. Do you still play sessions?
Janet:
Oh God, yeah.
It’s my lifeblood really because I was never good at practising. I don’t practise as such.
I depend on a session for a whole lot of things. It is my social life.
When I came up here to Dungloe, I knew there was a Comhaltas branch out in Meenacross and that Fiona in the library was in contact with them.
So the first thing I said was, “Where are the sessions going on? Where do people play? What pubs do they play in?”
I would slink in modestly and maybe say, “Would you mind if I came and joined you for a few tunes?”
I loved listening to Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh’s podcast and hearing what the proper etiquette should be.
She’s absolutely bang on.
You don’t go thundering in.
The first time I go somewhere, I’ll leave the harp in the car because it’s very hard to get in unnoticed when you have a bloody big instrument with you.
I make the least amount of trouble for myself.
It’s also important that you have a chair where you’re not jammed up against the table, and where your elbows aren’t in someone’s way and their fiddle or drones aren’t going to poke you in the eye.
It is about getting comfortable.
I didn’t know people in North Donegal the way I knew people around Glenties, Ardara and Glencolmcille.
But once I found the session in Hudaí’s, that was it. I’m there every Friday night when I’m here, and sometimes Mondays too.
Where there was traditional music, there was my tribe
Janet:
For the years I was in Belfast, and four years in Derry, this whole area was my hunting ground and my social network.
I would go out to a session in Bangor once a week with Diana and Nigel, and that was a whole different set with a strong Scottish connection.
But I knew that where there was traditional music, there was my tribe.
I would just get stuck in.
It was a night of joy and friendship.
It is all for the camaraderie. It is about finding where you belong.
Nobody is ever a stranger with Irish music, no matter where.
I used to travel all over the universe, whether it was America or Europe, and there would always be a session or an Irish musician somewhere.
There would be an Irish pub and you’d ask, “What night do the musicians come by?”
Even if you didn’t know the people, you knew people that they knew.
There were always connections.
That’s the thing about being Irish.
It’s not, “What do you do for a living and how much money have you in the bank?”
It’s, “Where do you come from? Do you know this fellow? I know your cousins.”
Tara:
We’re nearly always one person removed from everybody.
Janet:
Absolutely.
My mother was from Wexford. My father was from Cookstown, Tyrone.
I was born in Dublin but was raised between North Down and Dublin.
We always holidayed in South Kerry.
My dad was a musician too. He played piano. Another fellow played accordion and the two of them were the summertime dance band in Waterville.
Dad played a bit of concertina as well.
He was always around musicians.
Classical music was considered the proper music, what you learned in college and did your grades in.
Traditional music was the activity of every other day.
Two different musical worlds
Tara:
Did you find classical music was the prim and proper side, but traditional music was where the heart lay?
Janet:
For me, they were two completely different worlds.
My classical friends and colleagues could look down their noses at the fact that I was playing an Irish harp and not looking to move on to the “proper harp”.
“When are you going to get a proper grown-up harp?”
And I thought, “I have no aspirations to that. I’m perfectly happy. I’m playing an Irish harp. I have no interest in the orchestral harp.”
There was prejudice the other way as well.
When I was in Trinity doing my first music degree, I wanted to explore music in the world.
I loved hearing about what was happening in Cork with Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and Aloys Fleischmann.
I gave my first student recital on the harp.
I thought my fellow students could do with a bit of harp music because they wouldn’t have known much about it.
I played The Belfast Hornpipe. It’s not exactly your hardest-core dance tune, but I could do pretty frilly things and thought I might impress my classical friends.
Instead, the reaction was, “Here’s diddley-eye. Here’s diddley-eye.”
I absolutely recoiled.
I regretted playing it because I had brought that attitude down on myself.
From that point, I was fighting just to be treated ordinarily.
It was an immediate dismissal.
I realised there were times when I wouldn’t raise my head above the parapet and tell people how much more I felt like a traditional musician.
I’m not a straitjacketed musician.
I love what you might call improvising, although that’s not quite the right word.
You’ve got a great tune. Everybody is playing the tune and everybody is doing something slightly different with it.
You’re using ornamentation and variation, and with the harp you’ve also got the left-hand accompaniment.
It adds another level of adventurousness.
I was never somebody who could play something fixed.
I wanted to do it differently because you feel differently on different days.
Some days you feel perky. Some days it is hard to get out of bed.
On the good days, you’re flying it, doing rolls and cuts and God knows what else.
I loved that creative flexibility.
Perfection, nerves and approval
Janet:
I love classical music too, but I really feel at home with traditional music because I grew up with it and it wasn’t something I got beaten over the head with.
With classical music, I had to work very hard to get approval from my father.
He was a very fine musician and it was never quite good enough.
I would die of nervousness.
I’d get the shakes. I’d be sick.
I became very agitated with the pressure to play everything perfectly the way I was supposed to play it.
Whereas I could relax in traditional music.
Tara:
At what point did your dad give you the sense that you had arrived?
Janet:
He never really did.
He died young.
That’s one of the old sadnesses.
I was nineteen when Dad died and the younger ones in the family were ten and eleven.
We were just on the brink of him becoming excited about what I was doing.
I had won a few competitions in the Feis Ceoil, but I was spending most of my time desperate to get Daddy’s love and approval by getting the music that meant so much to him right.
That meant the grades.
I had finished all the grades, but he was a taskmaster when it came to gaining approval.
I never had that terror of doing it wrong with traditional music.
It was much more relaxed and interactive.
It didn’t matter if you played bum notes.
It didn’t matter if the people you were playing with weren’t the winners.
It was another place entirely.
It was an escape for me.
The musicians who came through the house
Janet:
I adored my father.
He was part of that social circle with Éamon de Buitléar, Seán Ó Riada, known to us as John Reidy, and Paddy Moloney.
They were regular people who wafted through our sitting room because Dad would bring them back after parties.
There was a Sunday morning session in Mount Pleasant and Dad used to disappear over there and play music.
He and Éamon de Buitléar would be the boom-chuckers on the piano if a piano was needed.
Dad played a bit of concertina too.
When he went into business, music became a pastime rather than a profession because he had a family to support.
This was before The Chieftains became The Chieftains.
Dad would have them out for office parties.
That was around the period when those musicians discovered they could make some money from playing.
I was always trying to play.
Seán Ó Riada’s attitude towards the harp was that it had become very drawing-room, lady-centred, Irish-Colleen, touristic caricature.
That disappointed him terribly.
But that was what I had been taught in school.
At Sion Hill we had a wonderful teacher, Máirín Ferriter.
We were being trained up for Jury’s Cabaret.
We learned how to use chords.
That turned out to be brilliant because when I was with my traditional musician friends, I could take the boom-chuck accompaniment I had heard my father doing on piano and transfer it to the harp.
I got into traditional accompaniment through the back door.
The Belfast Harp Orchestra
Tara:
My own dad died about eleven years ago.
When I was around nineteen or twenty, after years of little corrections and encouragement, I remember the first time he actually said, “That was really good, Tara.”
Janet:
Isn’t that such an important moment?
I wish I had had that closeness with my father.
By the time we were beginning to find that conversation, he was terminally ill.
But he was politically motivated too, and that influenced the work I later did in Northern Ireland.
I realised the harp could be useful during the Troubles.
We could have children from both communities playing together.
That became a core value for me.
Being useful enriched my life.
Tara:
Was that the Belfast Harp Orchestra?
Janet:
Yeah.
I’m so proud.
I didn’t have babies myself but I have harp students all over the place who are my nurtured outgoings.
A lot of the most dynamic, creative harp players out there now came through my stable.
People don’t talk about their teachers that much, but my cheeks glow when I hear them play.
My life was about creating the world I would have loved.
I would love to have been one of my own students.
Rethinking what it means to teach
Janet:
I didn’t get it right all the time.
My students taught me far more than I taught them.
When I produced my first book in 2004, I apologised to my students in the preface because I had experimented on them.
They taught me how to help them get things right.
There were things I hadn’t properly understood about the difference between formal and informal music.
There was pressure on me, and pressure I passed on to them, to produce a polished standard of harping.
I was interested in the music around the 1790s and the Belfast Harpers’ Assembly, the United Irishmen and the history around the harp in Belfast.
That story mattered hugely to me.
I was an Irish Catholic coming north, but with a name like Harbison I also had an Ulster-Scots planter background.
The Harbisons came over with the Ulster Scots and settled around the Lough Neagh area.
The family story is that they were originally Harbinsons.
Somebody dared to marry a Catholic, the family divided and one side eventually dropped the “n” and became Harbison.
So I ended up an Irish Catholic nationalist with an Ulster planter name.
That opened doors in ways that might surprise people.
I was always a bit of a floater between churches too.
My first husband was Presbyterian and my second husband is an English cathedral organist.
I’m fairly gregarious in my musical tastes.
I love big church music. I love rock music.
When Fintan Vallely’s compendium came out, somebody described me as a fusion musician.
I thought, “God, jeepers. I thought I could play a decent jig and reel.”
Tara:
You mentioned harper versus harpist.
What is the difference?
Janet:
It’s all very grey now.
It’s a bit like being a brilliant classical violinist and saying, “I’m a fiddler.”
The “-ist” ending, harpist, is the classical version.
I’ve always been around traditional music with the harp.
I did six months of lessons on a classical harp because I wanted to understand what people meant when they said my hand position was wrong or my thumb wasn’t right.
I thought, “The music’s coming out all right.”
But I wanted to understand what they thought I should be doing.
So I went for lessons in the College of Music in Dublin with Caitríona Yeats and learned how classical harpists did it.
We spent months on scales and arpeggios.
Caitríona eventually got a job in Sweden and Mercedes Garvey took over the class.
One day Mercedes asked me why I was doing this.
Why was I coming to classical harp lessons?
I said I had never had proper instrumental lessons and people kept telling me my hands were wrong.
Mercedes said, “Don’t you be minding them. Your playing is grand.”
By that stage I had toured the States with Comhaltas and won a championship.
Then there was Mícheál Ó hAlmhain.
He was never backward about coming forward and telling me what was rough and what wasn’t.
He didn’t like the way I was playing five-note rolls.
I learned a lot from him because he was listening with a very strong traditional ear.
Then in the sessions in Dublin I had wonderful musicians around me.
People would give me tunes and say, “Try that differently. Don’t be trying to do it the way the fiddle does it. Do it the way it works for you on the harp.”
Everybody shaped me.
They were all my teachers.
That was very different from the classical experience.
So I was quite happy to be a harper rather than a harpist.
Tara:
You have a harp beside you.
Can you show us the difference between the rolls Mícheál wanted and what you had been doing?
Janet:
I would have been doing a kind of five-note roll.
He wanted me doing a cut-and-tip roll rather than the triplet roll.
The treble is a very harpy thing to do. It’s easy and it impresses everybody.
The cut-and-tip roll is much harder work.
When I was teaching on the TTCT, Mícheál Ó hAlmhain insisted the harpers had to play the proper cut-and-tip roll.
No compromise. None of this triplet rubbish!
But he didn’t realise how much technical skill that takes on the harp.
We already have to decide what to do with the left hand.
We’re arranging and accompanying at the same time.
You have to work out what the left hand can do that complements the tune without overwhelming what is happening in the right.
You don’t want to make a dog’s dinner of it.
The core tunes that connect everybody
Tara:
Is the repertoire that harpers play in sessions slightly different, or do you try to play what everyone else is playing?
Janet:
One of my gripes is that harp players don’t learn enough of the basic tunes.
The core tunes are what connect everybody.
I was playing The Silver Spear there.
Then you have tunes like The Cat’s Meow. That’s relatively new, but it’s a great tune and everybody plays it.
Then there are the regular tunes: The Battering Ram, Saddle the Pony, The Kesh Jig, Miss McLeod’s Reel.
Yesterday I was doing Out on the Ocean. I knew it years ago as The Portroe Jig.
I think it’s really important that everybody has that core of standard session tunes that are widely known.
A lot of teaching now gives everything to the student on a platter.
You’re told what ornaments to put in and what bass notes to play.
It gets a fast result, but it isn’t your music.
It is the music of whoever arranged it for you.
People can go into Fleadh competitions with very polished arrangements but perhaps they’ve only worked on those same three tunes all year.
I produced a lot of children who did exactly that.
Eventually it came onto my conscience.
I thought, “They’re presenting themselves as traditional musicians but I haven’t taught them what to do for themselves.”
I needed to change my whole approach.
It was too easy for me to fix everything for them.
Now I teach people how to do it themselves.
They may get a bit miffed because I won’t give them a complete arrangement.
I want them to find their own voice in the music.
Teaching social musicianship
Tara:
Do you find you lose students that way?
Someone who is excited and wants the polished result might want to move faster.
Janet:
It’s already happened here this week.
There’s another issue.
I’m teaching people to play in a session and teaching accompaniment skills, but sometimes that isn’t what they or their parents want.
The parents want them to win competitions.
They want competition-ready arrangements with lots of ornamentation and funky basses.
That isn’t what I want to teach.
I want to teach them to get the music into the community.
I want them to enjoy and experience the communal aspect of music and have the kind of friendships worldwide that I have enjoyed throughout my life.
I make a point now of presenting myself as a teacher of social musicianship.
I’ve done all the other things.
I’ve had well over forty students with All-Ireland championship titles.
Almost all my students got As in their Leaving Certs or A-levels playing music.
I’m very proud of that.
But that was me coaching them with fixed arrangements to tick the box for a quick exam or competition.
I don’t feel I taught them properly because I gave them what was being demanded of me.
I didn’t stand my ground.
I have lost students now because parents are looking for competition-ready players.
Tara:
Are those who won the competitions still playing?
Janet:
Mostly not.
They didn’t have the breadth of tunes.
Competitions often aren’t looking for the regular tunes. They’re looking for peripheral tunes, big tunes, show-off tunes such as The Bucks of Oranmore or Johnny Doherty tunes.
Tara:
They’re not necessarily the tunes that give you the connection with other musicians.
Janet:
Exactly.
I can look at a generation of players I taught who weren’t able to pass that social element on because I failed to teach it to them at that time.
We were having a great time with the Belfast Harp Orchestra, flying around doing stage work.
I was teaching them stage music.
We would have had sessions behind the scenes too, but many of the players who also played concertina, flute or fiddle still tended to choose those instruments in the session rather than the harp.
That was my failing.
I’m hoping I can reverse that with the generation I’m teaching now.
Tara:
The question left by the previous guest is: have you ever given somebody playing in a session the look mid-tune?
And what level of misdemeanour earns it?
Janet:
Oh yes.
Apparently I’m renowned for the look.
When I was with the orchestra, I was facing the players and there would be the look.
I’ve got a great wee story.
We were playing for the Emperor of Japan in Áras an Uachtaráin.
One of the girls was about eleven or twelve and had missed one or two rehearsals.
I could see her footering and playing rubbish.
I was trying to give her the look and the people beside her were trying to make her look at me so she would see that she was getting the look.
Then I started mouthing, “Fake it.”
She didn’t think I was saying “fake it”.
Her eyes opened like saucers.
I kept saying, “Fake. Fake. Fake!”
Eventually she realised what I meant and started moving her hands around the harp, pretending to play.
The wife of the Emperor thought she was the most darling thing and what an expert she was.
She wasn’t touching a string, but from the audience it looked as though she was playing beautifully.
She had a big beaming smile once she got over the shock of what she thought I had been saying.
That’s how the look can work.
Newcomers and desperation to belong
Janet:
With somebody new to a session who doesn’t understand the etiquette, they might be desperate to lead sets or trying to jump in in the middle.
It could be ego.
Or it might simply be that they’re desperate to belong.
The word that comes to mind is desperation.
You cajole them and make them feel welcome.
They don’t need to be stressed or trying to meet an agenda.
It isn’t necessarily a look that says, “Stop.”
It might be a look that says, “Don’t worry. You don’t need to be desperate. It’s fine.”
Everybody is welcome.
Everybody is included.
A session is a family.
You’re going to have brilliant people and beginners.
It doesn’t matter.
Everybody will be able to play something.
I like to say it is organic music.
It isn’t linear.
You’re not starting at the beginning of the page and struggling to the end.
You play as many notes as you are able to play at the pace everybody else is playing.
Then you add more notes as you get better.
Before you know it, you’re flying it.
Tara:
Have you got a preference for how many harps should be in one session, or how many instruments generally?
Janet:
As many as possible!
If you are putting on a spectacle, a bunch of harps on stage looks wonderful.
That was part of how I created the orchestra.
I needed to find an audience.
Nobody was going to come to a solo harp concert.
Modern concert audiences are looking for spectacle.
The orchestra had beginners, intermediates and senior players.
People came in as beginners, moved through the orchestra and eventually became performers, teachers, studio musicians or people working professionally in music.
But I hope some of them also fed into the social environment and the social business of session playing.
That’s where my heart is.
That’s where the joy is.
Tara:
So how many people do you need for a session?
Janet:
At least two.
Playing on your own is like talking to yourself in the mirror.
There is only so much good you can get out of it.
Tara:
I’m like that with fiddles. I love at least two fiddles.
Janet:
I’ll play with anybody.
I remember in your podcast with Mairéad you asked her about instruments.
I have a big thing for the uilleann pipes.
I’ve always gravitated towards piping because I love the tunes they play.
I love the old piping tunes, especially the epic pieces such as Allistrum’s March.
I love that colourful story music.
But I’ll go to a session anywhere.
Tara:
We might play a few tunes.
I was wondering what kind of tunes we’d be playing so I could join you.
Janet:
You don’t need to worry.
I’d be more than happy to play a few tunes with you.
Janet’s description of the session as her social life, her practice and the place where she found her people runs through this whole conversation.
What is striking is how much of her teaching has gradually moved in the same direction. After decades of producing highly polished players and competition winners, she now speaks very openly about the limits of teaching music only for performance, exams or prizes.
Her phrase “social musicianship” feels important.
Knowing a tune is one thing. Knowing how to play it with other people, how to listen, how to adapt, how to join in and how to contribute without needing to dominate is something different.
Janet also talks about the importance of learning the ordinary tunes that connect musicians. Not simply the impressive pieces, but the repertoire that allows somebody to sit down with people they may never have met before and find common ground.
Perhaps that is one of the great strengths of traditional music.
You can travel somewhere new, know nobody, take out an instrument and discover that there is already a conversation waiting for you.
As Janet puts it:
“Where there was traditional music, there was my tribe.”
https://www.janetharbisonharp.com/
The Belfast Harp Orchestra - arrangements for harp
Edward Bunting Digital Harp Collection (ITMA)
Fr. McDyer, Glencolmcille
History of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann
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*Recorded and produced by Tara Connaghan and edited by Anita Alvarez Santos. Recorded in person in Dungloe in July 2025.
*Intro music: Live recording of Janet Harbison and Tara Connaghan in July 2025