For many years I dreamed of moving to Ireland and studying for a Master’s Degree in Irish Traditional Music Performance at Maynooth University. I wished to study harp with Gráinne Hambly and Michael Rooney and play hours of music every day. Little did I know I would get my wish, but under circumstances I could have never imagined. In March 2020 Covid arrived like a thunderclap, and like so many artists I lost thousands of dollars of work as gig after gig cancelled. By the end of the month, I was sitting morosely at my parents’ house, passing time helping with their home remodel by sitting in their barn loft, sanding, priming, and painting piece after piece of baseboard while listening to Stephen King audiobooks, Taylor Swift, and obscure Irish traditional musicians and wondering what on earth I was going to do with my life. In that intensely low point in my life, I reached for the things that brought the most solace to my soul: stories, music, and something to do with my hands. 

Everything abruptly changed on Easter Monday 2020 when I received an email from the Fulbright Commission congratulating me on a successful application and notifying me that I would receive a full scholarship and stipend to move to Ireland and complete my research proposal on traditional Irish harp accompaniment and pursue a Master’s degree in Irish Traditional Music. I was elated and suddenly a bit terrified at the prospect. I had been attempting to secure funding for my research since 2018 but had been waitlisted by Fulbright and rejected for a Government of Ireland Fellowship the year prior. Two weeks after Easter, I also received the Government of Ireland International Education Scholarship. There could be no doubt: I was moving to Ireland. 

Summer 2020, I packed my suitcase and moved 3,700 miles away from home, during a worldwide pandemic. I quarantined alone upon arrival in a strange room for two weeks and attempted to navigate a foreign country’s Covid restrictions. Unbeknownst to me, I was uprooting my life to move halfway around the world to study harp exclusively over Zoom, research a thesis without a physical library, and do little but play my instrument in isolation through month after month of lockdown restrictions. 

The fall term passed at a snail’s pace, but I worked hard to study and play harp despite experiencing lingering anxiety and crippling uncertainty about whether or not we would enter another full lockdown. I had the chance to attend only one class in person a week: A 45-minute music technology tutorial with two other students in the 18^th century Georgian Music building on the opposite side of campus. After much anticipation Christmas came, with an invitation to visit acquaintances in Northern Ireland. They graciously came and picked me up from my campus housing, and we drove an hour and a half to their home on the most southernly tip of Northern Ireland in Co. Down. 

Christmas passed in a welcome blur of family activity, with four children under ten clamoring to be entertained. I baked cookies and relished the sense of normality I felt while joining a family in doing home based holiday activities. The mundane daily interactions of playing games and Barbies with small children and cooking food with their parents lifted my spirits better than anything. 

Such carefree times didn’t last long. After Christmas the news was bleak—hospitals overrun with patients with Covid and other maladies, people dying in ambulances in queues stretching around the block from emergency rooms. The United Kingdom, of which Northern Ireland is a part, was placed under a strict stay-at-home lockdown. I’d come to visit for two weeks over Christmas; I ended up living with newfound friends for ten months. 

We hunkered down, found a routine, settled on a living arrangement, and I became an accidental lodger with a family of six. 

One of the unintended consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic was the space it created to practice my instrument. Throughout the entire year I completed my coursework, taught seventeen harp students and two online classes weekly, and had plenty of time to practice at least three hours a day. I had little to no in-person socializing outside of my lockdown family. However, sitting in a small room practicing hours a day does wonders to your playing. In all my years playing the harp, I never had time to practice with such intensity, even during my undergraduate degree, as there were always too many obligations to meet. There were days when playing harp was the last thing I wanted to do, but as with most things in life, making the choice to do something is the most difficult part. Once I actually began the work of practicing, I didn’t want to do anything else. Playing and singing the music created the motivation I needed, but I had to start with the physical work of sitting down at the harp, learning the tune melodies, trying out arrangement ideas, failing, and beginning again. Sometimes I just had to struggle through grueling, tedious work before I could reap the rewards and find joy in the making of beautiful music. During this time, I also studied online with Gráinne Hambly and Michael Rooney, attended every online Harp Festival I could find, and even taught some online workshops and gave a virtual concert or two. That Covid-haunted year forced me to focus my energy on only a few things: playing or teaching harp, researching my thesis, occasionally entertaining a three-year-old, and yes, running.

During my Fulbright year in Ireland, the country endured six and a half months of near complete lockdown in their homes (no going further than 5 km from your residence for most of that time and only for essential reasons). That fall I stumbled on an app called “Walk to Mordor” that logs distances walked or run and leads you through all the milestones Frodo and Sam cover throughout TheLord of the Rings on their way to Mordor. I had rarely gone running prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, but in 2020 I laced up my running shoes and began to run regularly for the first time in my life. I learned to struggle along, one foot in front of the other, despite the consistent intense desire to quit at every step. The struggle was made endurable, even enjoyable over time, by music, audiobooks, and interesting podcasts. Listening to art while running, most of the time in the rain, helped me persevere even though all I wanted to do was quit. And there is nothing so exhilarating as being notified you have arrived safe in Rivendell or knowing you are being chased by orcs to help you book more miles every week. I tracked my running progress through the app and made it the 1,779 miles to Mordor in just over a year. Apart from the diversion and discipline of running, playing, and studying, there was also a heavy sprinkling of rather violent BBC crime dramas, long walks on the beach, and a bit of online shopping for camping gear that distracted me from the depressing world news constantly bombarding everyone on every media source. 

In the midst of such difficult times, one of the best distractions was working on my thesis, titled “The Once and Future Harp: The Irish Harp as Traditional Song Accompaniment in the Recorded Era, 1900–Present.” I received my Fulbright fellowship by submitting a research proposal on the topic of harp accompaniment of traditionally unaccompanied Irish language song in the 20^thcentury, and so I had to figure out how to research my topic and complete a decent thesis without access to any physical archives or libraries. I settled on my research focus after considering what area of Irish harp study would be reasonable to approach in a Master’s thesis and intersected with my two serious interests of Irish harp and traditional song. For years I had been immensely interested in self-accompaniment on the harp and had studied Irish traditional song and the Irish language with Irish guitarist and singer Dáithí Sproule in Minnesota and spent three summers Studying the Irish language in the Gaeltacht (the Irish language speaking region) in Donegal, Ireland.

While studying and writing, I had the opportunity to notate harp accompaniment from three separate recordings of excellent harpists and analyze the difference in their approach to song accompaniment: Mary O’Hara in the 1950s self-accompanying herself singing“Óró Mo Bháidín,” Kathleen Loughnane accompanying Seán nos singer Seosaimhín Ní Bheaglaoich singing “Bean Dubh a’ Ghleanna” in the 1990s, and finally, Sligo harper Michael Rooney accompanying traditional singer Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh singing “An Buachaill Caol Dubh” circa 2012. 

All three harpists examined through these recordings approached the role of harp accompanist in various ways. Their individual approaches to accompaniment were highly influenced by the way in which they came to learn the harp, whether through a traditional classical harp background in a convent school context or the broader approach to traditional harp playing gained through the lens of the Irish musical tradition. Despite their backgrounds, each harp player developed an individual style that manifests itself in their playing and accompaniment. Time and the shifting musical landscape of Ireland widened the musical palette these musicians demonstrate, but no matter the era in which each musician was born, all emphasized the primacy of the song melody in their playing. Mary O’Hara’s accompaniment relied mainly on steady, straightforward arpeggios. 

Moving forward several decades, Kathleen Loughnane employed many long rolled chords that support and strictly follow the phrasing of the singer. Harmonically, the chords are fairly simple and mostly follow a triadic chord structure. But, by the 2010s, Michael Rooney has taken his own approach to accompaniment with chords that followed the melody closely, yet are harmonically interesting through the use of added notes and untraditional chord choices. He approached the accompaniment with a different mindset, prioritizing the intervals within the accompaniment rather than focusing on the root chords. His approach expanded the sound the harp is capable of producing and is harmonically distinct amongst the three harp players.

The case study portion of my research was my favorite portion of the thesis to write. I enjoyed the practicality of discovering exactly what harp accompanists were doing on these recordings and then I learned to examine my own playing in turn. In my previous projects, I had relied heavily on arpeggiated accompaniment, which I still use in my playing. However, listening to so many great harp players during my Covid year inspired me include more jazz influenced chords in my own playing. I added more seventh and ninth intervals into my chords on tracks such as “When First I Went to Sea” and “So Here’s to You.” And in the accompaniment for “Bruach na Cairraige Bainne” I attempted to follow the melody as closely as I could and allow space for the rolled chords to ring. 

Instead of having a year-end recital to perform, the University paid for my academic cohort to go into a recording studio and each make a seven-track album on which we were graded. My album, “Hall-Gate House,” is the product of that year of practice and study. The title track takes its name from the house I lived in with my newfound Irish family. While I was living with them, I wrote a waltz in the traditional Irish style as a thank you to them for taking me in as a stranger so wholeheartedly. The night before I moved back to America, I presented them with the tune embroidered as sheet music in a frame as well as the audio track from my recording session in Dublin. They hadn’t known the tune I’d been practicing for months in their spare room was a tune I wrote just for them. After I moved home, I completed the final four tracks of the album with my musical mentor and friend Dáithí Sproule and released it in fall 2022. “Hall-Gate House” seemed the best title since it was literally the only place I saw, my Irish home, for most of 2021. 

“Hall-Gate House” has been out in the world since fall 2022 and I am grateful for the positive reception it has received. It was a labor of love to create, especially under unique circumstances I’ll be telling my grandchildren about someday, and I’m immensely proud of it. Despite being locked down, isolated, and then marooned (albeit happily) with strangers turned dear friends, I grew so much during my Fulbright year both personally and musically. I learned how to struggle onward even when I thought I had nothing left to give. During the process of recording “Hall-Gate House” I re-recorded one particular track three times, once in Ireland and twice in Minnesota. But by the third recording session I managed the difficult accompaniment section without losing the tempo or rhythm of the melody and I was glad I’d persevered until the track was completed to the best of my ability. It is my hope that the hard-learned lesson of perseverance, both personal and musical, will impact my approach to harp playing for the rest of my life. If the season of lockdown in Ireland taught me anything, it is that in running, as in life and harp, there comes a point where you just have to keep going, one foot in front of the other, listening to the music that brings you joy and pressing forward on the way to Mordor and back again.