10thirtysix

(uplifting music) I'm Julia Coronelli. And this is my second season as principal harpist at the Milwaukee Symphony. I just fell in love with the harp when I was two years old. I think I always loved magical things and fairy lands and all of that as a little toddler and kind of always wanted to go into that world. And I saw a harpist playing at a wedding when I was two years old and I was completely mesmerized. And told my mother I was going to play the harp. And she said, "Are you crazy?" This harp today is a 41 strings and seven pedals with 21 settings. And so nobody starts playing that instrument. So I started playing a little Celtic harp with levers instead of pedals. And I just, I loved it. And I actually didn't have a full size harp until I bought this one in 2013. So I even played my Julliard Masters recital on a three-quarter size instrument and just kind of always, it probably actually suits my size much better than a full-size instrument, as I'm five feet tall. But there was no way that I could get the sound out of a smaller instrument that I can get out of this size instrument. So that's different in regard to a lot of other string instruments, because there's all kinds of different sizes and you can kind of figure out what suits you, but for harps, there's one size that they figured out. This is how we make it sound good. And so I've really had to kind of adapt being very small. And just kind of make up my own way of playing the instrument. (Julia laughing) (ethereal harp music) I love my instrument. And I guess it's kind of more similar to wind instruments in the regard that harps don't really last forever because there's so much tension and there's so many moving parts. And the pedals go, there's rods that go up actually through the column. There's seven pedal rods, and then it goes into the mechanism and there's so many just tiny moving parts and so much tension on the instrument. That after about 30 years, they don't, they don't really sound like they once did. But until that point, I really love it because I think it is a really intimate relationship also because we're not using any, we don't have a bow. We don't even with a piano, there's nothing striking it. It's just we're literally pulling the sound out with our fingers. So I really love that aspect that it's just so tactile. And with my personal instrument, I know exactly how, you know, how to press and hopefully get the sound I want. Except when strings are breaking during concerts, (Julia laughing) but that's part of the territory. (Julia laughing) (happy music)