15-Mar-2019 Once again the dragons are getting too excited with their bio posts… This time Liz’s bio was a little long for the main page so here’s the longer version for all you fans to enjoy!

Liz had zero chance of not ending up in music somehow. With a mother working as a professional musician, an uncle and cousins all in bands and owning a music store, and an aunt who also played flute… Well, you get the picture. But her journey to playing the harp didn’t begin until high school, when her mom asked her, “If you could play any instrument, what would it be?” It only took Liz about 5 minutes to turn over all of the instruments in an orchestra over in her mind. Suddenly, she landed on it – the harp! This confused her mother, as Liz had never even mentioned this before. Even so, on her very next birthday, Liz got a beautiful Celtic harp made from red cedar, and she never looked back. Really, though, it was the harp that chose her.

Next, meet Cher – Liz’s harp. Cher was delivered by Liz herself – she made Cher herself with a master luthier at Sligo Harp Shop. The name “Cher” is a play on words – this model is called a Luchair (loo-share), meaning joy or light in Gaelic. This harp is a traditional Celtic style with manual levers to change pitches – the type that has been played for hundreds of years and precedes the big, ornate orchestral harps you’ll see at the symphony.

Liz’s goal is to break stereotypes about what the harp is and can do – she aims to steer as far away as possible from the saccharine sweetness typically applied to the harp idiom. Liz plays with the idea that the instrument should serve the music, and that we shouldn’t be fitting the music to the instrument. You’ll find her playing power chords to fill out the sound, intricate melody lines in keeping with traditional Celtic-style playing, and finding any possible way to make Cher fit into any song or style – including the use of reverb, overdrive and tremolo effects.