McGrath,

It was Derek Bell. A brilliant harper and from all accounts, and very nice man.

Jana, sharping levers are fairly inexpensive, even if you pay to have them installed. At an Irish session you could get away with haveing sharping levers on the F strings and the C strings, and then you would be able to join in on a lot of tunes.

In a good session where all musicians are respected you can start off a tune yourself and get others to join in. Usually the other musicians will play more softly while the harp is leading the tune. (Not all musicians are aware of this, though, and I was getting frustrated at the sessions I used to attend where one man who played an accordion would pick up the tune, play it much louder and faster than I was playing and then make it almost impossible for me to keep playing throughout the whole tune. His way of playing in sessions is unusual rather than the more common respect for other musicians.)

In our session I would have a few tunes which a dulcimer player also knew and we would do those and other musicians might quietly accompany us on whistles, accordion, guitar etc. The whistle player had a few favourites which she liked playing with the harp too.

Do you know about the e-mail based international Harplist?    Harping people from all over the world are members and we discuss a wide range of harp-related topics. They are a very nice bunch of people, too. A lot like the people here at Mudcat.

Helen