07:30 PM
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Encircling the World is a musical project designed to illuminate the common experience of musicians and music lovers from many traditions. Yes, there are differences in instruments and traditions, but what do we share, what do we have in common, how can we inspire one another, and what is this beautiful thing called music?
This fifth installment of EtW offers an evening with harpists from South American, European and African traditions. Performers include Julia Seager Scott, triple harp and clarsach; Martha Mazzoleni, Paraguayan harp; and Sharlene Wallace, Celtic harp!
Each musician will play a solo set and speak about what they choose to share about their musical education, experience, views on music’s role in their lives and their communities, and so on.. They’ll also improvise some music together, and there will be time for questions and discussion with the audience. Always a fascinating and ear-opening musical time – join us!
Featured Program
Sharlene Wallace is a Canadian lever and pedal harp player, composer, educator and visual explorer, all through which she expresses her relationship to space, the natural world and intuition. Winner of two international lever harp competitions, Sharlene has given concerts and workshops across Canada, the United States and in Europe and toured with Ron Korb (flutes), George Koller (bass), Joseph Macerollo (accordion), Kim Robertson (Celtic harp), Harp & Holly (Sandra Swannell, Terry Young, Rob Ritchie) and Susan Piltch (flute, piano). Sharlene is a founding member of the trio Iona Passage with pianist Eric Robertson and fiddle player Anne Lindsay. Sharlene is an influential figure in the lever harp world for her performances, recordings, compositions, teaching and for her use of this instrument in contemporary and original music. Commissions written for Sharlene include Rodney Sharman’s Music for Lever Harp, Strings and Percussion and Alfredo Rolando Ortiz’s Niagara Moon. Sharlene’s own compositions are featured throughout her nine independent albums. In 2024 she released two albums for lever harp and electronics: Lilac Embers, an album of Shar-compositions for acoustic and electric lever harps with electronics by Jean Martin, and Trees.Listen, a co-composition recording-performance-environmental project with composer Frank Horvat for Celtic harp and fixed electronics. Trees.Listen’s live performance includes photo / video projections by Sharlene. Sharlene has taught lever and pedal harp privately, in four universities and in workshops across North America, including over three decades for Island Mountain Arts in Wells, BC. She herself has a performance degree from the University of Toronto where she studied with harp oracle Judy Loman. Sharlene is also a graphic designer and photographer.
Martha Mazzoleni was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and her love for Latin American music was instilled in her by her parents from an early age. She wanted to play the harp from the age of 4, but her parents first chose to put her in piano lessons. At the age of 9 she began to take Paraguayan harp and accordion classes, and gave her first public performance two months later, during a Christmas party. She began studies with Paraguayan Master Benicio Godoy, who thought Martha could continue to share his musical legacy for years to come. She had the opportunity to play at different venues and events, allowing her to develop enough confidence to conduct successful performances across Uruguay, parts of Argentina and in southern Brazil. She made her first recording at the age of 20 with the group Raiz Americana (American Root). As a harpist she represented the Paraguayan Embassy for more than 10 years and the Embassy of Chile for over 7 years. Martha moved with her husband to Toronto in 1990 and since reigniting her musical career here has performed in many private and public settings, radio and TV. She was in Toronto Talent, Hispanic Roots and has been featured in numerous articles in Toronto's Hispanic papers such as El Popular, De Norte a Sur, SNAP South Mississauga News Paper, Abanico Magazine, La Guia Magazine, DOS Magazine and others. She has been a judge member for the Unpublished Music Festival Radio CIRV FM and Ondas Hispanas Channel 2.
No one ever asks Julia Seager-Scott if she wishes she played the flute. Not as she muscles her Lyon & Healy concert harp (47 strings, 82 lbs) backstage at the National Ballet of Canada, or at symphony gigs across Ontario, or opening for Feist with Charles Spearin and The Happiness Project (Juno Award winner, 2010). It doesn't happen as she wheels her harp into the pit at the Stratford Festival for the 1000th time, nor when she draws the short straw between the other two harpists in the Soaring Harp Trio and they get to say hello to fans while she schleps the bloody great things across the parking lot. That's why she decided she needed more harps, like the baroque, wire-strung Gaelic harp called the Clarsach (34 strings, 15 lbs), so she can more accurately play the music of the Irish blind harper Turlogh O'Carolan (who at least had a guide and a horse when he was on the road). And that's why she got an Italian triple harp (93 strings, 28 lbs). It was David Fallis and the former Toronto Consort who encouraged her to get that one, and she's since played with them and with the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, both as a continuo accompanist (to Dame Emma Kirkby, among many others) and as a featured soloist. She also played the Handel Harp Concerto all the way across the country in Calgary, with the Rosa Barocca Ensemble. All those burly handlers at the airports in Toronto and Calgary? Nope. They never said a thing. Julia even played for former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. After she had finished, he looked her right in the eye as if there was something he wanted to ask but, being a man who knows what's good for him, all he said was "Thank you very much."