Harpists often have unique stories on how they began learning the instrument, said Marguerite Lynn Williams, founding member of the Chicago Harp Quartet, which performs at Ravinia’s Bennett Gordon Hall April 7.
For Williams, she’s satisfied a lifelong dream of her mother’s to play the harp. It was too expensive for her mother to purchase, but when Williams’ grandmother died she left enough money so her mother could purchase a harp, which she gave to her daughter.
Williams had already been studying music seriously for about nine years, but the moment she placed her fingers on some of the harp’s strings, “I fell in love with the instrument,” she said. “It appealed to my personality — fairly outgoing, yet introspective.”
At Ravinia, the Chicago Harp Quartet will perform a world premiere of Williams’ arrangement of selections from the opera “Carmen” by Georges Bizet.
Catherine Yom Litaker, Julie Spring and Emily Ann Granger make up the rest of the quartet and along with Williams, have all performed with some of the world’s greatest orchestras, including in Chicago and Toronto as well as Lyric Opera of Chicago. Williams also serves as principal harpist of the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
The quartet is about as unique as can be found in the classical musical world. “There are probably only about half a dozen professional harp quartets in the world,” Williams said.
She met her fellow harpists when studying at Roosevelt University.
“I like playing with other people. So I started arranging music for harp student ensembles,” she said. That led to her founding the Chicago Harp Ensemble, a student group, in 2010. She then began arranging more difficult music for professional harpists which led to the founding of the Chicago Harp Quartet in 2012.
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“I bribed my (harpist) girlfriends to come and read through music with the promise of dinner and wine,” Williams said. “They loved it.
“I really love arranging. I think of it as a jigsaw puzzle when I observe the orchestral score and start manipulating the music to fit within four players’ hands.”
For each arrangement, she said she learns “every single note of every single part.”
Chicago Harp Quartet has performed at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center and produced two CDs. Their latest, “Dance Sketches,” is coming out April 12 and will be available at the Ravinia concert.
Williams said her goal with the quartet “is to show that harp isn’t just pretty arpeggios and glissandos. We can be incredibly powerful.”
After the quartet performed her arrangement of Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody” at a recent concert, a composition professor commented “that he had never heard so many different colors come out of the harp. That’s exactly what we’re trying to show.”
When choosing which piece to arrange, Williams said, “It has to be inspired from some event or some memory. At the beginning, I pulled out music that I had a strong connection with from my childhood playing piano or dancing.”
One of her favorite pieces to play on piano is “Wedding Dance” by Edvard Grieg. “It’s fun. It’s energetic. It ended up sounding amazing on four harps,” she said.
She took ballet from ages 6-14, and one of her favorite pieces to dance to was “Prelude and Mazurka” from the ballet “Coppelia” by Leo Delibes. She’s arranged that for four harps as well.
“That one appeals to me because the mazurka is a very strong dance rhythm,” Williams said. “It was one of my favorite pieces when I was little. I listened to it over and over again.”
The biggest challenge for the quartet, she said, “is moving the instruments and keeping them in tune.”
The quartet has “perfected a tuning regimen where we actually tune simultaneously. We go through the whole harp together (all 47 strings) at the same time … It takes about 10 minutes.”
They also read their music off iPads instead of music stands and sheet music. “We want people to see us performing, not the back of a music stand … We never stop moving our hands and our feet.”
Sheryl DeVore is a freelance reporter for the News-Sun.
Chicago Harp Quartet
When: 8:30 p.m. April 7
Where: Ravinia Festival, Bennett Gordon Hall, 201 St. Johns Ave., Highland Park
Tickets: $11 for concert; $50 for dinner and concert
Information: 847-266-5100; ravinia.org