{"id":28760,"date":"2021-03-18T21:44:29","date_gmt":"2021-03-18T19:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.camac-harps.com\/blog\/?p=28760"},"modified":"2021-03-24T15:24:47","modified_gmt":"2021-03-24T13:24:47","slug":"the-camac-melusine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.camac-harps.com\/blog\/en\/news\/the-camac-melusine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Camac M\u00e9lusine…"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"C\u00e9line<\/a>

C\u00e9line H\u00e4nni. Photo: Marie Taillefer<\/p><\/div>\n

In Switzerland, the singer and harpist C\u00e9line H\u00e4nni<\/a> is reaching new audiences with the lever harp. Her work includes club sessions<\/a>, museums, multidisciplinary performance art, alternative spaces, solo\/group impro, and projects with a social mission: you will find it fascinating, unexpected and constantly evolving. Under the artist name Orlando, her recent album Anywhere Road<\/a> is a musical exploration of texts by Thoreau, Fernando Pessoa, Emily Dickinson, and Emily Bront\u00eb; another upcoming project will be to create new soundscapes from the 20,000 hours of recorded archives at the Mus\u00e9e\u00a0d’ethnographie in Geneva<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The pedal harp, especially electroacoustic, is a (slightly) more familiar creative hub in alternative and contemporary music. C\u00e9line H\u00e4nni is classically-trained, but an “it’s complicated” relationship status is not confined to Facebook. “I always felt ambivalent about the pedal harp, because I never enjoyed its classical repertoire”, she explains. “I concentrated on singing at the start of my career. But I’ve always liked both traditional and contemporary music, and as a singer, I used both to explore the voice. I was also inspired by artists like H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Breschand and Zeena Parkins, who are pushing the boundaries of the harp. The harp has huge potential in new music, an enormous sonic universe. After several years focused on experimental work, I also needed to return to the melodic, the acoustic, and a form of simplicity in both sound and form.\u201d<\/p>\n

C\u00e9line’s return to the harp began with an electric lever harp. She explored a lot of processing, accompanying her vocal experiments. “This also opened the doors to many other disciplines”, C\u00e9line continues, “because of the enormous scope of the amplified harp. I’ve always been an explorer; I love to appropriate extra-musical sources, cross over into other disciplines and bring them into my own performances. Art brut\u00a0<\/em>(Outsider Art) particularly is a limitless source of discovery and surprise. In my project Mille choses de terre<\/a>, a performance based on textes bruts, the harp sounds like an e-guitar.”<\/p>\n

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