BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
“Play it faster, play it louder, make a viral reel, hook someone in the first three seconds before they scroll past. Being the loudest voice in the room gets rewarded.”
Harpist Emily Granger describes these expectations and pressures placed on musicians who release new music.
Then she takes her album in an entirely different direction.
A Thing of Beauty is, in Emily’s words, “an act of rebellion” against the fast-paced nature of our lives; against being a musician or a listener in a world that doesn’t slow down. Her calming new album is not intended for a quick hit of dopamine — instead, she encourages you to listen to each thoughtfully composed track in the order she has chosen for you.
Emily has handpicked compositions exclusively by Australian women. Their stories allow us to hear, feel, and process our emotions such as grief and loss, meeting us wherever we’re at on our healing journey. That’s what this music gave to Emily, too.
This American-born, Australian-based harpist tells CutCommon how her newly released album A Thing of Beauty came to be.
Congratulations on your new album release, Emily! How does it feel to have this new collection of pieces out there in the world?
Thanks Stephanie! Honestly, it was quite scary at first. This album is deeply personal. It’s sparse, nostalgic, intimate. There aren’t a dozen notes to hide behind, so it really has felt like I’m baring my soul on this one.
What has surprised me is how much incredible feedback I’ve gotten. People have come up to me after concerts in tears, telling me what a particular piece stirred up for them. People on healing journeys, people grieving lost loved ones. Really opening up to me because I opened up to them. It turns out the quiet, exposed music is exactly what people connect with. So it feels wonderful, and a little less scary every week it’s been out in the world.
It’s had five 5-star reviews now, including in Limelight, which for an album this quiet still astonishes me.
Take us through the story of how this album came to be, and why it was important to you to focus exclusively on works by Australian women.
I had been thinking about this album for a very long time. My last solo album In Transit arrived fully formed in my mind in the middle of the night somewhere over the Pacific, flying from LAX to SYD. I’ve recorded quite a number of albums since then, but all chamber music. I knew I wanted to record another solo program and just couldn’t put my finger on it for ages.
Then it really started when I met composer Hilary Kleinig. I’d worked with her on my Hush album Magic Sky, with Claire Edwardes, and fell completely in love with her music, so I asked her to write me a solo. I think I texted her a little brief: just something beautiful, sweet and simple. She came back with A Thing Of Beauty, which landed in my inbox on an ordinary Saturday afternoon, and suddenly I knew how the whole album would take shape. The rest was history.
As for why it’s exclusively women, I wish I could give you a grand curatorial answer, but the truth is quite simple. This was just the music I felt pulled towards. The last couple of years have involved a lot of grief and a lot of processing, some of it the kind of loss you don’t talk about at dinner parties, some of it the ordinary upheaval of moving cities, starting again, growing older, those kinds of things. I was also learning to hold my ground with people and relationships, really learning to trust my own intuition. The music that really resonated with me just happened to all be written by women. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. There’s something in how these composers write about memory and loss that resonated with me immediately.
What are some of the meaningful stories that you share through your music, which come from the voices of these women?
Alice Chance’s Emily’s Suite is the one I love telling people about. I commissioned it because I love Alice and her music, and instead of starting fresh, she went back to something she’d made 10 years earlier. She was living in a freezing share house in Melbourne, stuck in a rut, and set herself a task: one short piano improvisation every day, plus a tiny gold wire sculpture to go with it. She lasted 13 days. None of them ever became finished pieces. When I asked her for a harp solo, she pulled three of them out and finished them! Alice describes it as a long-distance call with her younger self. It feels a bit like that from my end too.
Karoola Seasons is by Christina Sonnemann Baehr. Karoola is a tiny place in northeast Tasmania, and the four movements walk you through a year there. Each one came from a haiku by the poet Hilary Burden. Alpacas in a paddock, a wren, on a frozen birdbath. Hilary notices everything the rest of us march straight past. Tassie is one of my favourite places on earth, and this piece puts me right back there, weather and all. Free holiday!
Then there’s Reminiscing by Ulpia Erdos, which is her looking back at herself as a young harpist and the sheer joy of learning the harp. We were friends online for years before we ever met in person. Recording her music is what turned that into a real friendship which I deeply cherish.
What would you say are some of the themes or feelings that link each of these works together on your album?
There’s a real thread of memory running through the album: of childhood, of family, and of landscape.
A lot of these pieces started life as something else. A haiku, a poem, a person. Anne Cawrse’s Come to me is built on Christina Rossetti’s Echo, which I read aloud before I perform it. Sally Greenaway’s piece is about watching someone you love slowly lose their memory. And there’s a run right through the middle of the album that’s all about motherhood: Katy Abbott, Nat Bartsch, and Tara Minton.
Everything about being a musician right now pushes you to impress. Play it faster, play it louder, make a viral reel, hook someone in the first three seconds before they scroll past. Being the loudest voice in the room gets rewarded.
This album is not that. These are profound, touching pieces of music, and they ask something much harder of me than just fast fingers. They ask for interpretive depth.
That’s also why the live version of this program matters so much to me. I read the poetry and tell the stories between the pieces, and a silence lands completely differently in a room full of people than it does through headphones. At every concert on this tour, from UKARIA to the Melbourne Recital Centre to the Utzon Room at the Opera House, people have stayed behind afterwards to talk.
Putting out something beautiful and quiet right now feels like an act of rebellion. I would much rather offer people something gentle and true than something designed purely to impress them.
Those undercurrents of calm and beauty also flow through your instrument. Why do you think the harp sounds so beautiful?
I think there’s a physical reason for it. Every note on the harp starts with the pressing of my finger into the string; after plucking we hear the string and the harp vibrate and resonate, and then the sound begins to decay. Unless I muffle the strings, it keeps ringing underneath whatever comes next. And even when I do muffle, it takes a while for the whole instrument to stop vibrating, so you really do get a lot of resonance. That’s the beauty of the harp. Notes overlap and blur into each other constantly. It’s that wash of sound that is what people are responding to when they say the harp relaxes them. There’s also no bow, no breath, no reed. Just fingers on string, which is a very direct way of making a sound.
It was this sound that drew me to the instrument when I was a child. I became obsessed with this one CD that had a harp on it, and I was hooked from that moment now 25 years ago.
How do you hope listeners will experience your album?
Most people will hear this album through a playlist at 11 at night, or catch a snippet in the car. And I’ll take that. But my real hope is for the person who puts it on properly, with nothing else going on, and lets it run in order. It’s sequenced deliberately and it gives you far more that way.
If someone gets to the end of it feeling a bit lighter than when they started, that’s the win.
Any parting words about your new release?
Mostly just a huge thank you! To the composers who trusted me with this music, to ABC Classic for backing it, and to everyone who came to the concerts and stayed to talk afterwards. That’s the part I’ll remember for a long time to come.
There’s one more concert this year, at the Tyalgum Music Festival on Sunday 27 September at 10am. And the album is streaming everywhere now, so please have a listen.
Learn more about Emily Granger on her website and listen to A Thing of Beauty.
Images supplied. Credit Chloe Ireland.
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