ABOUT
Nancy Hurrell plays a wide range of music on modern and historical harps. A professional harpist in New England, she provides contemporary and Irish music for special events. In concerts with early music ensembles, she performs medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music on historical harp replicas. She recreates soundscapes of the past in lecture-demonstrations and promotes her interest in harp history in workshops, articles and books.
WRITINGS, LECTURES, WORKSHOPS
A harp historian, Nancy Hurrell is a contributor to The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (2014) and her articles are published in journals in the US, UK and Ireland. The leading authority on Irish harp maker John Egan (fl.1797-1829), she authored The Egan Irish Harps: Tradition, patrons and players (Four Courts Press, 2019).
She presents lecture-demonstrations at museums, libraries and international music festivals and was a guest lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music Museum (London), the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin) and the Metropolitan Museum (NY).
Hurrell teaches early music workshops and has taught Renaissance harp at Brandeis University and The Boston Conservatory. Her early harp arrangements are available in Historical Harp Collections (Afghan Press).
“Nancy Hurrell is a an all-too-rare researcher in that her work is practice-led. The author doesn’t just write about harp history; she plays many kinds of historical harps, seemingly equally at home on medieval harps, chromatic baroque harps, single- and double-action pedal harps and modern Irish harp... so her contribution to the field is a delightful binary: as researcher and also as a performer, each strand of activity informing the other.”
LISTEN