Offering Harp 101

In a red-topped, barn-shaped studio just outside Bridgetown, Timothy Habinski is working out the economics of putting a harp in every school in the province.

The harp-maker and musician is also composing his response to an issue that became a talking point in the business community this month when the province bailed out NSCAD University. What is the connection between entrepreneurship, arts education and the economy?

As sole proprietor of Timothy Harps, Habinski makes up to 30 professional Celtic harps a year, mostly for export.

But the cost of the harp places it beyond the reach of most families and certainly most schools. As a result, too few people can play and teach the instrument.

"The harp has been a very strongly class-associated instrument," explains the luthier, harpist, singer and songwriter, whose family moved to the Valley from Ipperwash, Ont., in 2009.

Traditional pedal harps can sell for $15,000 to $90,000 and modern Celtic harps are "still on the pricey end of things," says Habinski. "I would like to see kids be able to have access to them regardless of what economic bracket they belong to."

He has designed a scaled-down, 30-string harp that schools can buy at-cost for about $800. It takes him less than 20 hours to make the student model compared with 100 hours for a professional 36-string harp.

For his plan to work, especially in small, rural schools with limited options, Habinski must also provide the right curriculum to go with the new harp.

In co-operation with high school principals in Annapolis Royal, Bridgetown, Lawrencetown and Middleton, and fellow harpists around the world, Habinski is fine-tuning such a curriculum.

The first video component, showing a variety of musical styles, will be filmed during a gathering of harpists in New Jersey in July 2012. The curriculum will be tested and refined in the pilot schools over two years, as part of existing music and independent studies programs.

Habinski says the music program has to be "self-administering" and can’t "impose a heavy burden on the teachers who are going to be doing the courses and measuring the progress of the students."

If provincial schools embrace his vision, Habinski would set up a non-profit facility in Bridgetown to produce the smaller harps.

The business benefits for him would be indirect, coming from the potential sale of harps to students who learn the instrument in school. But there would be immediate benefits to the community from this cottage industry.

The workshop would likely employ two full-time and two part-time workers to produce, string and finish the harps.

If the school program took off here, Habinski would try to expand the concept and the production line by marketing the made-in-Nova Scotia harps to schools in the United States.

In the meantime, the elder of his two daughters, aged seven, is taking up the harp that he made for her this Christmas. The strains from her instrument will swell his hope of hearing "kids playing harps all over the province."

Story by Rachael Brighton

The Halifax Chronicle Herald

December 26, 2011

(Rachel Brighton is a freelance journalist and a former business editor and magazine publisher)