Marta Cook’s singular approach to the Irish harp has brought her music to audiences throughout Europe and North America. Highlights include the World Harp Congress (Vancouver,) the North Atlantic Fiddle Conference (Limerick,) Spoleto Festival USA (Charleston), Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park (Chicago), Stony Island Arts Bank (Chicago), Espace Culturel Bertin Poirée (Paris), The Irish Centre (Leeds), and New York Live Arts (Manhattan.) In 2020, Marta was the harper chosen to represent Ireland’s national instrument among forty outstanding artists commissioned by The Embassy of Ireland to produce work for Shades of Green - A Celebration of Irish Arts in America. 

With family roots near the mountains associated with the mythological Harps of Cliú, Marta’s earliest influence was her mother’s songs and stories. Having been fortunate to study at a young age with Gradam Ceoil 2001 winner Máire Ní Chathasaigh, the “doyenne of Irish harp players” and the great innovator of the living Irish harp tradition, Marta has continued to develop techniques to advance the stylistic development of the harp as a solo instrument in traditional music. Marta’s playing is further influenced by the great musicians of Gaa-zhigaagwanzhikaag/Šikaakonki/Chicago past and present; archival, commercial, and private recordings of the cylinder and 78 RPM eras; and the seminal musician Ann Heymann’s revival of the early Gaelic harp. In 2021, Máire cited Marta’s “deep knowledge and love of the tradition” and “distinctive style,” naming her as one of the most significant Irish harpers playing today (alongside 2019 Gradam Ceoil recipient Laoise Kelly and international soloist and teacher Gráinne Hambly.)

An exceptional teacher of all ages and abilities, Marta works with students across the US, Canada and Ireland. She is affiliated with the Shepherd School of Irish Music, directed by her partner, the renowned fiddle player Devin Shepherd. Marta additionally serves as a master teaching artist for the Ohio Arts Council’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program (which pairs Ohio apprentices with tradition bearers both inside and outside the state). She also teaches group classes on various aspects of Irish traditional music for the New York-based company Tune Supply. In addition to numerous regional and national awards, Marta’s Irish harp students have been recognized with fifteen medals at Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, the international competition for Irish traditional music. These awards include five world championships.

For nearly thirty years, Marta has worked as a harpist, composer, arranger, improvisor, and studio musician, appearing on a variety of albums (including Yo-Yo Ma's GRAMMY ® - award-winning 2010 release, Songs of Joy and Peace.) In 2021, Marta’s collaboration with Ann Heymann, The Monarch Cycle, was commissioned in 2021 as North America’s contribution to Harp Ireland’s annual celebration of the Irish harp, the Gala Concert for Lá na Cruite | Harp Day, at which time Marta was interviewed as part of the “Humans of the Harp” series. Other works focus on Irish harp and contemporary dance, notably Elena Demyanenko’s Raw Nerves (2014), and harp and voice, in collaboration with writer and performer Nikki Patin. In 2012, Marta’s diverse range of expertise led to an invitation to coach the legendary harpist Deborah Henson-Conant on creating and performing the harp parts for guitar virtuoso Steve Vai’s 2012 Story of Light tour.

Marta’s most recent work combines performance, teaching and community organizing with research and writing on historical and political contexts that illuminate both contemporary experiences of traditional music, and the responsibilities of traditional musicians within our communities and in the wider world. Her article “Subjects of Tradition: Cultural Construction and Irish Comprador Capitalism” appears in the February 2024 special issue on Irish capitalism of Irish Studies Review, edited by Aidan Beatty and Conor McCabe. She is also the cultural advisor to the film Remembering Water, a short film by Sensitive Visuals that explores a journey of awakening to Irish ancestry, white supremacy, assimilation, and the legacies have brought us to a point of collective crisis and possibility amidst the current genocide of Gaza.

Complementing her lifelong work as a traditional musician, Marta began playing the pedal harp as a teenager and holds an honors degree in harp performance from the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, where she studied with the legendary orchestral harpist Sarah Bullen. Marta additionally studied musicology at the University of Chicago, and is widely recognized as a versatile accompanist of Irish traditional music on both the harp and piano.

Currently, Marta is organizing a community concert in support of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Foundation, tentatively scheduled for November 2023; and a community conversation series connecting elder traditional music masters with music learners and enthusiasts around the world; and future screening events for Remembering Water featuring live Irish traditional music and community discussion. Stay tuned for details!

NEWS ALERT!
Marta’s student Faolan Rogers is mentioned in the Journal of Music in Ireland in recognition of his recent double championship in harp and fiddle at Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann!

marta Cook
Midwest Culture bearers Video Montage

This video is compilation featuring examples of Marta’s work as an Irish harper and teacher. It was compiled as part of an application for the 2024 Midwest Culture Bearers Award offered by the American Folklore Society. The full videos of several of the pieces may be viewed below. Full versions of the other performances are either linked below or available upon request.

Video Clips in the Compilation

• Marta Cook, solo Irish harp: Jenny Picking Cockles, a traditional reel inspired by the playing of Donegal fiddler Néillidh Boyle (1889-1961.) This performance was created to demonstrate aspects of practice-based methodology for the development of specific techniques and effects on the harp and thus to provoke deeper engagement with the potential subjectivities and realities that might arise from knowledge produced by embodied processes of action generated by imagination. The full video is available below.

• Marta Cook, Irish harp, with Seán Gavin, uilleann pipes: Kean Ó Hara /The Heather Breeze. The first selection is an eighteenth-century harp piece by Turlough Ó Carolan (1670-1738) collected from the piper Patrick Carew (“Paddy Carey”) of Lag Lane, St Finbarre’s parish, Cork, in the 1840s. It is followed by a traditional reel. The full video is available below.

• Marta Cook, solo Irish harp: Molly Halfpenny, one of several hornpipes based on the seventeenth-century harp piece Molly nic hAlpín, probably composed by Thomas Connellan (c.1645-1698.) This version is influenced by the playing of the legendary Irish-American piper Patrick J. Touhey. This video is an excerpt from an image essay, “The Irish Harp in Diasporic Context.” The full video is available below.

• Ossian Rogers, solo Irish harp: The Humours of Ballyloughlin, a very old traditional jig learned from the playing of Máire Ní Chathasaigh. Ossian began learning the harp with Marta in November 2019. This clip was recorded at Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in August 2023, when Ossian was nine years old. He was awarded a silver medal for this performance. The full video is available upon request.

• Adi Jones Radford, solo Irish harp: Eleanor Plunkett, an eighteenth-century harp piece by Turlough Ó Carolan. This version was learned from the playing of Máire Ní Chathasaigh and recorded in celebration of Ireland’s Lá na Cruite | Harp Day in 2020. The full video is available here.

• Marta Cook, Irish harp, with James Kelly and Devin Shepherd, fiddles: The Duke of Leinster’s Wife, a traditional reel. This video was recorded as part of an online celebration of the 130th anniversary of the birth of the legendary Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman (1891-1945.) Marta organized the celebration in collaboration with Tune Supply, a company established in 2020 by and for traditional musicians to provide employment during the early phase of the pandemic. The full video can be viewed here. It is a good example of how community music gatherings can be adapted to an online format.

Jenny Picking Cockles (Reel)

A tune learned from the playing of Néillidh Boyle, as recorded in 1953 by Peter Kennedy - with a few ideas from John Kelly Sr., Willie Clancy, and of course my own. Recorded for the North Atlantic Fiddle Conference, hosted by the University of Limerick, 2021, and subsequently presented at the Ward Irish Music Archives conference, Archiving Irish America: Music, Dance, and Culture, April 2024.

The presentation reflects upon the reality that the harp is technically a percussion instrument. When separate strikes upon the strings feel connected, it is a a collective illusion that begins in the imagination of the musician. Is this a type of virtual reality? Draíocht? Is it just reality? Is Néillidh Boyle’s poetic imagery - “it’s done with a feeling in the blood” - incredibly practical advice?

The images are a photo essay on Irish music in a diasporic context. It includes images from the World's Fair; excerpts from the letters of Irish public figures; old newspaper articles; advertisements; images of the city, past and present; and photographs of musicians.  Thematically, it deals with complex histories that entail both Irish complicity with colonial violence and Irish culture as resistance.

We're particularly fond of the first tune, an air composed around 1700 by Turlough Ó Carolan (1670-1738). The tune is named for Kean Ó Hara, the scion of a Sligo landholding family who served as High Sheriff of Sligo in 1708. learned this version from Máire Ní Chathasaigh. The second tune is a well-known reel called The Heather Breeze that I associate with the wonderful fiddle playing of Dublin fiddler, long resident in Miami, James Kelly.

The Merry Sisters of Fate (Reel)

Inspired particularly by the piping of Séamus Ennis, this is a special performance commissioned by the Embassy and Consulates of Ireland in 2020. The tune was recorded by a Meath fiddler with Donegal roots, Frank O’Higgins, in 1937, as well as by Donegal fiddle legend John Doherty.

For this video, I collaborated with Dublin visual designer Deirdre Molloy to create a visual setting. The Sisters of the title are likely to be the Fates of Greek myth, but we chose to reference to the ancient tripartite goddess of war, fate, and prophecy, the Mórrigan. Our design is inspired by the three poems she speaks at the end of the Cath Maige Tuired, depicting a battle and two wildly divergent prophecies that I take as a reference to a multiverse of outcomes.

Marta’s Musings (Jig)

A beautiful jig by Marty Fahey. Marty and I collaborated on a blog post sharing the amazing story that we uncovered - a project that led him to compose this tune. Marty writes,

As this tune started to emerge, I had two reactions to it: 1) that it had an understated lyricism/ happiness about it and 2) that I imagined the resonance of harp playing as a way to showcase it the best. Having arrived at those conclusions, it was only natural to dedicate it to Marta who had, over the past couple of years, helped me with a couple of musical videos and was also my "fellow detective" in getting to the bottom of a mystery that prevailed on one of the more important "harping" paintings in the canon of Irish art, James Christopher Timbrell's, Carolan, The Irish Bard, c 1843-1844. Thank you, Marty!

Excerpt from Bach: Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Minor, BWV 1001: II. Fuga

This short sample is designed to show my levering technique using Truitt levers. The piece shown is an excerpt from my note-for-note transcription of the violin score for lever harp. A version of this piece is familiar to pedal harpists as the wonderful Etude No. 2 from the Bach-Grandjany Etudes, based on BWV 539, Bach’s arrangement of the fugue for organ. Having played that for a number of years, I was inspired by violinist Viktoria Mullova’s stunning interpretation to try the original version.  To me, the sonority of the lever harp is better suited stylistically to this approach.

"Incredible facility always subservient to raw expressive power...poetic phrasing" 
– Le Journal de Saône-et-Loire, Le Creusot, France

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