Karen Marshalsay: Traditional Scottish Harps
McDonald Road Library are excited to welcome one of Scotland's leading harpers, Karen Marshalsay, for a live music offering of the Clarsach bray harp and modern lever harp on Saturday 21st February!
About Karen Marshalsay: Traditional Scottish Harps
One of Scotland’s leading harpers, Karen Marshalsay released her second album, Eadarainn a’ Chruit : Between Us the Harp, in 2025 and recently launched it with a concert at Celtic Connections in Glasgow.
The follow-up to Karen’s 2019 release, The Road to Kennacraig, the album received a four-star review from The Scotsman newspaper and was subsequently chosen as one of the top five folk albums of 2025 by the Scotsman’s jazz and folk correspondent, Jim Gilchrist.
Radio exposure included tracks being played on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune programme, leading to Karen featuring on the programme in a live edition broadcast from Inverness. Celtic Connections then invited Karen to perform the album in a concert at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow which included appearances by all the guests who contributed to the album as well as all four of the harps that Karen played on the album.
Eadarainn a’ Chruit : Between Us the Harp celebrates connections both musical and personal. It features contributions from Irish music legend Cathal McConnell, the doyenne of Scottish harp playing, Alison Kinnaird, piper and Gaelic singer Allan MacDonald and Karen’s colleague from the Cathal McConnell Trio, award-winning fiddler-violist Kathryn Nicoll.
Karen is a master of all three Scottish harps – the warm sounding modern gut harp, the clear ringing wire-strung clarsach and the baroque bray harp with its buzzing sitar-like effect – and she features all of them in her solo concerts.
With a particular interest in playing pipe music on the harp, Karen has worked with Allan MacDonald, of the famous Glenuig piping brothers, featuring in his acclaimed pibroch concerts, including the Edinburgh International Festival’s Herald Angel Award-winning From Battle Lines to Bar Lines series in 2004. She also featured in the National Piping Centre’s Ceòl na Piòba concert in 2013 and has worked with African, Paraguayan and Indian musicians on multi-cultural projects including Yatra, which premiered at the Edinburgh Mela in 2008. More recently Karen has guested with the Russian String Orchestra, playing her own compositions, during the Edinburgh Festival in 2018 and 2019.
Karen’s passion for pipe music is highlighted in the pibroch, The Battle of the Bridge of Perth (Ceann Drochaid Pheairt) with its phrasing closely resembling piping techniques, and her compositional talent materialises on tunes written for people and places, including Helen’s Farewell, Isabel Gow’s Welcome to Edinburgh and The Road to Kennacraig itself.
The Road to Kennacraig was produced at Temple Studios by Robin Morton, a founder member of internationally regarded folk band Boys of the Lough and one of traditional music’s top producers, with credits including Dick Gaughan’s classic Handful of Earth, Alison Kinnaird’s seminal The Harp Key and albums of Gaelic singing by Flora MacNeil and Christine Primrose.
As well as appearing in solo concerts, Karen is currently a member of both the Cathal McConnell Trio and the long-established Scottish traditional music group The Whistlebinkies. She has also featured in a duo with Cheshire-based harpist Lauren Scott, recording the single The Meeting of Friends, and has produced new works for Celtic Connections’ New Voices series, Hands up for Trad’s Distil showcase concerts, and Drake Music Scotland. Karen was Composer in Residence with Harps North West in 2016.
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