Send Mail
 
 Drawing her inspiration from ancient and modern poetry, Celtic music, and classical music, harpist and songwriter Carol Wood creates music that lies somewhere between the folk song and the art song. Her music is often called “magical” or “enchanting,” perhaps because she plays and writes for the Celtic harp, with its pure, delicate sound.

Carol was initially drawn to the harp because of her background in medieval literature. (She began studying the harp while finishing her Ph.D. in medieval Welsh poetry.) There has always been a special affinity between poets and the harp—the troubadours, the Celtic bards, and Anglo-Saxon scops, all played their own versions of the harp.

Her first CD, The Chaucer Songbook, was a collection of songs from Chaucer’s works, arranged for harp, voice, and other instruments. (The CD was accompanied by a book published by Mel Bay.)

Since then, Carol has been writing her own music; she has published four collections of music for the Celtic harp, voice, and other instruments with Afghan Press (A Gathering of Friends, Friends Far and Near, The Beasts of Bethlehem, and Homage to Yeats.)

Her second CD, The Beasts of Bethlehem, featured her own settings of several Christmas poems, including the title suite, a collection of poems by the great contemporary American poet X. J. Kennedy, along with her wistful version of Thomas Hardy’s “The Oxen.”

Her latest CD, The Eve of St. Agnes, includes her settings of poetry by great poets of the past and present, such as Robert Herrick, William Blake, and W. B. Yeats, as well as her settings of her own translations of six of the mysterious Anglo-Saxon riddles. The title piece is an instrumental suite inspired by Keats’ famous poem. (“Not every great poem can be—or ought to be—set to music,” she says. “But that’s a whole other topic.”) The CD also includes “The Magician’s Birthday,” a composition which was named one of five finalists in the Jazz and Blues category of the 2005 South Atlantic Songwriter’s Competition.

Carol was a clinician at the Oklahoma Harp Conference in 2003 and adjudicated at the Celtic Harp Competition at the Richmond Highland Games in Virginia (also in 2003). She has performed in all kinds of venues, from coffee houses to concert halls, and in all kinds of places, from McPherson, Kansas, and Houston, Texas, to New Orleans and Paris.

“What I really love to do is to set poems to music so that I can sing them, or so that other people can sing them. Sometimes people ask me if I ever write my own lyrics; I always say no, I don’t. I wouldn’t dare to, because I spend nearly every day teaching the greatest poetry in the language. (In my other life, I’m an English lit professor.)”