by Elizabeth Jaxon and Marta Power Luce

If harpists decided to appoint one of their own to the position of Harp Ambassador to the World, Isabelle Perrin would certainly make the short list of contenders. Born in France and brought up in the famous French school of music, Perrin’s roots are as French as Camembert. But Perrin’s musical life reaches far beyond French borders. She studied with Susann McDonald at the Juilliard School and has built a career performing and teaching around the world. After being named artistic director of the World Harp Congress in 2011, Perrin is fresh off leading her first congress in Sydney last summer and is now turning her sights to Hong Kong in 2017. Though based in France for most of her career, Perrin has just recently moved north to Oslo, Norway, where she is quickly finding herself at home.

Oslo is where the Atlantic Harp Duo—–Marta Power Luce and Elizabeth Jaxon——caught up with Perrin via Skype. Power Luce and Jaxon, both Americans now living and working in Europe, studied with Perrin at the École Normale de Musique in Paris and are fluent in French, so their conversation loses nothing in translation.

Harp column: In the course of your life you’ve been an orchestral harpist, a teacher, and a performer. Do you believe that somebody can be consistently excellent at these three things all at once? Or, do you believe that these are separate strengths that come at different phases in life?

Isabelle perrin: Well, I have to say, in my own experience, that those three things have been together more or less all along. For sure, teaching and orchestra—that’s for sure—because I started the two together. My first position, which was in Nantes, on the west coast of France, combined those two roles: teaching at the conservatoire and playing principal harp in the orchestra. When I won the audition at the Orchestre National and moved to Paris, I had to drop the teaching in Nantes. For about two years I was not teaching, and I missed it so much! I was lucky enough to finally get a teaching job in Paris at the École Normale, where I had many wonderful students, such as the two of you. I could not imagine my life without students and without teaching. It’s so fulfilling.

These pedagogical aspects of my personality have been with me since I was a child. I remember, when I was a young student in Nice, at the age of only 11 or 12, I already had my first students—the youngest beginners. I would imitate my own teacher when I was with them. I always loved that.

My solo career really began when I moved to Paris, because it was much easier to do that there, and because I got to meet wonderful musicians. It was only about a year and a half ago that I had to make the choice to stop playing, because of a physical injury in my thumb. So, it depends to what extent of course, but I think it’s possible to manage the three. In fact they complement each other very well!

HC: About your thumb, I know you’ve recently suffered a chronic thumb injury. Could you explain what happened and what you’ve been through to get better?

IP: It started when I had a bad fall, about 10 years ago. Going up some stairs, I fell on my left hand and all my weight landed on my wrist and on the base of my thumb. It was extremely painful and my thumb swelled up a lot, but we checked it and nothing was broken. I think, though, that the shock of the fall caused some kind of micro-fractures in the joint, because later the pain kept coming back regularly.

About five years ago, I was working on my last recording, which was a baroque CD of music by Bach—both J.S. and C.P.E. Bach—and, of course, you know me; I’m very picky. I’m picky with my students, and I’m picky with myself. I spent hours and hours working on the left hand, until it sounded perfectly clean and clear. I was using a flat-thumb muffling technique, which is especially effective for Baroque music. But I think that the repetition of that gesture with my left hand thumb, combined with the micro-fractures that were probably still there, weakened the cartilage.

…when we are musicians deep inside, whatever instrument we play, we are musicians with our instruments and we are also musicians without, whatever happens.

After that recording project, I had pain for months, and it didn’t go away, so I started to go see many, many different doctors. Some of them said I should get an operation, some said I shouldn’t, some said I should get a cortisone shot. I tried that, but it didn’t work. At the time, I was still playing. I had a lot of pain, but I was playing and preparing for concerts. Usually after a concert I would relax, wait for one or two months, the pain would go away, and I would start again. I still managed to play a few concerts a year. Then in the summer of 2013, I gave a recital in Switzerland. After that concert my pain was worse than ever. When, even after two months of rest, I still was in great pain I knew I had to do something.

By this point, I had found a really great hand surgeon. He was the same surgeon who had operated on [prominent French harpist and composer] Bernard Andrès, so he knew a lot about the hands of a harpist. I consulted with him and checked everything. You know, as long as I was still playing—less, but playing nonetheless—I was very afraid of the operation. But when I got to the point where the pain was so bad that I couldn’t play at all and it was even interfering with my daily life (just peeling an apple or a potato was impossible), I thought, okay, I have nothing to lose anymore. I decided to do the operation.

It’s been almost ten months, and my thumb is getting much better. I have regained the strength in my thumb; the pain in everyday life is gone; and now I just need to build back speed, because of course the speed in my left hand is not what it used to be. I have to be careful. I can only practice very small amounts at a time. If I practice two days in a row, I can feel that I’ve overdone it, and then I have to rest quite a number of days after that. I don’t know how many months it will take before I can be back on track as before, probably not regarding quantity, but hopefully regarding quality [laughs]. That, we’ll see.

HC: So this has been a forced break from playing.

IP: Yes, yes exactly.

HC: That must have left quite a hole in your life. Have you filled the space with something else temporarily, until you can get back to playing? How have you managed this transition that’s been forced upon you by your thumb joint problems?

IP: Actually, it happened at the same moment when I was setting up in Norway and when a lot of things were happening there. I was working a lot in the school and also with the Norwegian language—because, you know, learning a language takes time. It also happened to be the moment when I became the artistic director with the World Harp Congress (WHC), which keeps me quite busy. So, I have to say that I never sit in a chair and go, “Oh my gosh, what am I going to do today?” [Laughs.] The days are as full as they always have been, and very exciting.

HC: Has this experience changed your outlook on performing at all?

IP: The only thing I can say is that, in some respects, I’m more relaxed than before. Performing is exciting and very rewarding. The moment you’re on stage, the moment you exchange with your audience, the moment you give them something and you feel what they give you in return—that moment is incredibly rewarding. But, at the same time, preparation is very stressful. It’s the same for all of us, even the top soloists. There’s always a nagging anxiety. “Have I prepared enough? Am I going to play this concert the way I want to play it?” We all know that there are performances where we reach that ideal, and there are performances where we don’t. Art is something that you cannot calculate. That is what’s so magical about music. It makes performing exciting, but also incredibly stressful at times, and frightening.

HC: In the life of a harpist, there are moments when we have a shift in identity. First, you’re a harp student, and then you graduate, at which point you may find yourself facing a great deal of stress and even depression or anxiety, because all of a sudden you’re out in the real world and you’re on your own. Then, when you retire, it’s the same thing; you’re not playing as much, and so you might wonder what that means for your identity. Did you face something like this when you had to stop playing the harp, or did you feel that it was a natural continuation of your personal identity?

IP: To answer this, I have to tell you a story about one of the doctors I went to see: a famous surgeon in Paris, who is known for being a complete jerk. He’s really a very unpleasant person, brutal and not nice at all. I asked him, “If I get this operation will I be able to play again afterwards?” And he answered, “Why do you care? You’re not a musician anymore anyway.”

HC: Whoa!

IP: Yes! So, you know, this was really, really hard to hear, because, as you said, as artists we’re very fragile. But when we are musicians deep inside, whatever instrument we play, we are musicians with our instruments and we are also musicians without, whatever happens. Being a musician is not only about how well you play your instrument; it’s in your mentality, in your personality, in your head. I would say people sometimes see themselves as musicians just because they play an instrument well when they are actually good technicians of the instrument, but not musicians.

For me, not being able to play didn’t change so much. First of all, it was never as though I had lost a hand or a finger or something like this. My injury is not permanent, hopefully, so I’m always looking forward, and not focusing on what I cannot do in this moment. That just causes frustration. I’m on a path where hopefully I will play again. Of course I can’t read the future from a crystal ball, but we’ll see what happens. In any case, I am a musician, and I live my music every day with my students. I don’t think I will ever not be a musician.

HC: Being a musician, especially at the top, professional level, can require a lot of sacrifice. Do you feel you have had to make sacrifices to achieve your artisticgoals? In retrospect, do you feel like they were worth it, or do you think you could have done things in a different way to avoid certain sacrifices you thought you had to make at the time?

Isabelle Perrin, below above as a young student around 1970 and above during a lesson with Annie Fontaine, grew up in the French school.

IP: I think that you are right to say that as a musician we make sacrifices. That’s for sure. They started with me when I was a child. I was lucky to live in Nice, where I only had to cross the street to go swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, but I had no vacation. My mother was always saying, “You need to practice. You need to practice.” No weekends, almost no vacation. As a child, I sacrificed a lot, and as an adult, yes, I had cause to sacrifice. I tried—I say “tried,” because I’m not sure I succeeded all the time—but tried to balance things as well as possible. At a certain point, though, you need to have the support of your family and the people around you. You might have to say, “Sorry, today I cannot go out for a walk because I need to learn this concerto,” or, “I have a recital in a week and I still need to practice,” and they need to understand you. As you gain experience working with less time, however, you learn to practice better. When you are very young, you may think that the hours you put in are the only thing that counts, but they aren’t. It is true that, to be in-shape physically, the hours need to be there. You need to have played many hours of scales before you can perform a scale with no problem, and the same goes for other techniques. But beyond that, there is a lot of work that can be done better with less time. This is also something important to teach children, because it’s easier to learn from a very young age.

HC: So, your advice for teachers would be to help children not only to consider all the aspects of music, but also to be efficient in their practice.

IP: Exactly. Concentration. Planning out what goals you want to reach by the end of your hour- or half-hour-long practice session. When I am explaining this to my students, I sometimes make the analogy of climbing Mt. Everest. You start at sea level, and you need to go up 8,000 meters. There are moments where it’s going to be easy, moments where it’s going to be difficult, moments where the sun is going to shine, moments where there are snowstorms. Then, there are moments where you go up and moments where you need to go down in order to go up again. That’s the way it is. But, if you just walk one step at a time, eventually you will get to the top. It doesn’t work to just jump there. You need to be patient.

HC: Switching gears now, you mentioned that your position as artistic director of the WHC has been keeping you busy. What does being the director of the WHC mean to you? And what is on the horizon for the WHC in the upcoming years?

IP: Well, for me, being the artistic director of the WHC is a huge responsibility, but also a great honor. It’s a lot of work and a huge commitment, but also incredibly rewarding. I get to meet so many people and I get to know them in a different way, not just as performers or friends. When you organize an event and it’s your job to invite people, you see a different aspect of their personality, which is very interesting. So, it means a lot for me to be the artistic director.

HC: As artistic director, what exactly does your job entail?

IP: My job, first of all, is to provide support to the local artistic director [in the host city] together with my associate artistic director Karen Vaughan. So, I’m not the only one making all the decisions or anything like that! Actually, the local organizer takes on the main role of artistic director, but we three work together very closely. My first experience with this was with Alice Giles in Sydney, Australia, where we had the WHC last summer. This was a wonderful experience. Alice is a great person, and we had a wonderful partnership as co-artistic directors. I didn’t know her very well before—I met her in Vancouver at the previous congress—but we became close friends. Now, she’s going to visit me in Oslo and give a masterclass at the music academy here. So, we have kept in close contact, and this is wonderful.

Now, of course, I’m starting to work with Dan Yu in Hong Kong. Even though the congress in Sydney was only a few months ago, we are already working hard on Hong Kong. Organizing one congress is one thing. I would say it’s not that difficult, because you are fresh, you have a lot of ideas, and it’s very exciting. But I think the challenge is to maintain this same freshness, this same excitement; to keep coming up with new ideas, new people to invite, and new programs; and to renew the congress every time. That is a challenge. But you know, sharing new ideas with your colleagues and friends to see if they are good, and then finding ways to make them work is so exciting! It also stretches our curiosity, since we always need to find new talents, new pieces, new or different ways to play the harp, new combinations. This is the harp world, and it is so alive with creativity!

HC: When will the next WHC be?

IP: In July, 2017, in Hong Kong. The dates are probably going to be July 16–23, but it’s not totally confirmed yet.

HC: What innovations and new ideas have you come up with for this next congress?

IP: Well, I have been going over the program with Dan, but of course it’s much too early to say anything officially. I can tell you that we have a lot of ideas—very interesting ones—but we are more than two-and-a-half years from the next congress, so a lot of things can change. We already have a list of people who we know we would like to invite and a list of programs also. As always, there will be premieres; there will be commissioned works. I think having this congress in Hong Kong will bring a lot to that area of the world. It’s somewhere the WHC has never been before, and we definitely intend to give the congress program an Asian touch.

HC: That promises to be an interesting congress in a part of the world that many of us don’t know much about! Which brings me to ask you: how did growing up and studying in the French school shape you as a musician? And how would you describe the differences between the French tradition and other musical traditions you have encountered around the world: in Asia, in America, or elsewhere in Europe?

IP: I have to admit I only feel qualified to comment on the musical traditions in the Western part of the world. Of course, in Asia, music is also an extremely important part of the culture, but the Asian musical tradition is still quite foreign to us. For me, it’s easier to relate to the German school, the American school, or the Russian school. Probably what has shaped me the most in France is the attention we pay to colors and sounds. The French school is very much focused on sound. We know exactly what sound we want, and we are constantly striving for that ideal.

This is something we don’t even really think about. Actually, I only started to think about this when I had my first foreign students: students who hadn’t grown up in the French school. Because when you grow up in this environment, it’s part of you—it’s completely natural—so you don’t really think about it. But when you have to teach these ideas to students who struggle with sound, then you need to think about it. You need to find solutions and explanations: what causes a certain kind of sound, and how do you get the sound you want? Also, I have to say that playing for 20 years in the best French orchestra of course also helped me a lot, because French orchestras are famous for their sound.

HC: After years of teaching in Paris, you are now based in Oslo. What differences have you noticed so far in the mentality of the students, of your colleagues, or even of the school administration in Oslo versus Paris?

IP: I have to say that the mentality of the students is not different at all. I have always had wonderful students with wonderful mentalities. I think it also has a lot to do with the positivity of the teacher. This was something I learned from Susann McDonald when I was at Juilliard and something that I kept with me all my life and will be using all my life. It was always very important to me that my students in my class should be friendly and supportive of each other.

HC: It’s true. I remember you were always having us get together outside of class, listen to each other in class, and it did really help to have a supportive relationship with our colleagues.

IP: Yes, I remember Susann saying to us, her students, “You are making friends for life, from every part of the world.” And it’s true! A harp class may have students from Japan or China, and then others from America and from all parts of Europe. You make close friendships when you are in school, and then when you are in your professional life and you tour the world, you always have someone you can call to visit and borrow a harp to practice. That is so important. As harpists, we are often quite isolated. It is inherent in the nature of the instrument. In the orchestra, most of the time we are alone—at best there are two harps—so we are not members of a large, supportive group. Out in the greater musical world, a harpist is often seen a bit like a UFO! The key for us to make our way in the musical world is to be strong together and helpful toward each other. I think that’s the greatest service we can do for the harp, in general, and for ourselves, of course.

In Oslo, it’s exactly the same. At this point I have eight students from different parts of Europe, from north to south: Lithuania, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, etc. The greatest cultural difference between Oslo and Paris is in fact not with the students, but with the administration and teachers. In Norway, there is no hierarchy. When you have an issue to discuss, you can just go directly to whomever you need to speak to, instead of having to relay your message through a chain of people. This makes everything much simpler, faster, and easier. That’s very, very comfortable. I have to say, it is not so comfortable in France. Also the conditions in Oslo are so wonderful! My first teaching position, at the conservatoire in Nantes, was an exception, because there the classrooms were very nice. But when I was in Paris, in the two different places I taught, the conditions for teaching were really not easy! [Laughs] You remember that?

HC: Oh yeah! [Laughs]

IP: In Oslo, it’s so wonderful. The conditions are the best you could imagine. They are best for the teachers, and they are best for the students. We have a wonderful classroom, and there are also practice rooms for the students. There are many harps. So it’s really easy. Everything is much easier.

And then this year I also became head of the string department. That was a little bit of a challenge for me!

HC: How is your Norwegian? I know you’ve been studying Norwegian for a few years now.

IP: It’s getting better and better, especially now that I have this more administrative responsibility. I am writing Norwegian and reading Norwegian, and not only Norwegian, but I also need to read Danish and Swedish. People here write to each other using any of the three. They are different languages, but they have the same roots, and Danish is a little bit easier to read while Swedish is a little easier to understand orally. It’s very exciting for me. You know me, and you know I like challenges. I have fun with it.

HC: Do you have any advice for beginning teachers? You’ve been on so many competition juries over the years, and you’ve worked with so many students in masterclasses. What are some common shortcomings you’ve found that you think could be avoidable for teachers?

IP: Well, here’s one piece of advice that might be worthwhile for teachers to consider. When we deal with beginners, most of the time they are children—sometimes very young children—and we think that because they are children, we need to make things easy for them. Therefore, whether intentionally or not, we end up skipping over some of the most essential aspects of music. As a result, I’ve seen so many students, even in competition, play without dynamics and without any sense of what a rest is or how to count the rhythm. When you think about it, though, who can learn more easily than a child? No one! Children can learn so much, so fast.

I remember my daughter going to a bilingual school, she was 5 or 6 years old, and she spoke French at home and had English at school. But also in her class, there were some kids the same age already speaking four languages: English and French in school, and then two other languages with their two parents at home. And that was not a problem! If you learn to ride a bicycle when you are 5 or 6 years old, it’s not a problem. But if you want to learn this as an adult, it’s very difficult. To learn a sport is very difficult when you are an adult. Take skiing for example. I learned to ski really late, and I was always very afraid. I would take it slowly, and I was never comfortable with it. But when I see kids learning to ski at a young age, it looks like they’re not even thinking about it. Similarly, I found that it’s no more difficult to teach a child when they are 6 or 7 that piano is a dynamic where you should play soft, and forte is a dynamic where you should play loud. Have them add all the musical colors already, like they would in a drawing. They are never content to just make a white and black drawing. They want to use red and yellow and blue and green. It’s more exciting for them! You can make music exciting for a child exactly the same way. It will not be more difficult for them, and they will have much more fun. I think that is something that teachers sometimes don’t remember enough. We think, oh, they will learn this when they’re older. But then it’s more difficult.

HC: So, we should really be teaching all the elements of music from the very beginning.

IP: Yes, we should.

HC: Then, what about these students, as they grow up and are choosing what to do about their career. Do you have any advice for young harpists who want to go on to have a performing career?

IP: That’s a very, very difficult question. Because, the thing is of course, it depends on the student. It happens that some people (and here I’m talking not only about harp students, but about all young people in general) want to have a career they don’t necessarily have all the abilities for. The most difficult thing is when you have a student who really, really loves the harp, or music, and wants to do it as a profession, but you know deep inside that they are going to struggle. Music is a very, very difficult environment—we know that. I would say it’s closely related to sports, actually, but is even more complicated. Sports require both physical ability and mental ability. Music also requires these two things, but on top of that it requires artistic ability. This means that you can very well be perfectly physically trained to be a musician but artistically, maybe not quite enough, or mentally not quite enough.

But now, you are speaking about a solo career, right? To have a solo career, you absolutely need to have those three things together. But it doesn’t mean that you cannot have a very happy and successful musical life if you are not a soloist. You can be satisfied with many, many other things.

HC: Yes, there are so many other ways to make money with your music.

IP: Exactly. Sometimes I have students who I don’t think are so well fitted for doing this profession, but they say, “Oh, I really want to be a harpist!” When I am in a situation with a student like this, I ask them the question, “What would your life be without music? Would it be like cutting off one of your arms or legs? Would you feel like you wouldn’t be whole anymore if you didn’t have music in your life—if you don’t pursue a profession in the musical world?” If the answer is yes, then definitely, you have to find your way in music, but maybe not as a soloist, maybe as something else. Maybe you will have to invent your own musical life.

The Atlantic Harp Duo, Marta Power Luce (left) and Elizabeth Jaxon (right) with Isabelle Perrin (center).
The Atlantic Harp Duo, Marta Power Luce (left) and Elizabeth Jaxon (right) with Isabelle Perrin (center).

I have had students who were trained as classical harpists and then went off to do something totally different, but still in the musical world with the harp. One student has her own heavy metal band with the harp, and another one has become a jazz singer, accompanying herself with the harp. A lot of them are doing wonderfully. The trick is to find your own self. But that’s difficult anyway, in life.

HC: It seems, in the harp world, you have to always carve your own niche. There are very few pre-set career paths for harpists.

IP: Exactly, but this is what makes it so exciting. •

Marta Power Luce and Elizabeth Jaxon met and formed the Atlantic Harp Duo in 2006 when they were both studying with Isabelle Perrin at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. Their partnership has endured through the years, and they continue to develop new ideas and explore opportunities for two harps. They are both thankful to Isabelle Perrin for everything she taught them about the harp, music, and life, and she remains a source of inspiration for them to this day.