Alumni Gazette

SOUND ART: Harpists who deviate from preconceptions about how harps are supposed to sound take “a bit of a risk,” Lattimore says. (Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg/The New York Times/Redux)

Mary Lattimore ’02E calls her harp “my friend.”

They’ve been through a lot together, and the instrument has the scars to prove it. There’s the nick from a friend’s drumstick that got away during a performance, and the scratches from the kitten who used it as a jungle gym.

“It definitely has the marks and scratches, but it’s all about our personal history together,” Lattimore says. “My memories are on this piece of wood that I’ve been traveling with for so long.”

That piece of wood is about six feet tall and weighs 85 pounds, and, before the pandemic, it accompanied the Los Angeles–based Lattimore on tour some 200 days of the year.

CREATIVE COLLABORATIONS: As the pandemic limited her ability to tour, Lattimore has focused on collaborations with other musicians and scoring films. (Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg/The New York Times/Redux)

“That was my idea of heaven,” says Lattimore, who in seven years burned through three used Volvo XC90s—a model that could accommodate the harp she inherited after high school from her mother, who used to play with North Carolina’s Asheville Symphony Orchestra.

Along the way, Lattimore has established herself as a leading musician in creating a new identity for the harp, helping take the instrument in musical directions that few thought—or were aware—that it could go. A composer and performer, she’s earned recognition for her experimental approaches to crafting sounds that defy the stuffy stereotypes of the harp as well as for her eagerness to ignore musical genres as she shares her music.

Her most recent recordings, Silver Ladders (2020) and the anthology Collected Pieces II (2021), earned rave reviews from the music site Pitchfork, which devotes most of its attention to rock and roll and rap music. She’s collaborated with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth fame and Neil Halstead of the seminal shoegaze band Slowdive. (Halstead also produced Silver Ladders.)

She’s recorded albums with noted folk musician Meg Baird and has worked with electronic musical artist Juliana Barwick, singer-songwriter Sharon Von Etten, among many others.

Classically trained at the Eastman School of Music, she counts the Cure as one of her favorite bands.

“People have a lot of preconceived ideas about harps and how they’re supposed to sound,” she says. “So if you deviate from that idea of angels and that classic harp association, you’re being vulnerable. You’re taking a bit of a risk.”

Lattimore says she’s comfortable with risk in part because of her education at Eastman. Aside from learning how to play the classics and improvise, she became competent in composing parts of music that sound equally thoughtful and unexpected.

Given the number of notes played on a harp with each hand simultaneously, she says, sometimes a melody can get buried. Lattimore remembers her harp professor, Kathleen Bride, singing the melody to “accentuate the real, concentrated essence of the song.”

“I definitely still use that now when I write melodies,” she says. “I think about her singing and how beautiful a piece can be if you keep that simplicity in mind, even if you’re layering and layering.”

Lattimore’s latest release, the nine-track Collected Pieces II, features her hallmark layers of melody, including two written in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown.

At the time, she wasn’t feeling particularly creative, and she had no intent to release either one. But she wound up releasing both “We Wave From Our Boats” and “What the Living Do” in hopes of capturing “a weird mood from a weird time.”

Another track, “For Scott Kelly, Returned to Earth,” was dedicated to the astronaut best known for spending nearly a year in space—and written after breaking her jaw during a fall. She couldn’t talk for two months, which made her think about herself “returning back to Earth and learning how to talk to people again after a long time of quiet isolation.” (Lattimore, who emailed the song to NASA, heard through the space agency that Kelly loved it.)

Since her first recording in 2013, Lattimore has released three albums of new music, along with compendiums and collaborations.

When the pandemic halted touring, Lattimore turned to more collaborations. She says the process of learning from, and communicating with other people through instruments involves curiosity and trust, and leads to exciting musical evolutions. She recently recorded the instrumental duet “Sugar Kiss” with guitarist Steve Gunn, with whom she has performed for years.

Now focusing part of her creative output on film scores—another COVID-19-related byproduct, as a way to “pivot in a worst-case scenario”—Lattimore is working on music for two documentaries.

Though still young, she thinks about how such work could be good to keep her involved in music creatively as she ages, once she’s not able to lug around her “giant 85-pound sculpture” anymore. (In fact, both her parents had hip replacements around the same time after moving the harp for so many years.)

The cumbersome nature of her craft is also why Lattimore keeps a second harp at a backline company in Prague for overseas shows, an investment made possible through a Pew Fellowship grant in 2014.

Early this year, Lattimore was happily back to touring—back to meeting new people, exposing audiences to an instrument they may not ordinarily see, new adventures, and new landscapes.

“Going from place to place—there’s a freedom in that,” she says. “You can kind of leave mundane things behind because there’s so much purpose and meaning.”

Flanigan is a Rochester-based freelance writer.