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When Kate Ellis' father was near death a year ago she performed a long-distance harp vigil for him.
Each week the Free Press profiles a Grand Valley community member for its “Meet Your Neighbors” series. Look for a new “Neighbor” each Monday in the Free Press.
When Kate Ellis' father was near death a year ago she performed a long-distance harp vigil for him.
Inside her Grand Junction home Ellis oriented her harp toward Wisconsin and played all day while keeping her father in her heart and mind. She also recorded a CD of her harp music and sent it to him by overnight mail.
The next day Ellis' father was taking food, receiving visitors and on the mend. A few months later he traveled to Hawaii to see an old friend from medical school.
She doesn't take credit for the healing but she knows it made her dad, a doctor, “very happy.”
In our culture the healing power of music is hard to quantify, she said.
“In other cultures, they'd say ‘it was the music. She sung him back,'” Ellis said.
While music may not always cure, it heals, Ellis said.
Ellis will be a certified clinical musician in December after she completes the final exam of a program she started two-and-a half years ago — a program that included two levels of course work and two internships playing the harp for people who are ill or dying.
Once a week Ellis brings her harp to St. Mary's Advanced Medicine Pavilion, 750 Wellington Ave., where she plays for four to five hours in the lobby and has attracted a loyal following.
Ernest Guthrie sat nearby listening as Ellis played the harp Thursday near the pavilion's entrance. Guthrie met Ellis three months ago at a stroke support meeting and comes to listen to Ellis play whenever he can.
He said the first time he heard Ellis' harp music he felt better afterward for days.
In other areas of the country, including hospitals in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Boston, Phoenix and Denver, as well as several towns in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, harp music has been incorporated into the hospital program for its therapeutic value.
“Hospitals in general are unrestful, noisy. When you take a harp into a space like that people's attention is arrested and drawn away from their suffering,” Ellis said.
Ellis will play at the pavilion twice a week starting the week before Thanksgiving through Christmas.
Ellis has also played for hospice patients who are dying.
Even those who are in a semi-conscious state, or are deaf, respond when Ellis plays the harp for them, she said.
“We hear from our bones as well,” Ellis said. “We pick up the vibrations, the different frequencies; it's very powerful.
“We are tonal beings. We respond to sound.”
That's why in other cultures there is so much chanting and singing, especially around illness, she said.
Always musical
Ellis, 57, started playing the harp four years ago after moving to Orchard Mesa next door to a man who worked for a local harp maker, Dwight Blevins.
“I heard the word ‘harp' and it hit me — I've got to play that,” Ellis said.
She bought a small harp from Blevins, graduated to larger harps, and took lessons and attended workshops from various teachers around the country.
As a child growing up in Washington, D.C., Ellis played the piano, guitar and bassoon — a woodwind instrument. She performed in state honors orchestra, was part of a folk duo band, and attended “Up with People” concerts where she was often invited to join the group on stage with her guitar.
“My parents sent me to Italy to go to high school because they thought I was going to run away to join Up with People,” Ellis said.
While music was considered a “nice accomplishment” her parents didn't consider it a “serious” career path, Ellis said.
Italy was both exciting and lonely at first, she said.
“I couldn't speak for the first few months. But my guitar was a good way of communicating. I learned folk songs in Italian,” Ellis said.
Her Italian friends were all philosophers — serious, and into politics, she said.
“So I got very political, cerebral,” Ellis said.
Ellis spent four years in Europe and at one time spoke nine different languages, including Italian, German, French, Russian, Japanese and Arabic. She had friends in all of the countries where those languages were spoken.
Ellis returned to the United States and majored in Russian at Cornell University. But when she, her then-husband and infant son moved to Minneapolis where there wasn't a Russian program, she earned, instead a doctorate in English.
Ellis taught literature and mythology at the college level for 25 years.
She returned to her first love of music when she picked up the harp at 53.
‘Singing cells'
Some people tell Ellis they don't have “music in them,” but she says that's not true.
“We all have music in us. Music is our birthright,” said Ellis, who teaches harp lessons in her home.
It's important for people who may have abandoned music for a career, to bring it back into their lives, said Ellis.
So three years ago she bought her husband, John Woodruff, a concertina. The couple gather with friends on a regular basis to play Celtic music together with harps, the concertina, a fiddle and an occasional drum.
Ellis also has an electric harp in her home that is hooked up to an amplifier that's connected to transducers underneath a sound table where she treats friends to vibroacoustic harp therapy.
“It tunes (the body) up. It balances energy. It gets the cells singing,” Ellis said.
Ellis said she believes it was music that contributed greatly to her own healing.
In 1989 Ellis was crippled by multiple sclerosis and was told she would never walk again. After two years of “moping” she said she started studying alternative medicine and began listening intensely to the compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the singing of Luciano Pavarotti.
“I look back now and see what the music did for me,” said Ellis, who shows no trace of multiple sclerosis.
Ellis moved to Colorado 14 years ago. She also attributes her recovery to exercise and Colorado's blue sky.
There have been plenty of studies documenting the beneficial effects of harp music on the brain, Ellis said.
“It soothes people, puts people to sleep, changes brain waves,” Ellis said.
Ellis believes playing the harp for her daughter helped her tremendously when she was seriously ill.
Ellis wrote a series of poems and commissioned Seattle-based, and internationally known harpist Harper Tasche (and one of Ellis' teachers) to compose harp music to go with the poems. Ellis presented the book “TheaSophia Suite” to her daughter for her 25th birthday.
Ellis recorded a harp CD for the father of her daughter's boyfriend, who is dying of brain cancer and is in hospice care.
“They tell me he listens to it constantly,” Ellis said.
The therapeutic harp has an ancient legacy, Ellis said.
Reach Sharon Sullivan at ssullivan@gjfreepress.com.
When Kate Ellis' father was near death a year ago she performed a long-distance harp vigil for him.
Inside her Grand Junction home Ellis oriented her harp toward Wisconsin and played all day while keeping her father in her heart and mind. She also recorded a CD of her harp music and sent it to him by overnight mail.
The next day Ellis' father was taking food, receiving visitors and on the mend. A few months later he traveled to Hawaii to see an old friend from medical school.
She doesn't take credit for the healing but she knows it made her dad, a doctor, “very happy.”
In our culture the healing power of music is hard to quantify, she said.
“In other cultures, they'd say ‘it was the music. She sung him back,'” Ellis said.
While music may not always cure, it heals, Ellis said.
Ellis will be a certified clinical musician in December after she completes the final exam of a program she started two-and-a half years ago — a program that included two levels of course work and two internships playing the harp for people who are ill or dying.
Once a week Ellis brings her harp to St. Mary's Advanced Medicine Pavilion, 750 Wellington Ave., where she plays for four to five hours in the lobby and has attracted a loyal following.
Ernest Guthrie sat nearby listening as Ellis played the harp Thursday near the pavilion's entrance. Guthrie met Ellis three months ago at a stroke support meeting and comes to listen to Ellis play whenever he can.
He said the first time he heard Ellis' harp music he felt better afterward for days.
In other areas of the country, including hospitals in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Boston, Phoenix and Denver, as well as several towns in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, harp music has been incorporated into the hospital program for its therapeutic value.
“Hospitals in general are unrestful, noisy. When you take a harp into a space like that people's attention is arrested and drawn away from their suffering,” Ellis said.
Ellis will play at the pavilion twice a week starting the week before Thanksgiving through Christmas.
Ellis has also played for hospice patients who are dying.
Even those who are in a semi-conscious state, or are deaf, respond when Ellis plays the harp for them, she said.
“We hear from our bones as well,” Ellis said. “We pick up the vibrations, the different frequencies; it's very powerful.
“We are tonal beings. We respond to sound.”
That's why in other cultures there is so much chanting and singing, especially around illness, she said.
Always musical
Ellis, 57, started playing the harp four years ago after moving to Orchard Mesa next door to a man who worked for a local harp maker, Dwight Blevins.
“I heard the word ‘harp' and it hit me — I've got to play that,” Ellis said.
She bought a small harp from Blevins, graduated to larger harps, and took lessons and attended workshops from various teachers around the country.
As a child growing up in Washington, D.C., Ellis played the piano, guitar and bassoon — a woodwind instrument. She performed in state honors orchestra, was part of a folk duo band, and attended “Up with People” concerts where she was often invited to join the group on stage with her guitar.
“My parents sent me to Italy to go to high school because they thought I was going to run away to join Up with People,” Ellis said.
While music was considered a “nice accomplishment” her parents didn't consider it a “serious” career path, Ellis said.
Italy was both exciting and lonely at first, she said.
“I couldn't speak for the first few months. But my guitar was a good way of communicating. I learned folk songs in Italian,” Ellis said.
Her Italian friends were all philosophers — serious, and into politics, she said.
“So I got very political, cerebral,” Ellis said.
Ellis spent four years in Europe and at one time spoke nine different languages, including Italian, German, French, Russian, Japanese and Arabic. She had friends in all of the countries where those languages were spoken.
Ellis returned to the United States and majored in Russian at Cornell University. But when she, her then-husband and infant son moved to Minneapolis where there wasn't a Russian program, she earned, instead a doctorate in English.
Ellis taught literature and mythology at the college level for 25 years.
She returned to her first love of music when she picked up the harp at 53.
‘Singing cells'
Some people tell Ellis they don't have “music in them,” but she says that's not true.
“We all have music in us. Music is our birthright,” said Ellis, who teaches harp lessons in her home.
It's important for people who may have abandoned music for a career, to bring it back into their lives, said Ellis.
So three years ago she bought her husband, John Woodruff, a concertina. The couple gather with friends on a regular basis to play Celtic music together with harps, the concertina, a fiddle and an occasional drum.
Ellis also has an electric harp in her home that is hooked up to an amplifier that's connected to transducers underneath a sound table where she treats friends to vibroacoustic harp therapy.
“It tunes (the body) up. It balances energy. It gets the cells singing,” Ellis said.
Ellis said she believes it was music that contributed greatly to her own healing.
In 1989 Ellis was crippled by multiple sclerosis and was told she would never walk again. After two years of “moping” she said she started studying alternative medicine and began listening intensely to the compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the singing of Luciano Pavarotti.
“I look back now and see what the music did for me,” said Ellis, who shows no trace of multiple sclerosis.
Ellis moved to Colorado 14 years ago. She also attributes her recovery to exercise and Colorado's blue sky.
There have been plenty of studies documenting the beneficial effects of harp music on the brain, Ellis said.
“It soothes people, puts people to sleep, changes brain waves,” Ellis said.
Ellis believes playing the harp for her daughter helped her tremendously when she was seriously ill.
Ellis wrote a series of poems and commissioned Seattle-based, and internationally known harpist Harper Tasche (and one of Ellis' teachers) to compose harp music to go with the poems. Ellis presented the book “TheaSophia Suite” to her daughter for her 25th birthday.
Ellis recorded a harp CD for the father of her daughter's boyfriend, who is dying of brain cancer and is in hospice care.
“They tell me he listens to it constantly,” Ellis said.
The therapeutic harp has an ancient legacy, Ellis said.
Reach Sharon Sullivan at ssullivan@gjfreepress.com.
