About
Update: please send me a message if you would like to book a lesson with me. I am currently starting a new job and don't know my schedule yet, so have taken away my booking calender for the time being. I ca still respond to messages, though!
Hello! My name is Maija and I currently live in a tiny off-grid house on a homestead in Maine. I was raised with a strong classical music background, yet am also enthralled by folk music, folk arts, and the traditional ways of doing things. I have been playing musical instruments since I could walk, beginning with cello and piano before discovering the harp as a ten-year-old. Since then, I have performed on harp, cello, voice, hardanger fiddle, banjo, ukulele, and Zimbabwean marimba.
I’ve been performing on harp for 15 years, beginning in student orchestras and symphonies on a concert grand harp in high school and gradually transitioning to my smaller lever harp, which I favored because it is so much easier to travel with. I have been teaching on numerous instruments for 6 years.
I have performed for countless weddings, a professional symphony, pit orchestras, a fun gig with a traveling circus, and a TEDxFargo talk. My teenage summers were all spent at an intensive summer music composition school called the Walden School.
In college, I majored in Mathematics, but I continued to take music classes, including Tuning and Temperament, Music Technology, and Fiddle-making, among others. I performed with the Williams College Wind Ensemble, Marimba band, and theatre. I also played in student bands and wrote and performed some original music with a good friend.
During College my interests began to shift to folk music, and I began to play the Norwegian National instrument (the Hardanger fiddle). I was awarded a $5,000 travel grant from my college to study Norwegian folk music abroad. Since then, I have performed in Norway (on fiddle and harp) and have been informally playing celtic music in my small-town community in Maine. My current living situation does not allow me to live with my concert grand harp (I live in a tiny 12’x16’, wood-heated house), so as of 2020 I am teaching on my lever harp.
I love holistic processes like raising sheep, shearing them, spinning the wool, and knitting a sock with it. I like to take this kind of approach to teaching music, as well, where my students think of their harp as an extension of their body and of their voice, understand the melody that they are producing and think like they are singing through their fingers to create a beautiful, finished sound. I do not seek to only correct notes, but also musicality.
I like to teach the Suzuki method to beginners. This method relies heavily on aural learning, and emphasizes good hand position, which are the fundamental skills for any style and scope of harp playing, be it classical, folk, jazz, or rock.
I am more flexible with following my students’ interests as they advance and will cater my lessons to their individual goals, be that professional or casual. I often work with my students on becoming comfortable humming melodies, before we look at the music. Hand position, memorization, playing by ear, consistent rhythm, and improvising are skills that I emphasize.
Principal harp with the Winter Wonderland Orchestra in Fargo, ND, and Cirque Musica in 2017. Robert G. Wilmers, Jr., 1990 Memorial Student Travel Abroad Fellowship from Williams College in 2015. First Place in the 2012 Minnesota Music Educator’s Association High School Composition Contest. Grace Newsom Cushman Scholar Merit Award from the Walden School in 2012. Second Place in the 2010 Minnesota Music Educator’s Association High School Composition Contest.
Suzuki Method for the Harp, books 1, 2 & 3
For Celtic harp students, a great source of sheet music is a website called "thesession".