Album Notes

Carol Lloyd Wood holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from the University of Arkansas and has taught courses in Chaucer, Celtic and Germanic backgrounds of medieval literature, and other areas of literature for over twenty years.

For most of that time, she has also played the harp and has always been interested in the important and ancient links between poetry and the harp (or its cousin, the lyre). From the classical Greek poetry of Sappho to the creations of the Anglo-Saxon scops and the songs of the bards, troubadours, and minstrels of the High Middle Ages, the harp was the primary instrument that accompanied this poetry. Much of her scholarly work and many of her goals as an artist are concerned with these connections.

As a composer she is dedicated to the idea of increasing the repertoire of the Celtic, or lever, harp. In recent decades particularly, thanks to the many fine luthiers who build them and the superb musicians who choose to play them, these instruments have come into their own because of their great expressiveness and beauty.

After completing her dissertation, she began studying the harp with Barbara Belew and has had workshops with Lucien Thomson, Sam Milligan, Lynne Aspnes, and Mario Falcao. She has performed widely on concert, Celtic, and Gothic harps from New Orleans to Paris, where her performance was sponsored by UNESCO. For four years she played with the Lake Charles Symphony and has also played at universities, Irish cultural societies, meetings of the Modern Language Association, AIDS benefits, and Kwanzaa and Christmas celebrations. With bassoonist and flautist Charles Coley, she makes up the other half of the Coley-Wood duo.

Carol Wood is the author of the critically praised 1996 book An Overview of Welsh Poetry before the Norman Conquest, and she has published articles on the harp and its history in the Folk Harp Journal, HarpLight , and HarpSpectrum.