Welcome!

Here you'll find links to writings, musical arrangements, and more by us, Deb Knodel and Jane Valencia, as well as downloadable PDFs, and links to some related writings by others (reviews and an interview, for instance). Feel free to share our creations, but please keep our name and web address on them (or add them if they are not there) and please do not change or omit any of the text (quoting is fine). If you want to reprint these for profit-oriented purposes, please contact us. Thank you and enjoy!

Writings

Before this website was up and running, the gorgeous and thoughtful Community Threads hosted a Forest Halls web page.

Articles included:
Dragons In The Forest
and May Day/Beltane & the Green Man In Our Time

What Is An Elder? - an essay on the need for elders in our culture, first published in Village Voices - the newsletter of The Village Learning Community.

Spookytree

In Fall 2001 Spookytree performed a 45 minute version of our Forest show on Vashon Island for the Vashon Allied Arts New Works series. All of Spookytree performances are different from one another. Here is a PDF script of that one.

Into The Spirit House is a show Spookytree performed on November 13, 2004 with Celtic harps, voice, and singing bowl. Here is the script!

Harp

Bardic Harp Workshop Handout and Teaching Notes - This PDF by Jane Valencia dates back to Jane's first time teaching this workshop, at the Puget Sound Folk Harp Society's annual Crystal Mountain retreat. Unfortunately, Jane's entire family came down with stomach flu, so Jane prepared the teaching notes so that Deb presented the workshop on her behalf. Feel free use these notes and ideas (but please give Jane credit!) if you plan to use them in a non-profit situation (harp circles, harp retreats, etc.), and if you have any questions about the exercises, etc., Jane is happy to answer them. (The Rumi cards referred to in one exercise are a card deck of inspirational quotes from Rumi's poetry.)

A unique music webzine that Jane co-edited with the (then) young harpist Dierdre "Flippy" White: The Young Harpers Almanac in 1997-1998. The links are terribly out of date at this point, but we thought you'd enjoy browsing it anyway!

"a page from The Mystic Harper's Guide to Fun & Magic on the Harp" for December and the Year's End - This article by Jane originally appeared in The Reel Fling, the newsletter of the Harpers Hall & culinary society, December, 2000.

Resounding Spring is another "page from The Mystic Harper...", published in The Reel Fling in spring 2001.

Lauda - This PDF is an arrangement of a medieval Italian lauda (song of praise to the Virgin Mary) for nylon- and wire-sturng harps. Deb and Jane recorded this version on our first album Masque. This arrangement also appeared in Ringing Strings, the wire-strung column of The ISFHC Folk Harp Journal

A Note From Forest Halls is an article/letter Jane wrote to Harpers Hall after performing in their Gifts Of The Harp benefit concert. Published in The Reel Fling in December 2004.

Hebrides Dances - This PDF is an arrangement of three dances from the Hebrides Islands in Scotland, found in Patrick McDonald's A Collection Of Highland Vocal Airs published in the 18th centurly. Deb and Jane arranged these dances for wire- and nylon-strung harp, and recorded them (and Lauda) on our first album, Masque. The arrangement was published in Ringing Strings, the wire-strung harp column (then, by Dinah LeHoven) in The Folk Harp Journal

On The Web

Vashon Feature - KotaPress Poetry Journal - August 2002. Jane was the featured artist - some of her art, music, and song lyrics as poetry were included in this column.

Behind The Scenes - an interview with Jane Valencia that accompanied the above article in the Aug. 2000 issue of the KotaPress Poetry Journal.

An American Harper In Wales - an article by Jane beautifully displayed on the enchanted website realm Eldalamberon
Note: This website currently seems to be "off-the-air", alas! But we've managed to scavenge the Eldalamberon page, beautifully created by Adam Victor Christensen.

Performance & Album Reviews

Knodel & Valencia, Forest The review begins "Several years ago, I attended a concert by Debra Knodel and Jane Valencia, two harpers from California. This wasn't so much a concert as a magical journey ...."

"Forest" by Knodel & Valencia ... reviewed by Mark Feil The review begins "Deb Knodel and Jane Valencia's new album, Forest is a wonderfully complex musical journey though a mythical, primal forest. The liner notes guide you on ..."