Heart for the Harp

A HEART FOR HARPS

LUCY SCANDRETT’S MUSICAL CAREER HIGHLIGHTS A LIFETIME FULL OF ACHIEVEMENT

Even before greeting Hilton Head Island resident and professional harpist, Lucy Scandrett, I know she’s a master musician by the ethereal glissando I hear as I approach her front door.

Inside, there are no less than half a dozen harps of various sizes and harp-related figurines too numerous to count.

“Everybody needs a harp,” she professes, ushering me into her practice room where we maneuver around two full-size harps, one of wood, the other gold. Each weighs 80 pounds, supports 47 strings and bears seven pedals at the base.

The instrument’s benefits, she insists, include warding off arthritis, diminishing the pain of headaches and calming anxiety. There’s also the versatility of music that can be played — everything from Bach to Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”

“The wonderful thing,” she adds, “anybody can start to play at any age.”

For Scandrett, a native of Charlotte, N.C., lessons began at the age of 3 on a Clark Irish harp, much smaller than the ones before us. Her late mother, Elizabeth Clark, was her teacher.

By the time Scandrett was 5, her mother, who played professionally, arranged for Scandrett to play a song with the Charlotte Symphony. On Sundays they both played in church while Scandrett’s father directed the choir.

“I really loved playing the harp,” she says.

When the director of the famous Barter Theatre in Virginia called looking for a harpist to play the show “The Fantasticks,” Scandrett’s mother declined but suggested they hire her 16-yearold daughter.

“They sent a truck to take me, my grandmother, and my harp to Abington, a four-hour trip, where we stayed in a lovely hotel near the playhouse,” Scandrett recalls.

With only two rehearsals, she mastered the part, thus beginning her professional career.

After obtaining a degree in Harp Performance at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, Scandrett continued her studies at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., earning a Master of Music degree.

Marriage to her husband, Jack, a professional horn player (and heavy lifter who transports her harp to gigs) was followed by a move to Western Pennsylvania, where, in addition to teaching at several universities, Scandrett became the Principal Harpist for the Pittsburgh Ballet Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Opera Orchestra, and the Civic Light Opera Orchestra.

Those years of playing in “the pit” are full of stories.

“You never know what’s going to happen,” she laughs. “My back is to the stage, so I don’t see anything; it’s also dark with tight quarters.”

During one performance of Swan Lake, dry ice was used for dramatic effect, causing a dense cloud to obscure Scandrett’s vision just as she was starting to play a solo.

A HEART FOR HARPS

BY VICKIE MCINTYRE | PHOTO BY GUIDO FLUECK

“It’s one of those moments when you have a harp attack,” she quips.

There was also the night she was playing in a theater production when a suitcase slipped out of an actor’s hand and landed in the narrow space between her and the bass clarinet player. When the same scene approached the following night, Scandrett donned a miner’s hat, causing the conductor to double over in laughter and nearly topple off his podium.

Strings breaking? Too numerous to count, she sighs, which is why she always carries her “little black bag” containing replacements.

“I’ve had so many wonderful, amazing experiences,” she says, describing a trip with the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony to Monaco where they played for Princess Grace, who sat on stage “in a red velvet chair, surrounded by flowers.”

As part of the trio, The Three of Harps, she played at London’s Royal Academy of Music. She’s also performed with icons like Aretha Franklin and Josh Groban, shaken hands with football giants like “Mean” Joe Greene and Franco Harris, and played for more weddings than she can count, including that of Art Rooney’s daughter.

After an opera performance featuring Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti, she caught a bouquet of flowers graciously tossed by Sutherland to acknowledge her talent.

Playing for baby showers and hospital patients has been equally rewarding.

But it was the last time she played with her mother and her daughter, Lara, that has grown more treasured over time.

“It was at a small church outside of Charlotte and really special,” she says. “My mother was a wonderful teacher.”

Scandrett’s own love of teaching and performing earned her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 from the American Harp Society (AHS), an organization she’s been intimately involved with, serving as president for eight years and starting chapters of the organization in Pittsburgh and in the Lowcountry after retiring here in 2016.

Although her students are fewer these days, Scandrett still performs locally for public and private events.

This February at St. Andrews By-The-Sea, she joined seven other harpists from the Lowcountry Chapter of AHS, under the direction of Tim Reynolds, to premier an arrangement by world-renowned harpist, Rhett Barnwell, that celebrated Gullah culture.

“Over 400 people came,” she exclaims, adding that she hopes to “bring awareness about the harp” to as many people as possible.

With bookings already in place for 2023, her mission seems secure.

CURATING JOY

BY AMY BARTLETT | PHOTOS BY ROB KAUFMAN

RED PIANO ART GALLERY TAKES EACH PIECE TO HEART

Art has the power to make us feel. At the Red Piano Art gallery in Bluffton, it’s not just the works themselves, but the knowledge and personal passion of owners Ben and Lyn Whiteside that invariably make every guest — from curious to collector to curator — take every piece to heart.

What started as a hand-sized engagement gift to now engaging a “stratospheric social circle” of collectors, the Whitesides’ zeal for great art is the beauty in the brushstroke behind South Carolina’s oldest professional gallery of fine art.

Ben and Lyn Whiteside’s relationship with the gallery, which was established in 1969, began when Ben was delivering picture framing in the 1980s, and Lyn wanted to acquire a piece as a gift to celebrate becoming engaged.

“I called the gallery to see if he had ever remarked about any of the paintings,” says now wife Lyn Whiteside, “and ended up purchasing my first original piece of art — a painting by Ray Ellis which was about the size of a recipe card. I could barely afford it. We had no idea that about a dozen years later, in 2002, we would own the gallery” and still be running it as avid influencers another 20 years on.

As extensive as their reach and reputation have become (the gallery has sold to Oprah Winfrey, Ron Howard and Stephen Spielberg, to name a few), the caliber of art on Calhoun Street can be a surprise to newcomers.

Ben Whiteside stands next to a Jonathan Green painting.

“We’ll have guests who are shocked by the artists we have in the collection — painters like Stephen Scott Young or Jonathan Green. They’ll sometimes ask, ‘Is this authentic?’ to which the underlying question is, ‘Is this fake?’ I ask them if they’d like to see a video of it being painted,” recounts Ben Whiteside, painting his own proverbial picture of the art scene in Bluffton. “It’s amazing who wanders in (like the executive director of the Frick Collection museum in New York), or how we establish long-term relationships we can continue to pour into over the years as collectors and hosts of other artists, in an incredible arts community here in the Lowcountry.”

One of 10 galleries in Bluffton, and with Ben Whiteside serving as President of the Bluffton Merchants Society, he points out the synergy in the artists community.

Lyn adds: “The best part of the Lowcountry art scene is the incredible artists who live and paint here, as well as those who live all over the country and choose to come here to paint the magical natural environment. We are incredibly fortunate to have collectors who have been collecting with us for nearly 30 years.”

The Whitesides speak with a wealth of expertise and enthusiasm but never more so than speaking of the art and artists themselves, provoking a visceral conversation.

“It’s emotional,” offers Ben. “When you have a physical response to a visual stimulus, that response emerges as pure emotion – love, joy, anger. That’s what we do – we dispense happiness and joy. It’s a quality-of-life statement that if you have the interest and means to surround yourself with things that cause joy, why wouldn’t you?”

Lyn echoes, “Art is not only our business but our shared passion and hobby. Ben and I often talk about our business and art over morning coffee. Coming to ‘work’ is different every day and never boring. Meeting art lovers and collectors, working with artists, and helping buyers add to their collection is all truly a privilege.”

Lyn shared that her father once told her to “pick a job that you love.” Because they have both done so, investing decades of incomparable contribution to the art world and a Hilton Head original gallery, they’ve curated an elevated art experience for the Southeast and beyond.

Whether it’s a “new dry brush from Stephen Scott Young out of Bermuda (“The Little Scarf”) or the work of sculptors like Jane DeDecker, who also has installations up the coast at the well-known Brookgreen Gardens (Est. 1932), there is, as Ben Whiteside specifies, “something here to speak to the heart of every lover of art.”