Biography
My Story
(Please scroll further down for my official professional biography.)
I grew up on a council housing estate in southern England. My mum built my first harp in the shed after all us kids were asleep, so that I might have the instrument I kept requesting every Christmas. The county council later awarded me a grant to pay for my lessons, and loaned me a concert harp until I was 17. At that point, a real life fairy godfather turned up in my town, heard we were struggling to fundraise for an instrument and offered to buy me one. Without this benefactor, I wouldn’t have had a harp to take to university and continue my studies and subsequent career. I had an unlikely and very fortunate start, enabled by a handful of kind and determined people, a county council who were willing and able to support music-making, and a teacher who steered me in the direction of the right opportunities.
I couldn’t possibly have imagined as that little girl the life music has led me through, rich in people, travel and the kind of learning that impacts my broader self. Life lessons such as patience, perseverance, emotional resilience, confidence, staying calm under pressure, communication, connection with others and with oneself: a person can learn and experience all of these and more by playing an instrument. The experience of feeling understood by a piece of music, of knowing what resounds in you resounds in others, the crafting of shared meaning through music- and concert-making - these are not indulgences, but elements that reach to the core of our humanity.
As a professional creative now, I embrace any aspect of my work that enables human connection, development and enrichment. I find this can happen in a teaching room or a performance space, at a celebration or a ceremony, in a concert hall or at a local care home; it can happen in the intimate relationship of a pupil with their instrument, or in the bolder communication between performer and audience. It can happen in conversation, or in the wonderful world of non-verbal communication that the arts open up. It’s when the arts feel like a bridge.
Professional Biography
Kirsty Whatley studied in Manchester and Switzerland, and has worked as a performer, recording artist and teacher for many years. She has performed live on BBC radio and television, and on national radio stations abroad. After completing an MMus at the University of Manchester focussing on contemporary harp, she went on to postgraduate study in Basel, Switzerland, specialising in harps of the Renaissance and Baroque. With these, she appears on recordings such as the Taverner Consort’s L’Orfeo and their Gramophone-Award-winning Western Wynd; Alamire’s The Anne Boleyn Songbook; Fretwork’s In Chains of Gold; and I Fagiolini’s Leonardo: Shaping the Invisible, amongst many others. She has performed with groups such as The BBC Singers, Moscow City Ballet, London Handel Orchestra, English Touring Opera, I Fagiolini, Alamire, Taverner Consort, Ensemble Leones, Tetraktys, Stavangar Baroque, and Courtiers of Grace. With modern harp, over the years she has covered much of the standard orchestral and choral society repertoire, regularly supporting music-making in her local communities.