Disrupting the Harp
By Amy Karagiannakis
Noël Wan’s artistic path is shaped by both a deep musical fluency and a zeal for reimagining what the harp can be. A dual-degree alumna of the University of Illinois School of Music (DMA ’19, BMus ’14), she has ascended the international stage as a prize-winning classical harpist, an electroacoustic experimentalist, and a scholar deeply engaged in feminist theory and cultural inquiry. While her early career is filled with traditional milestones—Gold Medal at the 2022 USA International Harp Competition, solo performances from Carnegie Hall to Taipei—Wan now finds herself pushing the harp into radical new territory.
And sometimes, that territory sounds more like a machine shop than a concert hall.
Earlier this year, Wan performed on a sculptural instrument made from two salvaged car doors at Arizona State University’s Expanded Media Lab (ExMeLab). Created by transdisciplinary artist Tra Bouscaren, The Angel of Death installation reimagined the harp as industrial wreckage, its tangled strings offering little acoustic resonance but endless sonic possibility.
“It looked nothing like a harp and couldn’t be played like one,” Wan recalls. “I really had to lean into the noise potential…slapping the strings to create boom-y clusters, letting strings clang into each other, and creating eerie microtonal pitch bends.” Improvisation, distortion, and broken strings all became part of the performance.
This willingness to engage with the unpredictable is central to Wan’s current musical identity. Working under the experimental moniker The Mother’s Teeth, she blends feminist theory, sonic exploration, and linguistic play. “The name comes from a multilayered inside joke between me and my husband,” she says, tracing it back to the French title for Jaws—Les dents de la mer—and a cheeky poststructural remix: Les dents de la mère (The Mother’s Teeth). “I wanted to play with the idea of these beautiful, angelic harpists going totally feral,” she says. “But more ‘terrifying and weird’ and less ‘sexy girls gone wild.’”
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Wan’s shift to electroacoustic harp has been more than stylistic—it’s been existential. “It feels like the harp and I grew up together,” she says. “So, in many ways, my whole outlook on life has been shaped by the harp and classical music.” Yet learning the electroacoustic version has demanded a kind of unlearning: letting go of classical ideals like complexity and virtuosity in favor of texture, time, and timbre. “Sometimes I only use a few strings,” she says. “The tighter the box, the more creative you have to be.”
That ethos infuses not just her music but her teaching. Now an assistant professor of harp and entrepreneurship at Florida State University, Wan challenges students to reframe what music-making means in a shifting cultural and economic landscape.
“The core of entrepreneurship is something much more conceptual: it’s bringing a new idea to life,” she explains. “It’s the creativity that propels innovations, and it’s the drive that turns those innovative concepts into real practices.” Her students learn the basics— branding, marketing, funding—but are also encouraged to ask deeper questions. What does music do in the world? And who is it for?
Wan would like to see more institutions embrace interdisciplinary collaboration and artistic research. “Performance programs are often run like conservatories, which are vocational in nature,” she says. Instead, she imagines creative labs populated by students and faculty from across disciplines, tackling experimental music projects and community-engaged work. “Labs shift the focus from mastering skills to creating novel applications for those skills,” she says, “which is exactly my approach to entrepreneurship.”
That forward momentum shows no sign of slowing. Wan is already eyeing new artistic frontiers. One dream project is a “little chapel tour” performing experimental drone sets in empty roadside churches across the rural United States. Another is research into alternative music economies inspired by the work of theorists Brian Massumi and Erin Manning. “There are unsustainable financial issues with all three traditional paths for musicians,” Wan notes. “Are there other ways that our music-making can generate income? That’s what I’m hoping to figure out.”
Yet for all her boundary pushing, Wan remains grounded in a deep sense of purpose.
“As a performer and thinker, I hope to be remembered for doing work that was ahead of its time,” she says. “Work that expands the notion of what a musician can be, and work that makes people see and care for the world differently.”
If that legacy sounds ambitious, that’s because it is. But for Noël Wan, the harp is no longer just an instrument of refinement—it’s a tool for cultural transformation.