The Sweet Shop

The Sweet Shop by Fiona Rutherford is a charming collection of short, imaginative pieces for harp. As the title promises, the booklet takes you into a small musical world of sweets: sour-lemon twists, bubbly rhythms, chewy toffee moments and dreamy cotton candy moods come to life in eight miniatures full of character.

The pieces are aimed at intermediate level players and combine catchy melodic ideas with varied rhythms and playfully applied extended techniques. This makes the collection suitable not only as entertaining repertoire, but also as a small series of studies with which expression, timbre and technical agility can be further developed.

Fiona Rutherford, Scottish harpist and composer from Edinburgh, is particularly known for her work on the modern Scottish harp. In The Sweet Shop she demonstrates her strength for pictorial, immediately accessible music: each piece has a clear atmosphere, is short enough for lessons and auditions, and can be performed individually or as a small "sweet suite".

The pieces are written for lever harp or hook harp and are therefore ideal for Celtic harps, but can be played just as well on the pedal harp.