re: #85 austin_blue

Axes are tools for a working musician. She Who Must Be Obeyed has one of these:

salviharps.com

which runs about $30,000;

One of these:

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which was +/- $7,000 when She bought it, the Starfish, and a 21-string travel harp from an Orkney luthier, which was about $1,500.

The insurance on $40,000 worth of harps is pretty steep, but these are the tools of her trade. She’s classically trained at Eastman, has been playing South American, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Spanish/Sephardic (Ladino), Honky Tonk, Texas Swing, Rock, and Celtic tunes for almost four decades.

A musical polymath, is my fair lady.

As a grad student I lived above a harpist for a couple of years. It was beautiful, but it certainly filled my apartment with sound when she practiced (and she practiced for hours). But she wasn’t going to leave her $30,000 instrument in a practice room—I understood that—so I mostly did my work in the stacks of the library. To her credit, she never practiced after 9PM.