The Multi-Cultural Music Fellowship (MCMF) provides support for interactions between World Musical Traditions with a focus on the harp. Our goal is to increase appreciation and respect for different cultures through musical communication. Our Festival of Harps^sm concert series, begun in 1990, is a series of concerts and educational outreach programs featuring the harp. The vision for the Festival is to bring the different races, styles and periods together on one stage—showing the basic unity of the human spirit through the harp. The Festival of Harps brings together master musicians from places as diverse as Paraguay, Ireland, China, Germany and Peru.

We believe it is natural to love and respect people whose music has moved and delighted you. Every culture expresses itself through music. When you learn how to appreciate another culture's music, you learn what is most precious to people who are very different from you, and soon that essential beauty becomes precious to you as well. Melody, harmony, rhythm, the ebb and flow of tempo and dynamics, have a universality that transcends language, customs and politics.

We are training the harpists of tomorrow through our children's harp ensembles: Bay Area Youth Harp Ensemble, Mission Harp Ensemble, and Bahia Vista Harp Ensemble. These groups provide an opportunity for young harpists to not only learn to play the harp, but to acquire the skills and confidence that improve their academic achievement and civic engagement, and a safe space to nurture their creativity and envision their own potential. Many of these young harpists have gone on to develop their own musical careers, sometimes even performing in the Festival of Harps.

We produce opportunities for musicians from different cultures to play together— on the same stage, and sometimes at the same time in unique ensembles created especially for our concerts. In addition to the Festival of Harps, we have also produced and sponsored concerts by great Indian Classical musicians such as Warren Senders and G.S. Sachdev. When the musicians play together under the same roof, they bring their audiences with them, and everyone hears music that they never realized that they could like. We encourage you to contact us any way you can: through email, phone, or best of all by attending one of the musical events that are our reason for being.

Teed Rockwell
President, MCMF