Another milestone that will go down in history – Europe’s first harp guitar festival!

As recently announced in our Forum and elsewhere, our harp guitar brethren across the pond – headed by Philippe Fouquet – are putting on a 2-day festival in Le Mans, France on May 4th & 5th, 2013.

The website is now up for the Festival International de la Harpe Guitare!

There you’ll find the (mostly) France-based stellar harp guitar concert lineup (shown above), along with a luthier contingent of established and up-and-coming harp guitar builders.

While not affiliated with The Harp Guitar Gathering® or The Harp Guitar Foundation, you’ll see the latter on the list of sponsors, as we wanted to support the inaugural event of our special friends, many of whom have graced our own yearly Gatherings, along with others we in the States have never met, but know well through Harpguitars.net and sites like YouTube and Facebook.

I was keen to try to make it there myself if only to meet up with some old and new overseas harp guitar friends.  Having limited time and resources, the trick was how to turn it into a business trip…and so we have when Philippe and the promoters graciously invited me to give a lecture.  No, I don’t know a word of French, so Philippe plans to translate for the audience in real-time.  I expect it to be very enlightening, while highly comical (Benoit will be able to heckle me in two languages).

After brainstorming with Philippe, we chose the topic of the history of super-trebles – after realizing that all five concert performers now play one of these instruments!  Now to just come up with a title…either something dignified like “Form 4 Inventions through the Ages” or wacky like “Super Trebles: Fact or Fiction?”  I’m on the fence.

Regardless, I hope every last one of you on the European continent makes the effort to attend.  Just think of the gas money you’ll save compared to the Harp Guitar Gathering (which you really need to come to as well, by the way…).

We’re closing in on global domination!