About Oakway Studios
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had a student make the switch from the lever harp to the pedal harp. On the one hand, you don't want to give students pieces with too many pedal changes, because this is overwhelming when you're brand new to moving pedals. On the other hand, if you're only moving a couple of pedals per piece, how are you going to get really comfortable with changing pedals?
What I wanted was something that would give students lots and lots of practice moving pedals without playing music that was too challenging. Additionally, I wanted to systematically cover all of the various types of pedal changes, and progress from the easier skills to the harder skills. I realized that what I needed was an incremental exercise book focused solely on pedal changes. Since I couldn't find this, I set out to write a set of exercises.
I figured, in my usual overly optimistic way, that I would just sit down and whip off a few exercises and that would cover it. But there was so much to it. What skills should I cover? Was there a way to break down some of the more complex skills into steps? What was the best incremental order? I kept writing and revising and expanding and testing the finished exercises out on batches of students, only to make changes based on how well they did (or didn't) work. The whole project then progressed from a few exercises to many exercises and finally, to an entire book.
In 2016, I published this endeavor as my first exercise book, Pedal Exercises for Harp. It was a moment of accomplishment and pride for me, and I'm so pleased whenever anyone tells me how they learned to change pedals, or improved their pedal changes, through this book.
During that whole process, I started working on other exercises, all from the same basic premise of wanting to delve deeply into a skill and provide exercises to cover it thoroughly and systematically. In 2018, Exercises in Harmonics (with versions for pedal and lever harp) was published, followed by Glissando Exercises in 2020.
I also began arranging chamber music as need arose. Sometimes a musician would want to collaborate with me, but there wasn't much repertoire for our combination of instruments. At other times, a student would need chamber music at a specific difficulty level that was a challenge to find. In these situations, I grew increasingly comfortable with sitting down and working something out to meet the need at my harp, then creating a score and parts using music notation software, and eventually publishing these so other harpists can also play them.
A third area of interest for me is solo harp pieces, mainly written and arranged for myself. This is less about filling any particular need and more about becoming semi-obsessed with various pieces of music and using them to create something beautiful on the harp.
I keep a list of ideas and have all kinds of pieces and exercises in various stages of completion. I'm usually working on one or two projects intensely at a time. I publish something new when all aspects - including the musical elements, notation, proofreading, cover design, etc. - are complete. As always, this process takes far longer than I want it to!
Thanks so much to everyone who has purchased from Oakway Studios. I really appreciate all the supportive emails and positive reviews on Amazon. More works in all areas will be forthcoming!
Here I am working on an exercise book in my living room.
Oakway Studios publishes and distributes harp music written and arranged by Jacqueline Pollauf. This music falls into several categories, including pedagogical exercises, solo works for harp, and chamber pieces. In addition to the pieces of music and exercise books currently available, more works will be available in the future.
Thoughts on Oakway Studios
When I initially put Oakway Studios together, it was simply to publish one or two pieces. However, over time this has expanded and now I publish many of my compositions and arrangements through Oakway Studios (although I do have additional works available through other publishers).
Within composing and arranging, I have several different areas of interest. One of the first areas that captured my attention when I began teaching extensively was exercises for students. Most of my experience with exercises came from begrudgingly playing exercises on the piano as a child, which I simply viewed as something I had to play before I got to the fun pieces. I had never given much thought to how many technical skills I gained from working through those few exercises each week.
However, as a teacher, I began to realize just how valuable exercises can be. This was driven home to me the first time I