The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music will host the 13th triennial USA International Harp Competition in Bloomington 14–24 May 2025. Francine Marseille (USAIHC executive director), Elżbieta Monika Szmyt (Jacobs professor of music in harp), Emmanuel Ceysson (2004 USAIHC gold medalist), and Noël Wan (2022 USAIHC gold medalist) share their personal experiences with one of Bloomington’s major musical events.
Susann McDonald is a world-renowned harpist, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Harp at Indiana University, and founder of the USA International Harp Competition. | Courtesy photo
In 1989, Susann McDonald, world-renowned harpist and Distinguished Professor Emerita of Harp at Indiana University, founded the USA International Harp Competition (USAIHC). Since then, the USAIHC has become one of the most prestigious harp competitions in the world.
While the organization’s vision is to be “a global platform for the harp that will inspire artistic excellence, encourage personal growth, launch careers, and create community between musicians and their audiences,” its board president Joyce Claflin says the organization is pleased to continue its 35-year tradition with IU, a primary sponsor of the competition.
The USAIHC is also the world’s largest harp competition, drawing forty contestants and hundreds of other music lovers from more than twenty countries. They will gather in Bloomington for ten days of harp competition and other related events. These include performances by gold medalists Noël Wan and Claudia Lucia Lamanna (2022 The International Harp Contest in Israel) and NAACP Image Award–winner Brandee Younger. USAIHC Artistic Director Elizabeth Hainen will perform earlier in the season.
A full schedule of events and their locations will be listed on the USAIHC page and on social media platforms. While most of these events are free to the public, ticketed ones sell out quickly.
Francine Marseille
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in California, Francine Marseille, executive director of the USA International Harp Competition, has more than 40 years of experience in public relations, social media, and talent and events management. She has worked with such entertainment giants as DreamWorks, Hallmark Entertainment, and Paramount Home Video and has managed the careers of film talent and music artists.
Marseille has also started and managed the Owensboro Business Expos in Kentucky in 2023 and 2024 and served as executive director for Friday After 5, a nonprofit 16-week summer music festival and street fair that involves five or more stages that are mounted each week.
Francine Marseille is the executive director of the USA International Harp Competition. | Courtesy photo
While supporting community philanthropy, Marseille serves on the executive board of Owensboro Dance Theatre. Also vice president of Oasis Women’s Shelter, she collaborates actively with the city of Owensboro and the state of Kentucky to promote tourism.
As a high-schooler, Marseille was active in drama and competitive speaking. Later on, she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in communication: radio, television, and film from California State University, Fullerton.
During her early college years, she interned with Owensboro TV station WVJS-TV 2. She also anchored for the college channel and worked at the station’s news department, where she began as a camera and audio board operator and editor before she was hired full time as technical news director.
Marseille rejoined her ailing mother in Fullerton, California, where she completed her master’s degree, and began an internship with Paramount to work on a film. She says, “While becoming a part of the industry, I found my passion: marketing, promoting, public relations, and representing the artists I was working with.”
Marseille is excited about serving as executive director of the USAIHC because she can bring her experience into a whole new world while “introducing the exceptional talent coming to Bloomington from all over the world,” she says. “It has been so exciting to see the light in a child’s eyes when they see the harp and hear the music.” She enjoys working with students in the harp department at the IU Jacobs School of Music. “They are wonderful,” she says, “and have so many fresh ideas on how to introduce the harp to those that may have never experienced it.”
The most challenging aspect of Marseille’s USAIHC executive directorship, which started in April 2024, was learning as much as she could about the harp as quickly as possible. She is also challenged with innovating ways to encourage donations and sponsorships from business communities and individuals.
Elżbieta Monika Szmyt
A native of Poland, Elżbieta Monika Szmyt has performed solo and chamber recitals in Europe, Canada, Japan, and the United States. She has been a featured soloist with the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra, the Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Metropolitan Orchestra of St. Louis. She has also performed and lectured for World Harp Congresses in Copenhagen, Prague, and Dublin. Her solo CD, Rhapsody, was released on the DUX label.
Although Szmyt’s family had immense appreciation for music, there had been no professional musicians among them who had preceded her. She says, “I never thought I would even be good enough to make it as a musician, never mind as a harpist.”
A native of Poland, Elżbieta Monika Szmyt is now professor of music in harp, director of the Pre-College Harp Program at the IU Jacobs School of Music, and a USAIHC programming committee member. | Courtesy photo
At first, Szmyt focused on science and envisioned herself in a medical field. But her love of music inspired her to take lessons, beginning at age 11. In 1987, she earned two master’s degrees: one in clinical psychology from Warsaw University, the other in harp from the Frederic Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw. When she enrolled at Indiana University to study with Susann McDonald, she made a complete career switch from clinical psychology to music.
After she accepted a suddenly vacated Jacobs School faculty position to teach pre-college harp, her involvement with the harp department grew till she became its chair. “I feel honored to lead this department at the present time,” she says.
Now professor of music in harp and director of the Pre-College Harp Program at Jacobs, Szmyt has served on the USAIHC board since she entered its inaugural competition. As a USAIHC programming committee member, she helps to develop musical programs for the contest’s participants.
For Szmyt, the most rewarding aspect of her work at Jacobs is teaching and interacting with what she calls “a wonderful group of talented and motivated students.” She says, “It is a great pleasure to share time with them during lessons, master classes, and concerts.”
At the same time, the challenging aspect of mentoring them is meeting their various musical needs within just several months. For example, the twenty harp majors in her fall 2024 class have different needs and goals. While reaching out to train and advise every one of these students can be both challenging and rewarding, she also enjoys collaborating with other Jacobs faculty.
Emmanuel Ceysson
A native of Lyon, France, Emmanuel Ceysson fell in love with the harp at age 6. This love began during a music initiation course when he first heard a recording of a Mozart double concerto. He recalls, “I was immediately taken by the uniqueness of its sound and wanted to play it.” As an emerging harpist, Ceysson was inspired by French harpists Lily Laskine, Marielle Nordmann, and Isabelle Moretti, along with IU’s Susann McDonald.
Emmanuel Ceysson fell in love with the harp at age 6 in his native France. In 2004, he won first prize at the USAIHC. | Courtesy photo
After he won first prize at the 2004 USAIHC, Ceysson started his solo career in the U.S. and played principal harp in orchestras for the Paris Opera and Metropolitan Opera. Now the principal harpist at Los Angeles Philharmonic, he served as a judge for the 2019 USAIHC and then became its associate music director.
Ceysson says of his Jacobs guest recital experience on 15 September 2024, “Playing in Auer Hall in JSM [Jacobs School] always brings back lots of memories, as it is on this very stage I competed in 2004.” Recalling that he had emerged as a gold medalist from that competition twenty years ago, he realized how much he had grown as a musician since then. “It is a great hall for the harp,” he says, “and the whole harp studio and faculty were in the audience to support me, which felt amazing.”
As associate artistic director for the upcoming USAIHC, Ceysson will advise its artistic committee on music affairs. These include selecting the repertoire that will be played at competitions, the panel of judges, and guest performers.
For Ceysson, working with a dedicated team to organize a major event like the USAIHC is very rewarding. He predicts this event will define the musical future of numerous young harpists. He says, “They will make friends, listen to a lot of other musicians coming from all over the world, and learn from one another.” His work as associate artistic director requires a high level of responsibility due to the artistic decisions that can influence young harpists.
Ceysson advises emerging harpists to “practice hard and foster what makes you unique as a harpist,” assuring them that “everyone has something to bring to the music world in their own way.”
Noël Wan
The 2022 USAIHC gold medalist, Noël Wan, started playing the harp at age 4. Throughout her childhood and teenage years in Taipei, Taiwan, she continued to play the instrument “very seriously,” she says. During those earlier years, her mother was very involved in her harp education. At the same time, her instructors encouraged her to participate in smaller national competitions. She then went on to enter larger international competitions that included The International Harp Contest in Israel when she was 15.
Noël Wan was the 2022 USAIHC gold medalist and is now an assistant professor of harp and entrepreneurship at Florida State University. | Courtesy photo
“I don’t really think there was ever a decisive moment in which I said to myself, ‘I want to be a harpist,’” Wan says. Yet her early success in the competitions she entered led her to consider a professional harpist career. She has also drawn inspiration from her numerous instructors, including Erika Waardenburg, with whom she studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory when she was a teenager, and Ann Yeung, professor of harp at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she earned her undergraduate degree.
Of Erika Waardenburg, Wan says, “She taught me how to be a world-class performer and to have bold musical interpretations. It’s not surprising that she has mentored some of the best and most innovative harpists in the 21st century.”
Coming from a family of teachers, Wan was further inspired to teach and mentor harp students. Her career objective coalesced when she was a master’s student at the Yale School of Music, and she returned to the University of Illinois U-C to complete a doctorate that would qualify her for a university faculty position. She is now an assistant professor of harp and entrepreneurship at Florida State University.
At FSU, teaching and advocacy are both rewarding and challenging for Wan. As a full-time faculty member, she has advocated for the value of the harp. By modernizing the harp curriculum, she hopes to prove that the instrument is just as valuable as the piano or the violin. She intends to do that by expanding the outreach of the harp, bringing it into areas like community music, music education, music therapy, entrepreneurship, and commercial music.
For Wan, a highlight of performing in the 2022 USAIHC was her encore in the contest’s final stage: selections from Alexina Louie’s From the Eastern Gate. She says, “With Ms. Louie’s piece, I wanted to show a more personal side to judges and audiences — my identity as an Asian American musician who has always felt a deep kinship to contemporary music.”
The 2025 USAIHC is a large-scale event that will offer Bloomington’s music lovers an exciting experience. The contest will also be the springboard for the most talented new young harpists.
[Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct some inaccuracies.]
