About Frances

Frances M Thiele BA(Hons), PhD(History), FMusicolASMC, Dip.Ed.(Secondary).

Frances Thiele is a genuine and approachable harp player and performer who merges a wealth of historical knowledge with an innate understanding of her instrument. She began studying the harp at age nine and it has remained a lifelong vocation. She has performed extensively at music festivals and other events in Australia and played with larger classical ensembles such as the Adelaide Youth Orchestra, Melbourne City Opera Company, Bendigo Orchestra and the Melbourne Harp Ensemble. She has been actively involved in the Australian harp community as a long term committee member of the Harp Society of Victoria, and was Academic Coordinator and a member of the Organizing Committee for the World Harp Congress Sydney 2014.

With high-level training in both double-action pedal and lever harp playing, Frances is a vocal advocate for the development of a separate lever harp teaching and technique pathway. She was the lever harp consultant for the recent update of the AMEB Syllabus for harp and often composes, arranges and transcribes works for lever harp to develop the available repertoire. In addition to being a musician, Frances is an award-winning historian with a PhD in British History from the University of Adelaide. She is a Fellow of the Australian Society of Musicology and Composition and a published author. She has been researching the history of the harp in Australia for many years and published articles on this topic, most recently in the Historical Harp Society Bulletin.

Some of Frances’s sheet music arrangements and compositions, as well as harp history articles are available on this site.