NaturesSong.com
Title
Welcome to Nature's Song & The Rose Lyre Workshop
Description
Patrick Thilmany, whose workshop is located in the beautiful Hudson Valley in upstate New York, has worked with tone, harmonics, and vibration of sound for 28 years, and has been involved in teaching music and performing professionally since the age of 13. He had a personal goal of creating a stringed instrument that had tone qualities which reflected themselves within the listener in such a manner as to be beneficial spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, and physically.
He followed the advances in music therapy in the West, and related this information to the wisdoms of the East. In 1980 he was approached by an American-born music therapist who had received her training in Europe where music therapy was already established and applied in everyday practice more so than in North America. She was utilizing an instrument of European design called the Lyre (Lie-er) developed specifically for therapeutic settings. She asked Patrick if he could understand the nature of the tone created by her instrument and attempt to develop an American lyre from native woods, that would bear the spirit of the American soul in its nature.
After 12 years of intensive research, design, prototype development, and field trials, an instrument was born which manifested the archetypal qualities Patrick had sought in such an instrument. Following blind tests conducted by the North American Lyre Association, Patrick’s work in the form of the Rose Lyre was introduced at the 1993 North American Lyre Conference and heartily endorsed as the third generation of true Lyres, and the first (and only) outside of Europe. Since then, the Rose Lyre has grown to a 30 string soprano range lyre. After this dramatic introduction in 1993, the Waldorf School Movement requested that Patrick design instruments appropriate to the pedagogical work of Waldorf Schools due to the prohibitive costs associated with the European instruments.
