No Doubt--She’s Got Pluck

Sylvia Woods is introducing herself to her class as the off-screen harpist in “Dead Poets Society.” And, she tells them, the bearded harpist they’d be seeing soon in a pub scene in “Murder, She Wrote” was a decoy. Woods again.

The Saturday morning “I’ve Always Wanted to Play the Harp” workshop is under way at Woods’ Glendale harp center. Sitting before her is an unlikely trio: an unemployed shipping/receiving clerk, a customer-service rep for a company that makes electronic gear and a school custodian.

Woods, a 42-year-old Tennessee native who had the pluck to win the all-Ireland harp championship a few years back, stands before them. Six harps--ranging in size from laptop to concert grand--are lined up.

Pete Ambriz, Karen Lara and Ted Justice are poised at mid-sized models. First, Woods tells them, pull back your harp “and straddle it like it’s a cello.” Then, she says, “Find a red string and pluck it. That’s C.”

Woods scrutinizes Ambriz’s technique. She knows a guitar player when she sees one. “Pluck out ,” she corrects him.

By hour’s end, with Woods as cheerleader, her novices are playing what is undeniably, recognizably “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” They’re as tickled as if they’d just mastered “Greensleeves.”

“We’ll be in the recording studios by Monday,” quips Justice, 38, a nighttime Cerritos school custodian who is tackling the harp with the same enthusiasm with which he took up the accordion 25 years ago.

Woods understands. That’s what these free workshops are all about. Over and over she has heard, “I’ve always wanted to play the harp, but . . . but ‘We had Uncle Fred’s tuba,’ but this, but that . . .”

The harp is so, well, mysterious. Most people, she says, will tell you three things about them: Harpo played one. They’re expensive. They’re hard to play.

Those big ebony or gold numbers with pedals and 47 strings are roughly the price of a luxury car, but you can get a 22-string job that tucks under an airplane seat for about $500. (They’re popular with motor-home owners, she notes. “They can keep them in the bathtub.”)

Woods, whose year-old store boasts the country’s largest harp inventory, buys from only three companies--two American, one Italian. “There’s some really awful harp makers,” she laments, “guys who make them in their garages on Saturdays.”

The twice-monthly “I’ve Always Wanted to Play the Harp” workshops, Saturday morning and Tuesday evening, are a basic introduction with a little harp history:

* The most famous pre-Harpo harpist was Turlough O’Carolan, born in the 17th Century. He learned after being blinded by smallpox.

* Harps must be tuned daily. If there is rain, followed by a Santa Ana, “Harps go bonkers.”

* The harp is very forgiving. “No matter what you do, it sounds good. Now, if you had any family member who learned to play the violin, well, you know . . . “

* Harp players never use their pinkies.

Woods, who switched from piano and flute to harp while at the University of Redlands in 1969, has written 14 books about harps and recorded three albums. Her compositions include a silly song of harp puns, “Harpers Are Not Bizarre.”

The harp, once considered a suitable diversion for young ladies of blue blood, is now heard chiefly in restaurants and at weddings. But people buy harp tapes to play during meditation or massage, and, Woods adds, “A lot of people use them to keep their sanity on the freeway.”

Most instruments she sells are Celtic, or folk, harps, which have up to 36 strings but no pedals. With anything smaller, she says, “Once you get to about Lesson Four, you start running out of strings.”

Folk harps won’t cut it for complex classical numbers, but--with an average price tag of $2,000--are just fine for Renaissance, folk and pop music that doesn’t have a lot of sharps and flats.

At workshop’s end, Ambriz, 27, of Sun Valley, who’s been laid off from his job, is eager to get started on lessons and is “already on the list” for one of the rent-a-harps. Music director at his church in North Hollywood, he’s attracted by the harp’s tranquillity.

Lara, 35, a customer-service rep from Van Nuys who’s wanted to play the harp ever since she was little, is equally enthused: “I just want to sit here all day and play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ ”