Roger Muma – Ontario

harp & instrument maker

Roger Muma

Roger Muma has been making musical instruments, including folk harps, kanteles (Nordic lyres), ukeleles, banjos, and thumb pianos, for the past 48 years. During this time he also taught private music lessons in classical guitar, recorders, and lever harp. He was sidelined from making recorders when the music teacher at the Waldorf school where his wife, Joanna, was teaching, was in need of kanteles for his music program. Roger thus turned his attention to making kanteles– pentatonic, stringed instruments used in music therapy as well as with young children in school settings.

Interest in making harps started when Rita Constanzi, who, at that time, was principle harpist at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, bought Roger’s kanteles as birth presents for expectant mothers. She asked him if he had ever thought of making harps. That question planted the seed.

While still in North Vancouver, Roger was a member of the Circle Craft Co-op and took part in various juried exhibitions, such as Celebration of Wood, Vancouver 1981, 1982, and 1983. He also exhibited at various craft shows throughout British Columbia. It was during this period of time that he attended, as a vendor, the First Festival of the International Folk Harpers and Craftsmen in San Diego, California.

Since coming to Ontario Roger was a vendor at the Home County Arts and Music Festival, Victoria Park, London, Ontario for 34 years. He was awarded Best Functional Design for 1989, 1992 and 1996 and, more recently, 2013 Hall of Fame Artist. In 2016 he won the award for Best Booth Design. Roger was instrumental in setting up the Harp Classes for the London Kiwanis Music Festival in 2007. Also between 1987 and 1995 he sold 98 harps through Remenyi’s House of Music in Toronto.

Roger also participated in the Celtic Roots Festival, Lions Harbour Park, Goderich, Ontario between
1998 and 2015. He has also been a vendor at Somerset Harp Festival (2005) in New Jersey, U. S. A., the Harp Gathering (2009) in Ohio, U. S. A., and in Canada, at the Northern Lights Harp Festival (2009. 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017) in Ottawa and Cornwall Ontario. Currently he has been a vendor at Stratford Art in the Park since 2015. He also took part in Westland Gallery’s Square Foot Show from 2020 to 2024.

MumaHarps.com

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