Kennerly Kitt

Kennerly Kitt — American harpist — is part of Harp Twins alongside her twin sister Camille, performing rock and metal repertoire on concert harps. The project demands a specific kind of work. The concert harp is diatonically tuned and uses pedals to obtain chromatic alterations — which imposes concrete limits when trying to reproduce material written for electric guitar, full of minor scales, chromaticism and fast modulations. Each arrangement is a technical solution, not a direct transcription. The sisters developed an extensive repertoire including Metallica, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and film and television scores, recorded with the two harps in counterpoint — one taking the melodic line, the other the harmonic base, in a division that changes with the piece. The result has value beyond curiosity. Hearing familiar riffs in harp timbre exposes the melodic structure behind the weight — and shows that much of metal's classic repertoire survives without any distortion at all.