POCAHONTAS TEEN WINS BIG IN HARP COMPETITION

Sophonisba (Sophie) Gathman went to Ireland last weekend a 16-year-old Jackson High School student in braces and returned the second-best teen-age Celtic harp player in the world.

Gathman, of Pocahontas, Mo., was runner-up in the 16- to 18-year-old division at the world championship of Irish music in Enniscorthy, Ireland. She competed in the Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann, an annual music festival that draws the best traditional players of Irish music from around the world.

Now she is recognized as one of them. "I think I'm still in shock," she says.

Each year 200,000 lovers of Irish music attend the festival on the last weekend in August. More than 5,000 people perform in nearly 150 competitions in many different categories that include Irish instruments, dancing and even marching bands.

The New Age-ish Irish music often played on American radio programs is not heard at the festival. Established in 1951, the festival is dedicated to the preservation of traditional Irish music. This was the second year in a row the festival was hosted by Enniscorthy, a small city more than 1,500 years old.

Gathman qualified for the world championships in May by winning a regional competition in Detroit, Mich. In both competitions she performed a reel, a jig and an air.

Ten people qualified for Gathman's competition -- two other Americans, one musician from Great Britain and the rest from Ireland. She did not place when she competed in the festival two years ago.

She plays the music wonderfully even though England, Scotland and Germany could lay more claim to her. She likes the music, she says, because "you can make it your own. Every person has their own style.

"And it's fun to play."

Gathman succeeded despite spending part of the time in Ireland unable to see very well. Lacking a replacement for a torn contact lens, she had to wear another girl's glasses. "We went to a fast-food restaurant and I couldn't read the menu," she recalled.

She was named for a great-great aunt and a great-great grandmother both called Sophonisba but seems to prefer invoking the Italian Renaissance painter and the famed daughter of a Carthaginian general who had the same name.

She took up the harp after beginning with piano lessons. "I was getting tired of playing the piano, and I didn't want to play the same instrument as Hannah," she explained.

Hannah, her 13-year-old sister, finished first in Irish piano in the regional competition this year but did not compete at the world festival. The two sisters also perform with accordionist Michael Liley in the Celtic music group Children of Lir. In the group, Hannah sings and plays the tin whistle and the bodhran, a kind of drum.

Gathman learned the harp from Chadie Fruehwald at the Southeast Music Academy. She now studies with Eileen Gannon at St. Louis Irish Arts. Gannon won the championship in the over-18 division at the festival this year.

The Celtic harp is like "a naked piano," Gathman says. It weighs about 40 pounds and is made of maple with a spruce soundboard. It differs from a concert harp in that notes can be altered on the latter by using pedals, while sharps are played on a Celtic harp by moving levers on each string.

Gathman doesn't plan to make a career of playing Irish music. She thinks she'll teach either Spanish or English. Her father is Dr. Allen Gathman, a biology professor at Southeast Missouri State University. Her mother is Robin Hankinson, adjunct instructor in foreign languages at Southeast.

Except for being an Irish music champion, Gathman seems a typical teen who likes shopping, surfing the Internet and especially reading.

And her friends don't think anything is unusual about the music she plays, she says. "They think, it's just something she does."