THE IMPERFECT SHOW NOTES

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These show notes come via the Otter.ai service. The transcription is imperfect. But hopefully, it’s close enough – even with the errors – to give those who aren’t able or inclined to learn from audio interviews a way to participate.

Danielle Riegel  00:00

We played with also Povich, the famous Russian composer and cellist, and we played musky paintings of an exhibition, a piece that is played so much. And then you’re kind of like, oh my God, not that piece again. This is a bit boring, and it’s not the most dramatic piece, either, but it’s very descriptive. It’s about a museum, and you’re going through the different rooms in a museum and looking at different paintings. Roster, poet, everybody was excited, of course, to play with him. And he entered the stage, he lifted his arms, he gave us a nod. We started to play. And it was really if I was transposed into Russia. I’d never been there, but I tell you, I could smell Russia.

Achim Nowak  00:49

Welcome to the My Furth Act podcast. I’m your host, Achim Nowak, and I have conversations with exceptional humans who have created bold and unexpected lives. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on any major podcast platform so you won’t miss a single one of my inspiring guests, and please consider posting an appreciative review. Let’s get started. I am so happy to welcome Danielle Riegel to the My Fourth Act Podcast. Danielle is an internationally acclaimed concert harpist and a versatile artist. She was admitted to the young talent department of the Royal Conservatory in the Netherlands at the age of 12, which marked the beginning of a successful international career as a soloist chamber museum principal orchestra harvest Danielle is a prize winner of several major national and international harp competitions. She has performed all over the world with renowned musicians and maestros at prestigious music festivals and concert halls in great cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and Madrid, among others, for 15 years as the principal harpist of the Symphony Orchestra of The Hague in the Netherlands. Now in 2020 Danielle moved to Portugal, from where she offers harp concerts, sound journeys, one on one sessions and movement classes, and regularly plays at events and weddings. She is also and will learn more about a certified PARP therapist and certified in other body modalities as well. There’s so much to talk about. Hello, Danielle, hi

Danielle Riegel  02:57

Achim, thank you so much, and I’m delighted to be on your podcast and looking forward to talk with you this coming hour.

Achim Nowak  03:04

Me too. And just to set the stage, the reason I wanted to speak with you, I met you in person in the Algarve, and I was entranced by your music, but on a deeper level, I felt like the life you’re leading right now is probably really different from what you were originally thinking you would be doing in the career that you had for a while, and that really interests me now. As a young girl growing up, How soon did you take to the harp, or how did you find the harp, or how did the harp find you as the instrument that you have worked with

Danielle Riegel  03:43

oh, there’s absolutely no doubt about that. Like the harp must have found me, because as long as I can remember, I wanted to play the harp. My mom told me always that at the age of three, I started to beg for a harp, and the only thing that I can relate it to is that she had bought in France, where my family’s from, had bought a tape, and it was called Piccolo is Saxo, and it’s a story about a little piccolo saxophone that lives with his family in the woods, and one day he goes and explores a little bit by himself the woods. Here is another instrument, and he’s so excited, he runs back home and he tells his family, mommy, daddy, there are other families in the woods. We have to go and explore. Find them. So they also find grandma the harp, and she plays some beautiful glissandos, and I was intrigued by it. And yeah, back to my parents for a harp. They didn’t let allow me to play the harp immediately, as most parents don’t for their children, they I had to go to like this, general music classes. I had to go and take recorder classes together with my brother. And it started to turn out there that I had some kind of talent, because I played. Through the whole little first booklet immediately, and my brother was sweating on these first songs. And then they made me play the piano, but I kept begging for a harp, and they told me, when you are 10 years old and you still want to play the harp, we are gonna try to find you a harp teacher and buy you a harp. And that’s what they did, and it was a tiny little lap harp. And my teacher had told my father, well, she’ll be able to play on that for two years. So he’s like, Okay, well, hopefully in two years, then she is over it. But after two months, she called my parents and said, like, Well, I’m really sorry, but your daughter has a talent and she needs a bigger harp already. And then at the age of 12, I auditioned for the Royal conservative young talent department there, and I was admitted. And then after two months, my dad got another shock, because the teacher said she needs a bigger harp. You have to buy a concert harp for her. So my parents were kind of lured into it, but I knew it right from the beginning. That’s what I wanted to play.

Achim Nowak  06:05

I The clarity is very obvious. There was no doubt. Could you give us a sense of the kind of work that was involved in becoming really good at being a harpist. You know, I indicated that really impressed. I don’t play the harp, but I imagine there’s a lot of work involved,

Danielle Riegel  06:32

yeah, and a lot of blisters, in my case, because of I have a very sensitive skin. Oh, my God, all the early daily hours of practicing were quite painful. Often it was long days for me as a kid, I had to travel. We lived a bit in the countryside. I had to travel three hours, and if I missed the bus on the way back, it would be four hours a day traveling by bus, by train, by trem to get to the conservatory, and then it was full days of school, some music classes afterwards, and then go home, do your homework and practice a few hours the harp. And in the summer holidays, I worked, I cleaned toilets, I did everything to gain enough money to be able to go one or two weeks to master classes abroad in Wales. I remember one in nice and practice even more during the summer holidays and have classes from amazingly inspiring, famous harpists and later of youth orchestras. I’ve spent the whole summer, two months in the cold Stein castle for the International Youth Orchestra fest festival there during an entire summer, and every week, we were performing with famous conductors and musicians, which was amazing. But, yeah, it was music, music,

Achim Nowak  07:59

music. I would imagine that once you were in the youth orchestra, you were making this up. Now, so feel free to refute me that you were with your people. But I always wonder, and I think athletes can go to this as well as when you go to school, and then you’re so committed to something else, and in a way that makes you different from the other kids you go to school with, right, who may not have a similar passion. What was that like?

Danielle Riegel  08:30

I was just very, very happy to be in a place where I could be with like minded kids, where it wasn’t a strange that you were so devoted to something that was everything I wanted to do and become. For me, I need a lot of discipline and sacrifices. I couldn’t go play outside, I couldn’t go to the disco, but I never really liked those things. I didn’t like loud noises. I was always feeling very upset when kids were like, teasing each other, or, you know, doing a lot of things that kids do, or trying out drugs or all of that. And I was in these, you know, we had very small classes there in the conservatory, and every year we had to audition. So we actually started with, I think, two classes of 20 kids, but during the six years of high school, every year dancers, especially the ballet dancers, but also musicians, would drop out, because every year you had to re audition. And in my sixth grade, I was only left with one other kid. So the classes were extremely small, but that was actually very nice for me, because my sensitivity, my intuition, my passion for music and dance, wasn’t strange there. I wasn’t teased. It was very welcomed if we had like really important. Things To Do, competitions or concerts. We would get free from school easily. And in the German classes, we would listen to the winter ice tomorrow and everything. So that was it was fantastic,

Achim Nowak  10:14

as I’m listening to you, and I’m not a professional musician like you, but I remember my last three years of high school, I went to the German school in Washington, DC, and there were only six of us, and it was a thrill, and you couldn’t hide, so you had to work hard all the time. You couldn’t disappear like in a big class. But what a privilege it was to have to really apply yourself. So thank you for helping me remember that part I already alluded to, a very complete and complex career you’ve had. We could spend hours just talking about it. So I’m going to ask just the impossible and try to just invite you to highlight a few things. If you think about all the different places, festivals, concert halls, orchestras, masters, situations where you have performed as a harpist, if you would take us to one or two moments where you go, wow, that was amazing. All the hard work was worth it. This is magical, that I got to be there in this moment. What comes to mind?

Danielle Riegel  11:28

Well, since we’ve talked a little bit about the past, and you brought up the Youth Orchestra, there was really an incredibly strong moment. And my first Youth Orchestra experience with the Dutch Youth Orchestra and the Russian conductor there, we played Shostakovich fifth, and it’s a very, very dramatic piece, and it was the most inspiring thing I experienced up till then I was 17. I was just won the audition, and we stayed for a whole week together in this how do you say Auberge, where we got together and practice entire days and then gave a few concerts at the end. It was just so exciting, mixed with all of the nerves, because it was the first time I really played in a high performing orchestra, and then bit of a difficult piece as Shostakovich fifth. So the percussion player behind me was helping me with my entrances and everything, because the conductor was so scary and so strict, but he was so passionate about the music and about this Russian piece. And he told us all of this background stories about Shostakovich and about this piece, and he would point out exactly which melody represented whom. This is Stalin. Don’t play it beautiful. This has to be ugly and aggressive and other melodies, you know. And it the whole piece came to life and playing such amazing, powerful music, and then under starting to understand it on a deeper level, with all of these young musician was so thrilling, so exciting, that for weeks I was, I remember coming back home, sitting on the couch, and I was like, I can’t return back to normal life. And how do I explain this to my family, my parents? What I’ve just experienced. I couldn’t and I was in another dimension suddenly, and I knew this. I knew even more, like this is what I need to do. And I had a bit of a similar experience later, when I played with the concert about orchestra in Amsterdam, in the concert about which is always, anyway, an amazing experience, because that Hall has an energy of all of the famous, amazing musicians that have performed there that is so strong, so powerful, you can feel it so so strongly. It’s like you play. It’s like a warm bath for any musician, besides the amazing acoustic in which you can hear every little detail. But we played with Ross Povich, the famous Russian composer and cellist, and we played Mussorgsky paintings of an exhibition, a piece that is played so much. And then you’re kind of like, oh my God, not that piece again. This is a bit boring, and it’s not the most dramatic piece either, but it’s very descriptive. It’s about a museum, and you’re going through the different rooms in a museum and looking at different paintings. Roster, poet, everybody was excited, of course, to play with him. And he entered the stage. He lifted his arms, he gave us a nod. We started to play. And it was really if I was transposed into Russia. I’d never been there, but I tell you, I could smell Russia. I smelled the samovar. I was there, and I was in that the paintings came to life, and the sound of the orchestra sounded completely different. It sounded like a Russian orchestra. Yeah. And then I started to understand something about really great maestros and about music. It’s not so much about what you’re doing, you know, it’s not about playing the notes at the exact right moment with the right dynamic. It’s about the intention behind the notes, and it’s about the imagination, the visualization taking place because he was hardly moving. And I’ve seen that as well with Barenboim, for example, going to the Berlin Philharmonic a lot when I played there, and sitting backstage like he would hardly move. But for example, when he performed Ravel Bolero with the orchestra, he came on stage, and he was like a Spanish Toreador. He had such a muscle tension in his body, this proudness, and all he did was not to the persons, the musicians that had to start their solo. And he just kept this tension, this proudness, and it was so tight, how they played it, yeah. Coming back to that moment with Rostropovich and later, also moments with Neymar yerevy, the main conductor of the residency orchestra, which I was the solo artist for 15 years. They wouldn’t do much. They didn’t move much. They wouldn’t talk to us. They would talk with their body language, you know, showing the rhythm like a dance, almost like an internal dance. They were showing to us. They would. I remember this moment with nemeafe where he didn’t conduct us anymore. I forgot the piece it was, but there was an exciting moment in the piece, and he wouldn’t conduct us before it. And then suddenly he he stepped forward, gave us all a big shock, and that was a moment where he wanted some expression and tension in the piece, and we all shook up. That’s the way how they conducted. They took us to another level, where we became one and all like, kind of like riding together on a wave of frequency, of vibration, of emotion, of sound, and you could all sense each other. You could sense this vision that they were transmitting to us, and we all would know what to do and how to play, which is so different when you play with a bad conductor who’s just trying to you know you have to look at a stick, and he makes you count, and you become insecure, and he starts shouting at you, and it just became, comes a mess because you’re not listening to the music

Achim Nowak  17:34

anymore. You brought all of that to life for me beautifully. So thank you. I just want to test something else with you, because you so took me to the magic of what can happen in performance. But I have a theater, professional theater background, and also in my corporate work, I’ve done a lot of international travel and done stuff, and I always imagined that being a seriously successful professional musician, once you start touring more and getting around that, that can be glamorous for a while, but this can also be a very hard life. Am I correct in that assumption of what was it like to be the person who flies around to these orchestras is this soloist does all these things. How did you handle that part of the business?

Danielle Riegel  18:26

That’s always funny, because people are like, Oh my God, you traveled so much and seen all these places. I’m like, well, all I’ve seen is the hotel room and the concert hall. That’s all I can say about it. And now, being an independent artist, it’s even harder, because there’s so much organization that comes with it. It’s an inner battle like I want to tour, I want to explore, I want to play many places and meet people and everything. But especially if we’re a sensitive soul, it’s challenging to be on the road. And if you tour alone, it’s it’s lonely. You know, you have these deep experiences and amazing feelings of connection with your audience, and then you find yourself back in your hotel room on your own, and you’re like, Oh my God. Like, what I’m gonna do with this energy now? And who am I gonna share it with? It’s different. I guess if you tour with a band, I toured recently with Aila Schaefer, yeah, we were mostly in our room, actually, just doing yoga, meditating, doing preparing ourselves. So it’s not like a rock and roll or glamor life, like maybe pop singers do have, I don’t know, but a lot of discipline also then, because you have to stay in shape, you have to stay focused, you have to prepare yourself. You have to do sound checks and everything’s and in a way, it’s, it’s great to play in beautiful places and meet new people, but it’s challenging logistically, physically, and yeah,

Achim Nowak  19:49

in 2020 you moved to the beautiful Algarve, and how you use the harp right now is very different from. Some of your career beforehand, and because this is a podcast about how we move from one stage to the next in our lives. Can you give us a sense of what you Danielle, you know, what was your process, your journey where you got to the point where you say, No, I’m going to live in the south of Portugal, and I’m going to do really different stuff with the craft and the instrument that I love.

Danielle Riegel  20:27

Yeah, I think there were two things that started my transformation. The first was I became the solo harpist of the Symphony Orchestra of The Hague, which was, of course, an amazing position, and gave amazing concerts and worked with fantastic maestros and everything, but as an orchestra harpist, there’s a lot of waiting and counting and not so much creativity you can put into it. In the beginning, I still got a lot of offers, also from abroad and from Germany, where I had worked a lot and studied most of the time, I had to turn them down because of the orchestra schedule, and even when I had to play only in the Encore one glissando, I had to be there the whole week to rehearse and perform. And they became a little bit frustrating to turn down like amazing opportunities as a soloist and Chairman musician. So I started being this passionate being and needing something more than just sitting on stage and waiting for sometimes only a few notes to perform. I started looking for something else I could put my passion in again, since it was kind of becoming a bit more limited for my music career, I suddenly realized, wow, for the first time in my life I was in my early 30s, then I have a more stable life. Can I make this into my advantage? And then I was like, Well, my other big passion as a kid in life had been dance. So I started dancing Argentine Tango, and it was love at first sight. And it turned out I also had a bit of a talent for that. So as soon as I could, I went to Argentina took many, many classes, and became completely addicted to this, started traveling to Argentinian tango festivals, marathons. Was quickly asked to teach as well. Started performing. And it was a deep process of reconnecting with my body and also with my femininity and with my sensuality, and also a learning process actually to connect with other people. Because as a musician, although you connect on a very deep or high level, as you want to say, it like with the music, it’s not so much directly with people you know, a lot of musicians are maybe even a bit autistic. They spend a lot of time alone, and I spend most of their youth alone in their room, just practicing by themselves, and me as a sensitive kid as well, and not having had so much confirmation in that or having had the environment where there was welcomed or stimulated, I still was very insecure as a person getting to dance and know suddenly so many people through the Argentine Tango, and then starting to teach and having to speak in front of people, which was very scary for me in the Beginning, gave me a lot of confidence and really opens my heart in many ways, as the Argentine Tango, anyway does, because it is heart connection, physically and energetically, that you have within another person, intimately in those few moments, few minutes actually very strongly and starting to teach that to other people, I found out how isolated I’d lived my life up till then, and how much I actually liked that and needed that, and I started to become good at it, actually, in connecting with people more intimately, I would say, and teaching them about My passions. And it was just such a joy. I started doing also exploring more my spiritual journey, because very young age, I wanted to play the harp and I wanted to dance and I wanted to become a nun. At some point, I always had, yes, there’s, it sounds very strange, but at some point in my life, I found out why there was because from a young age, I had kind of these strong states. In one of these states, I found out the deeper longing behind wanting to do those things in life, and it was a deep, deep longing to devote myself to the Divine, and for me, that felt like unconditional love and light. There was also something that was not in my I come from a family of engineers and mathematicians and like, that was all crazy stuff I had always done from a young age. From the early 20s, yoga, meditation, Qigong, but then in my 30s, I started exploring that a little bit more in the. I started doing yoga, teacher trainings, Chi Kung trainings, coaching trainings, dance expression, teacher trainings, many other things, and then it became an inner battle and an outside battle as well. Actually, because of the discipline, needed to be a high level musician and to play an orchestra like that is very you know, in the orchestra every week you have a different conductor, a different program. It’s an it’s, I think, one of the disciplines that has a performing artist that you have to perform under the highest stress levels. It became difficult to combine with all of my other activities and work, because then, by then, I was working as a yoga teacher as well, and had my own Argentine Tango school, and it became an inner battle, because I started to experience this inner freedom by improvising with Argentine Tango, by creating all of these new concepts there as it was my business, and also by creating these methods that I created as an Argentine Tango teacher based on body awareness, heart connection, energetic exchange between two persons. And I loved using more of my creativity and connecting more intimately with people, instead of sitting on a big stage and playing for hundreds or 1000s of people and then going back home and haven’t even talk to someone you know the entire day, sometimes when you would have, like, rehearsals and concerts, or at least not during the entire concert. So yeah, there was quite a struggle going on, and that started to translate itself also physically. So I got back problems. I got inflammation in my gut. I also started doing a lot of healing on myself and therapy and coaching, and then did coaching trainings myself. And yeah, there’s just a big transformation going on inside of me. And I decided at some point to leave behind the orchestra, the fixed income, the status, everything, which was a very difficult process, because it also had brought me a lot and I was going towards a very insecure future. But I couldn’t do it differently. I just had to. It was to the calling was too strong, the other for my new journey and path, and then was the lockdowns, and all I knew was like, I cannot sit behind a computer locked up in my room. Yeah, I have found this inner freedom and connection with people, and that’s felt like my mission, my sole purpose, also to help people daring to be vulnerable, to open up for heart connection and be more intimate and reconnect themselves with their heart and soul, and then through that with other people. And I felt like I this is my soul purpose. This is what I need to do. And I just got a calling to go to Portugal by Van get a puppy. Well, I’m not a van life person. I had only had cats up till then, and I’d never heard of I’ve never been in Portugal, but I went. I thought I was never going to perform as a musician anymore, but I sold all my instruments and music collection. I brought only a little, small lap harp, and I was going a lot to esthetic dance in the woods outside. And then people asked me if I would play afterwards. And people were lying down so they couldn’t watch me. We took away all of the nerves I’ve had my entire life of having to perform. I was myself in this ecstatic bliss from the esthetic dancing outside in the woods in this magical country, and I started playing in such a different way. I was reconnected with my heart and soul and playing from there with people that had taken away the visual so their mind was less active, receiving my music more directly into their heart, and then seeing the reaction of people. Most of the time, a lot of people were crying. I started integrating my yoga, meditation chikung experiences by giving sound journeys with singing bowls and chimes and leading people into deep relaxation and meditation, and then seeing their faces afterwards, being so soft their eyes completely you could see the soul through their eyes, and it touched me so deeply. They would say things to me like this, the first time I feel hope again in so many years, or I feel unconditional love for the first time in my life. Or I reconnected with my dad parents, and it touched me so deeply. And then I realized I cannot keep this for myself, that would be so selfish. This is the gift that I received in life. This is my sole purpose, and I need to share this with people, and it’s also the thing that I know to do best.

Achim Nowak  29:55

Well, what struck me is you describe your journey so beautifully is you become a channel for something. Much bigger, but it’s supported by a mastery of craft. If that mastery of craft wasn’t there, the experience probably wouldn’t be as profound for others and in turn, for you, which is one of the gifts you gave me just now, a very good sense of what I call the mini harp meditative concert experiences like but because you mentioned that you also work one on one with people as a I’m gonna use the word healer. If you’re not comfortable with that. Let me know. But what does it look like? What do you do, Danielle, when you’re one on one with somebody and you’ve trained in all of these different ass, things, modalities, and you’re clearly a synthesizer who brings things together. So what happens one on one session?

Danielle Riegel  30:49

Yeah, I love doing that. It’s not something I make up. It just happens with the experiences and I have had and then been trained in. And it happened especially here in Portugal, where I was reconnected on deeper level of my with myself. As you know, there’s so much space here you live on a slower pace. It’s more quiet, more calm, and there’s just more time to go inwards. And here it really happened that all of my experiences, all of my trainings, started to come together, and I just birthed these concepts because I guess it was the most powerful experience I had had with them, and I just wanted to share that with people. And what I do is I start with a little, usually a little welcoming and inquiring with people tension setting, and if there’s anything they would like to attract more in their life or manifest, and then what is needed for that to let go of, if there’s anything in particular they want to release. So we set a little bit of an intention for the session, and then I do a little sound journey where I lead them into a deep relaxation with some sacred instruments to prepare them actually for the session, to bring them into their parasympathetic nervous system that activates the self healing capacities of the body, right? And then I continue with a holistic pulsing massage, which is a beautiful, very soft, delicate way of massaging a person. It’s like rocking a baby, and it’s very deeply relaxing for the nervous system. I usually add some other things intuitively. It can be Reiki. Can be a little bit of a heart massage, sometimes you use essential oils, a foot massage, a bit of try yoga massage, whatever I feel is needed for the client. And then I continue with the Tibetan singing bowl massage. And my master, Raul barti from Nepal, always used to say, like we use the singing bowls there where the hands cannot go, because the singing bowls work with vibration. And as we are, 75% water in our bodies, those frequencies, those vibrations of the singing bowls that I also place on the body. Go into the body, and they can release stress and tension, but also blockages and stagnation in your life. Force Energy that might have occurred happen through accidents, but it can also be because of trapped emotions and everything. And then after I play the harp for them, and that’s beautiful integration moments with these very high frequency instruments, and usually is a moment where people process and release emotions. But the beauty of the harp is that it always goes in a very soft and gentle way and leaves people with a very light feeling,

Achim Nowak  33:44

yeah, I hope our listeners get a sense of just what you describe now is so different from where your career started, which is the power of your personal journey. I as you look to your future and what to do next, what I’m wondering is, how much of what you do is intuitive. Do you have a strategic brain that says, I want to be here three years from now and to get there, these are the things I need to do, like, how do you decide what to do next with your life?

Danielle Riegel  34:19

Okay, I got a funny story about that, because when I left the orchestra, I wasn’t so easy, like, and I had to go into like, how do you call this, like, career coaching for a while? And I got a coach, and he came with all of these forms, delayed them out for me. And he was like, Yeah, we’re gonna do your five years career planning and your 10 years career planning. And I looked at the questions, and I was like, I no clue what to answer there. And I told him honestly. And he was like, why? He didn’t understand. Then I started explaining him that I cannot tell where I’m going to be in five years, how I lead my life is from my in being in close relationship and connection with my heart and soul and with. Intuition. So what I do when I need to take decisions is I go inside and I listen. You know, it’s the same for music. You know, I think it was Miles Davis who said, like the best musicians are the best listeners. That’s the place where, for me, everything comes from, where the whole creation comes from, from Silence, from listening, from going deep inside and then becoming so quiet that you start receiving answers, and that might require some practice for some people. For me, that has always been a very close, direct connection that I’ve had and received very straight answers, sometimes as concrete as get a van, buy event, get a puppy and go to Portugal, and which I did in two months. And for my career, it’s the same, I go inside and listen, and that’s where the answers come. And he got very angry when I explained it to him, and he said, You’re uncoachable.

Achim Nowak  35:58

Yeah, by his model, you certainly work,

Danielle Riegel  36:03

yeah, I guess so, yeah.

Achim Nowak  36:06

So what are some things that are intuitively emerging for you right now, where you go? These are other things and we want to explore. These are chat that might want to come up. Is there anything else that we should talk about?

Danielle Riegel  36:23

Yeah, that’s the funny thing about leading your life like this, because you never know. Yeah, it’s very adventurous, and sometimes it’s can be scary. I was definitely scared in the in the beginning sometimes, but I’m not anymore, because I know that if I follow my that voice from deep inside, that intuition, or my soul, or whatever you want to call it, it’s aligned. It’s aligned with something bigger than me. It’s aligned with my purpose. And things start to synchronize then and flow if I go against it. Oh, my God, life becomes very hard. So right now, as you know, I had plans to move to Lisbon, and I still probably gonna go. I found a beautiful apartment in estuary, signed a contract, and was like, Yeah, I’m gonna start a new life in Lisbon. I want to reconnect a little bit. I think it was a longing to reconnect a little bit more with my previous career life as a classical musician, being closer to culture again, after living a bit more in the wild in nature here in Algarve, where there’s very little culture, I wanted inspiration again. Wanted to collaborate with other musicians and facilitators and be more around a little bit, maybe more ambitious people again. And yeah, so I was prepared to leave everything behind here and move to Lisbon. And then the season started. I had everything organized, and I meet these incredible musicians over here in the Algarve, I suddenly get students over here. I’ve got five students now. Then I’m teaching. I found a facilitator, a fantastic woman that I already gave one workshop with, I’m gonna give more workshops with. And I’m like, oh my god, it’s not always the easiest way that you get if you live like this, but I’m feeling very grateful, very blessed, very inspired at the moment with those new connections, and it’s been incredible because I know it’s the right path, because it’s Exactly bringing me there where my deepest longing and excitement at this moment is, and that is to improvise and create my own music and really use music as a medicine, as a medicine tool. I’m playing with two South American musicians. I played with them in a ceremony. We played their beautiful medicine songs. And for me, that’s something I want to bring more into the world. Because for me, music has always been as important music and dancing as important as eating and drinking and breathing. And it is as well in with Native people, you know, and in tribes and everything they literally say, if you take away the song and dance of people, you disempower them. And I think a lot of depression and problems in our Western society come from taking away culture, taking away song, dance and prayer from people as a tool to heal, to process emotions and to be in connection with yourself and with other people and with the world around you. It’s wonderful to connect with people and play music with people that have that still somewhere in their genes, in their selves, and make music in their way in this. Way, and it’s something that is so nourishing, like for your spirit, for your emotions. And I have that anyway, when I sit behind the harp, I It’s my own medicine. It’s so soothing for my soul. It’s so comforting for my emotions, and it’s so relaxing for my body, and it’s as well like bringing me directly into connection with my intuition, with my inspiration, and making me just feel connected, because I think it connects you instantly with something bigger than you. But being able to do that with other musicians that stimulate me to improvise and start creating my own music is really extremely exciting and a big joy, and I feel that is where I need to go. It’s what makes me the most scary. It makes me really scared. But I feel there is my biggest growth now, but I’m sure I will find those musicians as well in Lisbon area. And I also know that Portugal is not enough professionally organized music wise, so I’m already preparing tours and festivals for the summer. So I guess I’ll just become touring independent artists. Again. That kind of fits with my favorite book that I had as a kid, which was Remi alone on the world I don’t know if that’s the English title, but it was this little boy that that lost everything in his life. I was always crying so badly, but he he had his monkey and his dogs. He had a harp on his back, and he traveled the world like that. That’s an image that I’ve internalized, I guess. So that’s where I’m going to go again, beautiful.

Achim Nowak  41:49

As I start to say goodbye in this conversation, I’m sure our listeners will be curious. They want to learn about more about you, your music, what you do. Where should they look? Where can they go to learn more about you, Danielle, and the work you do and how you are a service?

Danielle Riegel  42:09

Yeah, well, they can go to my website, which is www dot. Daniel dot love and I’m on social media. I’m on Instagram. My main account is Daniel Achill, harpist. I’m on YouTube, and hopefully soon on Spotify. I’ve started to embrace the modern world with recording and technical sound technique and everything. But up till now, I had only recorded like years ago, old fashioned in big classical music studios. And so I have CDs and everything, but I’m not yet on Spotify, which has to happen soon so, but I will, will publish that on my social media channels and and on my website. When, when that has happened?

Achim Nowak  42:59

Yeah, so listeners, it’s easy to find, Danielle, you know you’re just, just Google. Danielle, thank you for the gift of this conversation, and also thank you just for for the beautiful, deep work that you do. I was moved by this conversation. I’ve heard your play in the Algarve, so I know how transcendent your music is. So thank you. It was an honor to speak with you.

Danielle Riegel  43:28

Thank you, Achim. It was an honor to be on your podcast and an absolute pleasure to have this conversation with you. Thank you so much.

Achim Nowak  43:38

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The my fourth act podcast. If you like what you have heard, please like us and leave a review on your preferred podcast platform. And if you would like to engage more deeply in fourth act conversations, check out the mastermind page at Achim nowak.com it’s where fourth actors like you engage in riveting conversation with other fourth actors. See you there and bye for now. You.